What is Spotnana’s Booking Engine?

When we started Spotnana, we set a goal to move beyond the limitations of how things had been done in the past. We wanted to bring all the pieces of the travel puzzle together and power seamless end-to-end travel journeys.

To achieve this our travel platform needed a workflow engine capable of assembling every piece of information and sequencing every action perfectly. Beyond creating a flawless booking every time, we wanted to automate the complex workflows required for personalized offers, self-service trip changes, automated disruption handling, and agent servicing.

This is why we built Spotnana’s Booking Engine and designed it from the ground up to be a true orchestration tool for next-generation travel experiences.

The problem: Disconnected information leads to broken experiences

If you’re managing a travel program today, you know the frustration of fragmented systems. 

Essential data elements such as traveler profiles, policies, fare rules, negotiated rate codes, and travel program analytics all reside in separate databases. When it comes to orchestrating actions, workflows have to be built across a wide range of tools including OBTs, GDSs, mid-office systems, agent desktops, contact center systems, payment providers, email delivery engines, carbon calculators, duty of care systems, and more.

This complexity isn’t just an annoyance. It’s a bottleneck. Traditional booking tools are simply one step in a broken chain. They create a booking, but the crucial context of the traveler, the company’s policies, and the downstream ticketing and data processes are handled by separate systems.

The result is a patchwork architecture that fails to deliver the consistency, automation, and innovation velocity that travel managers demand. 

Spotnana’s Booking Engine: The conductor of the orchestra

Most booking engines execute workflows through brittle scripts that read and write text coded into an unstructured data file called a PNR (Passenger Name Record).

By contrast, Spotnana’s Booking Engine uses our microservices-based architecture and the structured databases in our System of Record to orchestrate workflows in a way that is scalable, reliable, and supports rapid innovation.

We designed Spotnana’s Booking Engine to be the central point of orchestration for all of our microservices. It acts as a conductor, pulling in all the necessary services and data elements at the right time to create a booking, manage an exchange, cancel a trip, redeem an unused credit, and more.

Here’s a simplified, conceptual example of how our Booking Engine orchestrates a booking workflow:

1.  Capture travel search parameters from user inputs.
2.  Access our Profile Service to get traveler information stored in our System of Record.
3.  Submit a search request through our Content Engine.
4.  Access our Policy Service to get policy information stored in our System of Record.
5.  Access our Unused Credit Service to capture details on unused ticket credits and MCOs.
6.  Retrieve and display search results integrated through our Content Engine factoring in policies, negotiated rates, traveler loyalty status, and unused ticket credits.
7.  Capture user selections throughout the booking flow.
8.  Trigger any necessary approval workflows through our Policy Service, including sending any required emails through our Email Service.
9.  Initiate payment via our Payment Service.
10.  Create entries for a trip and the related booking in our System of Record.
11.  Retrieve ticketing information via our Content Engine and update our System of Record.
12.  Make any necessary updates to our Unused Credit Service, Custom Fields Service, and Analytics Service.
13.  Send an email confirmation with an itinerary to the traveler through our Email Service.

Why this architecture matters

By definition, every online booking tool has a booking engine – this is what creates the booking. 

What makes Spotnana different is our modern infrastructure. Instead of embracing the limitations of existing data structures and workflow tools, we created a new tech stack designed to take advantage of the latest advancements in cloud computing.

As a result, Spotnana’s customers and partners benefit from:

• Faster innovation cycles and product releases – our modular microservices-based architecture allows engineers to work in parallel on different services, and each product build is much faster to compile, enabling a continuous release process.

• Configurable workflows and rules engines – rather than hard coding each permutation of a workflow, user-defined settings and configurable rules engines dictate how workflows are dynamically generated in real time.

• Superior scalability and reliability – as request volumes increase or decrease, new copies of each microservice are provisioned or deprovisioned. This horizontal scalability prevents outages and performance latency that can be caused by insufficient computing resources.

• An open platform that is easy to white label, integrate, and embed – combining an API-first design with a microservices-based architecture makes it easy for our customers and partners to connect Spotnana to other systems, create new user interfaces on top of our platform, and build our platform into other products and services.

A modern platform for the AI era

As AI becomes widely adopted in the travel industry, the benefits of Spotnana’s architecture will become even more apparent. 

A new generation of AI-driven conversational user interfaces is emerging. Since Spotnana is already designed to support any form of user interface through our APIs, this transition will be easy for us to manage.

Bigger picture, we are seeing a growing set of agentic AI applications in the world, and many want to support travel booking. While these applications are good at understanding a user’s context and preferences, they need to tie into robust platforms like Spotnana that have built robust workflows for booking, managing, and servicing a trip.

We’re building an open, intelligent, and modern foundation for global travel, and we welcome everyone to join us on this journey. Whether you’re a travel provider, TMC, financial institution, or a developer — we’d love to work with you.