There’s nothing easy about travel
Many of our current partners initially wrestled with the question of whether they should build their own travel solution from scratch. Here are a few of the benefits of working with Spotnana that influenced their thinking.
Reduce development and operating costs
Everyone is familiar with booking travel on consumer sites. While it seems simple on the surface, travel is massively complex behind the scenes. Here are a few examples to help illustrate:
Content fragmentation
Sources of travel content are highly fragmented and often built on pre-internet technology that is very difficult to integrate. To provide comprehensive access to air, hotel, car, and rail inventory, Spotnana has developed a content agnostic architecture with direct NDC integrations to top airlines as well as integrations with GDSs, LCCs, OTAs, rail aggregators, and hotel aggregators.
Travel content is highly complex, inconsistent, and often duplicated across multiple distribution channels. We consume pricing, images, fare rules, cabin classes, amenities, loyalty benefits, and more for each piece of travel inventory, and we dedupe content across sources.
Travel booking is fundamentally a shopping experience, and booking tools with inferior inventory struggle to gain adoption. We constantly add more direct integrations and content sources to our platform, since it takes ongoing investment to provide the best travel content in today’s rapidly evolving distribution landscape.
Aggregating all of this content from disparate sources and displaying it consistently with overlaid policies and negotiated rates in a matter of seconds requires a massive development effort and hefty cloud computing costs.
Self-service trip changes
Booking a trip is just the beginning of a traveler’s journey. Plans change, and it’s critical to enable travelers to cancel, change, and update their itineraries in real time. Modification workflows are complex and require addressing a tremendous number of corner cases. Adding to the complexity, content sources each handle changes in a different way.
For air bookings alone, Spotnana supports self-service flight changes across GDS, NDC, direct connections, and low-cost carrier (LCC) bookings. Our capabilities include support for changing partially flown trips, adding additional segments, modifying bookings where a traveler is waitlisted for an upgrade, and exchanging round-trip tickets for one-way fares – all of which require deep travel knowledge to implement. Similar capabilities are supported across hotel, car, and rail bookings.
Spotnana also supports self-service changes to seats, loyalty program numbers, known-traveler numbers, and more, as well as purchasing ancillary products like upgrades and priority boarding with separate forms of payment.
Building these capabilities has required intensive collaboration with developers across a long list of suppliers and content providers.
Servicing infrastructure for travel agents
Travel solutions need to support a wide range of users including corporate travelers, guest travelers, arrangers, administrators, and travel agents. Travel agent needs are particularly complex, because they handle a wide variety of requests while dealing with the urgency created by departure schedules and travel disruptions.
Spotnana has devoted an entire team to creating an Agent Desktop that sits on the same infrastructure as our Online Booking Tool. Agents using our platform see the same content, policies, preferences, and negotiated rates as the travelers they serve. Automated queues triage urgent requests, and agents benefit from all the automated change management workflows we’ve built into our tech stack for travelers.
This is just a small fraction of the complexity that lies beneath the surface when it comes to building a travel solution. The reality is that online booking tools have been around for decades, and corporations expect a huge amount of functionality out-of-the box. The required tech stack is massive and requires working with legacy systems that are hard to integrate.
While it may seem simple to cobble together a few content sources and travel component providers, the reality is that the effort and cost to turn these elements into a competitive offering is deceptively large and likely to create a significant distraction that drains critical resources away from your core business.
Minimize servicing costs and maximize flexibility
In addition to sorting out the technology for travelers and agents, anyone choosing to sell travel needs to hire, train, and manage a team of travel agents.
Travel agents are in short supply. Many were laid off during the pandemic and moved into other careers. Now that travel has rebounded, competition for experienced agents is intense. Moreover, the generation of travel agents who know how to work in legacy systems is nearing retirement, and younger workers demand to work with modern tools.
Spotnana’s Agent Desktop is not only modern and easy to use, it has built-in automations that allow agents to process a higher volume of inbound requests per day. This means fewer agents that need to be hired, and easier onboarding for you. We provide the training your agents require and ensure they stay up to date as we add new capabilities to our platform.
You can also choose to outsource servicing to Spotnana and completely eliminate the cost and complexity of staffing your own travel agents. We provide a white labeled servicing experience where our agents represent themselves as your employees across all communication channels and where the handoffs between our travel experts and your experts in your core business are seamless.
Accelerate time to market
Travel solutions are costly to build and take a long time to develop. Each of the core travel modalities (air, hotel, car, and rail) requires a significant development effort as do all of the core components that work across modalities including profiles, policies, negotiated rates, supplier configurations, payment methods, legal entities, duty of care, sustainability, analytics, etc.
New travel sellers also need to to negotiate agreements with each major supplier in every country where they want to provide access to local travel inventory, or find local partners with these agreements in place. This alone can take years for a dedicated team of employees and requires a huge amount of travel expertise as well as capabilities to manage bookings and fees in local currencies with local taxes.
Spotnana allows you to start selling travel in a matter of weeks. In addition to providing a comprehensive travel platform that supports all major travel modalities and all key personas, we offer a turn-key servicing solution, we have supplier agreements in place, and we provide a wide range of flexible integration and white labeling options. From day one, Spotnana was built to enable other companies to sell travel.
Spotnana brings next generation travel experiences to customers inside the Brex Empower travel and expense platform. Empower users gain access to the unrivaled travel options, easily see their travel policy on the mobile app at the time of booking, and enjoy automated receipt collection, memos, and approvals on trips.
– Henrique Dubugras, co-Founder and co-CEO at Brex
Reduce market risk
When you provide your customers with an industry-leading travel solution, you can generate incremental revenue, increase customer loyalty, and deepen customer relationships. However, if you think about the last time you spent hours in an airport due to an issue with an airline, you have a sense of the anger and frustration your users will feel if your travel solution isn’t up to par.
Spotnana is solely dedicated to building the world’s most advanced travel platform. We enable you to deliver unparalleled travel experiences that set you apart from the competition.
Our leadership team includes people with decades of travel industry experience and technology experts who have played leadership roles at leading software companies. We know how to build great software, we have the industry expertise to build things in the right way, and we have the relationships to drive innovation across the travel industry.
By partnering with Spotnana you eliminate the risks and unknowns that come with entering a new market and gain the confidence that you’ll deliver the most advanced capabilities to your customers.
Spotnana has been an incredible partner. Their technology is easy to integrate, they deliver an exceptional experience for both travelers and admins, and their incredible pace of innovation is only accelerating.
– Naveen Singh, CEO at Center
Future-proof your travel strategy
Spotnana was created to bring disruptive change and innovation to the travel industry. The legacy technology that other platforms rely on goes all the way back to the 1960s. These dated systems have stifled change for decades.
While others have built thin digital front ends on top of these legacy systems, Spotnana’s founders tackled the unsexy work of fixing the underlying plumbing of the travel industry, so our partners can benefit from modern infrastructure designed to support a new generation of travel experiences.
It’s our strategy to serve as a catalyst for travel innovation and always be at the forefront of what’s new. One way we achieve this is by building direct integrations to the world’s largest travel suppliers. This approach gives us access to the best possible traveler experiences with most comprehensive content and competitive prices, creating a foundation for driving future innovation. Wherever possible, we want to be first to market with new capabilities and increasingly we’re the company large suppliers are choosing to co-create new ideas.
By working with Spotnana, you join an ecosystem of innovators and benefit from the latest advances in travel. Let’s talk about how we can work together to bring a new generation of travel experiences to your customers.
Spotnana added support for NDC redemptions of EDIFACT-based flight credits in a matter of weeks. Their next-generation modern infrastructure is ideally suited for NDC, and we look forward to working together to bring new innovations to market.
– Anthony Rader, Director of Airline Retailing Technology at American Airlines
