Qantas launches new SMB Business Rewards booking experience powered by Spotnana

In August of this year, we announced that Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform had been selected by Qantas to power its new online booking and travel management experience for small and mid-sized business customers. 

I’m excited to share that we have now rolled out the new experience to more than 480,000 companies that are members of the Qantas Business Rewards program! 

This milestone represents a tremendous achievement for both Spotnana and Qantas. We’ve worked together closely to embed Spotnana as new infrastructure in the Qantas Business Rewards website, develop and test new features and user experiences, and implement our most comprehensive white label project to date. 

Driving rapid innovation in partnership with Qantas

To deliver on the bold vision of the Qantas Business Rewards team, we engaged in a series of workshops to identify key areas for innovation, define integration points, and map out user workflows. 

As a result of these workshops, we worked together to add the following new integrations and capabilities to Spotnana’s travel platform:

• PSS integration – Spotnana developed a first-of-its-kind direct integration between Amadeus Altea, the Passenger Service System (PSS) used by Qantas, and our API-native travel platform.
• Multiple content integrations – since our platform is able to ingest and aggregate content from any source, we were able to build a unique shopping experience where air and car content is sourced through Amadeus Altea and hotel content is provided through an integration with Qantas’ proprietary hotel reservation system. 
• Loyalty program integration – to support a key requirement of the partnership, we developed the ability to view, earn, and redeem rewards points associated with both a business account and with a traveler’s frequent flyer account. 
• Expanded payment options – we added support for members to pay for trips using Qantas Points, cards, or a combination of the two. In addition, we added the ability to select airline-specific UATP cards as a form of payment. 
• Mobile device optimization – we enhanced our booking experience to support a responsive web design that scales to fit mobile devices of any size. 
• Localization – in order to support Australian terminology and spelling, we added support for language translations and translated the text across all aspects of our user experience.

While we developed this extensive set of features in record time, adding new capabilities to our platform was only one aspect of what was needed to support a successful launch. The next step was to ensure the Qantas Business Rewards team had complete control over the user experience.

Redefining what it means to white label travel technology

One of the most important decisions Spotnana’s founders made in our early days was to make our platform open so other companies can easily integrate, embed, and white label our technology. 

Together, we developed a customized user experience for Qantas Business Rewards members that blends seamlessly with the Qantas brand and website. Highlights of the white labeled experience include:

• Fully embedded experience – the transitions we developed between the Qantas Business Rewards website and Spotnana are smooth and virtually undetectable. On every screen, we use Qantas fonts, colors, a custom Qantas navigation bar, and a custom footer. Website URLs and emails are also fully white labeled. At launch, the experience supports air, hotel, and car bookings.
• Member benefits –  when users search for travel options, they see their program benefits, including member deal discounts, and the opportunity to earn loyalty rewards points is clearly highlighted within the experience.
• Enhanced shopping experience – travelers have access to additional product information, photos, and filtering options that weren’t available in the previous Qantas Business Rewards website.
• Custom points payment experience – at checkout, a custom component with a slider enables a user to determine how much of the total cost should be paid via points or a card.
• Custom user management page – our integration goes far beyond the booking experience. Users also get access to powerful administration tools, such as the custom design we implemented for adding and removing travelers from a Qantas Business Rewards account.
• Custom policy management page – We deployed a simplified version of our policy management capabilities as a separate component on a dedicated page.
• Real-time analytics – users are able to access a wide range of travel reports with real-time data on their bookings.

The new Qantas Business Rewards experience powered by Spotnana’s modern technology stack also improves user efficiency. Together, we were able to reduce the average time to complete a booking from more than 10 minutes to under 2 minutes.

Continuing to redefine the art of the possible

This is just the beginning. We have a comprehensive roadmap of features and capabilities we will work together to deliver, and the steady stream of new enhancements we release on a continuous basis to all of our customers and partners will be available to Qantas as well. 

“Unlike the traditional approach to building supplier booking sites that relies on legacy infrastructure and bespoke hand-coded user experiences, Spotnana provides a cloud-based platform that is easy to white label, embed, and customize. We are constantly adding new capabilities to our platform, creating a future-proof solution for travel that grows in value every day.”

– Shikhar Agarwal, co-founder and CTO, Spotnana

We could not be more grateful to Qantas for selecting us, and we’re truly excited about the next set of innovations we plan to deliver together.

To learn more about partnering with Spotnana, please contact us here.