Q&A: How Solutions Travel is scaling global travel on Spotnana

For years, multinational travel programs have been assembled from a patchwork of regional providers, each with its own technology, servicing model, and data. The result for travel managers has been fragmented content, inconsistent service quality, and reporting that arrives late and resists consolidation.

Solutions Travel built its global operation differently. As the first travel management company (TMC) to bring Spotnana to market, the agency runs on a single global technology foundation spanning more than 42 points of sale worldwide. Solutions Travel is now part of the Talma group, an established agency group with more than 30 years in the industry.

The company enters its next phase under new leadership. Brett Leslie, who spent two and a half years at Spotnana during the travel platform’s early days, has been named CEO of Solutions Travel, bringing hands-on knowledge of the technology to the servicing organization built around it.

Solutions Travel CEO Brett Leslie.

We spoke with Leslie about his new role, what the Talma Group relationship means for customers, how Solutions Travel approaches global servicing, what the company has built on top of Spotnana’s open platform, and where it is headed next. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.

You recently stepped into the CEO role at Solutions Travel. What does this moment mean for the company?

This is about leading Solutions Travel into its next phase of growth. As part of the greater Talma Group, there is a strong focus on the growth Solutions Travel has achieved, the access to clients it has earned in a short period of time, and how global the company has become. There is also significant interest in the expertise we have built with Spotnana as one of the first TMCs to market.

The technology is in a strong place. The focus now is on the other part of our value proposition, blending in the traditional servicing layer that comes from an agency perspective. We want to let the technology do what it does best, and we want to do what we do best, which is layer in the service components. That means getting the right people in the right positions and the right processes in place to perfect that side of the business.

Solutions Travel is now part of the Talma Group. What does that mean for your customers?

The real benefit of Talma comes down to size and scope. This is about leveraging volume, reach, people, and processes. Talma is an established agency that has done things well for more than 30 years and has continued to grow, mainly through acquisition, over the last two to three years. There are markets where Talma wants to carry its vision, and Solutions Travel is best positioned to carry that message and market value forward, especially from a U.S. branding perspective.

It also means full ownership in more markets rather than a partnership model, and it positions us in the best possible stance with vendors so we can maximize our value to the industry.

You spent two and a half years at Spotnana in its early days. What do you bring from that era into leading Solutions Travel?

First and foremost, I have always believed in Spotnana founder Sarosh Waghmar and his vision. That is what attracted me to Spotnana in the first place. He was redefining what the future of travel would look like, from the user perspective, to the travel management perspective on the agency side, and most importantly in the approach to content.

I worked in the trenches with Spotnana as it came to market, hearing feedback from clients, seeing where the platform was working and where it was not, and translating that feedback into best practices for agencies. Bringing that knowledge to a traditional TMC means showing how to think differently, where the benefits of Spotnana come from, and which changes will not be easy at first but will create a better path forward. Solutions Travel accomplished the goal it set out to achieve: becoming one of the larger and more recognized players by taking advantage of early expertise and a bespoke partnership with Spotnana. Now it is time to spread our wings and take that further into the market.

What does the global model look like for a Solutions Travel customer today, and how does it compare to the traditional approach?

Nobody can fully own operations in 120 or more countries, so there will always be some element of a partner network. The question is how much ownership and control you have over it. In some cases we use partners for access to certain content, but more often for access to local systems so we can stay compliant with local requirements like tax reclaim.

One of the most powerful things about Spotnana is that it is one global platform. We have structured ourselves with more than 42 points of sale around the globe, servicing some of the largest companies, while controlling the entire operation end to end. We control the Spotnana technology and its setup, the agents, and the processes those agents work within.

Agents in any location can access content in real time. That gives us global visibility and a true follow-the-sun approach, without handing work back and forth between regional systems and duplicate mid-office quality control routines that add delays and traveler frustration.

How have you structured the servicing organization?

We service a wide array of clients, including some at 97 or 98% online adoption doing hundreds of thousands of transactions. There will always be an element of customer service, so we have organized around segmentation, matching the right customer, and the right traveler base within that customer, to the right service offering.

That means multiple tiers of service. Some tiers are staffed by agents with three to five years of experience, and we are focused on bringing along the next generation of travel agents, where Spotnana’s technology guides work that used to require 15 or 20 years of experience. 

At the same time, we cater to the legacy VIP level of agent, with 12 to 20 years of experience handling complex international trips. Those agents do everything they can within the Spotnana ecosystem, then go outside it to leverage vendor relationships: early check-ins, late check-outs, amenities, and proactive monitoring like confirming a black car pickup 24 hours before a flight.

What results are you seeing on the service side?

Our customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is above 4.7 out of five. We are also seeing a strong push toward mobile, with more travelers managing trips from their devices. The Spotnana app mirrors the traveler and travel arranger experience, which helps drive that adoption.

We still see a decent amount of phone and email, but as more travelers move into a chat-enabled environment, we see more of them move away from email. We want to continue down that path. Chat is a more efficient way to service travelers in real time, and tracking service level agreements (SLAs) and performance is far easier in phone and chat environments than in email.

Travelers and travel managers built habits around older tools. How do you keep clients from carrying old processes into a modern platform?

It comes down to trust and transparency. In the early days, I was guilty of checking a price somewhere else to make sure. As travelers learn how good the tools are now, they trust the system. With functionality like show but don’t allow, some clients push back, but we keep a hard line on transparency. The minute somebody goes to Google Flights and finds a basic economy fare you did not show them, you lose trust in the system.

We say yes to clients often, but we also try to be consultative and explain why something was built the way it was, and more specifically why Spotnana built it that way. 

Approvals are a good example. One client had 85 different iterations of its travel policy and generated more than 6,800 approval emails across the organization in a single quarter. That leads to frustration and complexity.

Let approvals happen in real time, guide the traveler properly, and trust the technology to lead people in the right direction. Companies need to think differently, and my job is to challenge them, in a friendly way, going forward.

What has Solutions Travel built on top of Spotnana’s platform?

Data has always been important, but it is becoming even more important to clients. There used to be a handful of third-party systems people relied on for data management. Now the majority of companies are moving to their own data lakes. They want to ingest all of the raw data and produce output that makes sense to them. The way we calculate carbon emissions, for example, may differ from how they want to calculate it.

Thanks to Spotnana’s open API, the first thing we built was a connection to the Trips API, which lets us extract 100% of the raw data and either work with it directly or push it into clients’ data lakes, reporting tools, and benchmarking tools. As Spotnana continues to mature in areas like benchmarking and real-time analytics, more clients will start to lean on those capabilities directly. The Trips API has been a huge win for a number of our clients.

Looking ahead, where is Solutions Travel headed next?

Global expansion continues to be a big focus. We have a strong foothold in the Americas and Western Europe, and we have eased into Eastern Europe. Asia Pacific is the most complex market, and we approached it last, building alongside Spotnana and its roadmap. You will see bigger market expansion and focus there. We just acquired Bay Travel in Australia, we continue to look at acquisitions in markets like Singapore, and we are expanding functionality alongside Spotnana in markets like Japan. A big part of the work in the region is getting financial processes right, from the movement of money to cash payment for airlines.

The clients we bring on in global markets share an entrepreneurial mindset. We tell them up front that we are building the next generation of travel together, that it will not always be easy, and that we will be at the forefront of what the industry is doing. Some clients are not ready for that, and that is okay.

What should the market understand about the size and scope of Solutions Travel today?

People should understand and be excited about the growth. Solutions Travel is becoming a household name in the larger market, and I would like to bring these capabilities to the small and midsize business (SMB) market as well. We will finish this year with close to $600 million in annual sales. We have multiple clients in the Fortune 1000 and a client in the Fortune 5. We are the backbone of companies people do not even realize we are part of.

Our aim is to be the best agency in the world rather than the largest.