Direct Travel powered by Spotnana

There’s no way for me to start this post except by expressing my deepest gratitude to our Executive Chairman, Steve Singh. 

Steve founded Concur and led the company as CEO for over 20 years before Concur was acquired by SAP for $8.3B. A few years later, Steve joined Madrona Ventures and became the largest investor in Spotnana, our biggest champion, and an indispensable mentor for me. To put it simply, Spotnana would not exist were it not for Steve Singh.

Today Direct Travel, one of the world’s largest corporate TMCs, announced it has been acquired by Steve and an incredible group of investors. I’m thrilled to share that Spotnana has been selected as the core infrastructure that will power the next generation of Direct Travel’s global corporate, leisure, and group meetings and events business.

We are tremendously excited that Direct Travel has embraced Spotnana’s open Travel-as-a-Service platform.

Powering The Perfect Trip

When Steve was the CEO of Concur, he frequently talked about a vision to create “The Perfect Trip.”  To help enable “The Perfect Trip,” every supplier requires access to all the data they need to work together and support a seamless traveler journey.

Steve and I both believe that travel experiences are far too fragmented.

Today each part of a trip exists in isolation. There is no way for your car service or your hotel to know if your flight is delayed. Suppliers typically have no way of knowing whether the person buying a ticket is someone trying them for the first time or their most loyal, valued customer.  And once a trip is complete, submitting expenses is a hassle involving far too many manual steps.

Spotnana’s modern infrastructure has the capability to tear down these data silos and provide everyone with the trip information they need to deliver an unparalleled traveler experience. While the travel industry has a long way to go to fully realize all aspects of “The Perfect Trip,” Spotnana has the right architecture to support this today, and the investments we’re making in AI this year will take us much closer to realizing Steve’s vision.

“Spotnana’s cloud-native Travel-as-a-Service platform allows us to solve real problems that have plagued the travel industry for decades. My top priority is to offer our customers a delightful travel experience, and Spotnana’s industry-leading platform, which has been selected by multiple Fortune 100 companies, is critical to achieving that goal.”

– Steve Singh, Executive Chairman of Direct Travel and Executive Chairman of Spotnana

Delivering a complete solution for travel, meeting, and expense management

Steve has also invested in two other companies that have built integrated solutions in partnership with Spotnana’s open travel platform:

• Center – provides a cloud-native card-first expense management solution embraced by thousands of companies. Center has embedded Spotnana’s travel platform into their product offering to deliver a complete travel and expense solution for customers.

• Troop – provides a cloud-native meeting planning and group travel logistics platform for companies that plan multiple small, mid-size, and large meetings a year. Troop has integrated Spotnana’s travel-as-a-service platform to book and manage travel.

Together, Spotnana, Center, and Troop will provide Direct Travel customers with a complete, seamlessly integrated solution for managing business travel, group meetings and events, and expenses.

Building longer tables, not higher walls

Today’s announcement is possible in part due to Spotnana’s open, API-first architecture and the decisions we made early on as a company to allow anyone in the travel ecosystem to connect to and build value on top of the Spotnana platform.

We believe that the fastest path to true innovation in the travel industry is through collaboration with others. We are proud to serve some of the world’s largest global companies and to provide the core infrastructure powering travel for a growing community of TMCs, technology providers, financial services providers, and suppliers.

Our product roadmap is enriched by the needs and ideas of everyone we work with, and all parties benefit from a steady stream of valuable new capabilities as a result.

Spotnana is more than a technology company providing modern infrastructure to the travel industry. We’re becoming a movement, and we welcome others to join us in bringing the best ideas in the travel industry to life.