What exactly is Spotnana?

As Founder and Chief Product Officer, the question of what Spotnana is comes up in many of the conversations I have with job candidates and people in the travel industry. The truth is, we invented the term Travel-as-a-Service platform to describe ourselves, because no existing category came close to defining the totality of our business.

At the end of the day, what people really want to know is “what does Spotnana do?” The simplest answer is that we are a technology company building new, modern infrastructure for the trillion-dollar travel industry.

When you book a trip, there are several key players involved, including:

Travel providers – airlines, hotels, and ground transportation companies make their travel inventory available for purchase. 

Travel sellers – online travel agencies (OTAs) and corporate travel management companies (TMCs) provide an online shopping experience along with trained staff who can deliver assistance to travelers. 

Travel buyers – corporate and leisure travelers select travel options and provide a form of payment to complete a transaction.

Spotnana is working with all of these stakeholders to reimagine how travel is purchased, sold, and experienced. Our technology connects travel providers, travel sellers, and travel buyers through a single, unified travel platform. We are working to create a transparent relationship between travel providers and travel buyers that supports personalized shopping experiences and perfectly seamless, end-to-end travel journeys.

Bringing trust back to travel

If I asked you to describe the experience of buying something on Amazon, you might talk about the great selection Amazon has, the everyday low prices, or how everything is personalized. Amazon not only makes shopping easy, it makes returns so simple that I sometimes find myself buying more than I need.

Compare this to the experience of shopping for travel. When most people book a flight, they use multiple tools and websites to evaluate their options. Why does this happen? Because people believe there is a deal to be found if they shop around. 

This creates tremendous headaches for corporate travel managers. Far too often they hear the words that are the bane of their existence: “I found it cheaper somewhere else”. Yet, if travelers booking outside of a corporate booking tool, not only do they lose critical visibility that helps them manage spend, negotiate the best discounts, and protect each traveler’s health and wellbeing. 

Spotnana is dedicated to rebuilding trust by providing access to the most comprehensive selection of travel content at competitive prices. Our cloud-travel platform taps into dozens of APIs to pull together travel content from the widest range of sources in real time, so travelers never feel the need to shop around. We then make this content available for purchase through a modern shopping experience.

Spotnana also provides the core infrastructure for travel sellers to service travelers. Our travel platform includes technology for travel agents to respond efficiently to customer requests as well as a comprehensive set of tools for travel sellers to manage customer deployments, access content sources, configure service fees, automate workflows, and more. 

How Spotnana is modernizing travel infrastructure

Today the travel industry relies heavily on technology and data structures that were developed several decades ago. 

For example, most bookings are still managed through a text file called a Passenger Name Record (PNR), because the technology for booking a flight pre-dates the invention of the relational database! 

Earlier in my career I ran a TMC, and I ran up against the limitations of the travel industry’s outdated infrastructure as I tried to drive innovation. Eventually I decided to roll up my sleeves and start Spotnana so everyone could benefit from a new generation of modern infrastructure. 

My team and I started with a blank sheet of paper and imagined how a travel platform would take advantage of the latest cloud-based software architectures, the rapid proliferation of content sources and APIs, and the emerging opportunities around AI. As a result, the architecture of Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform is very different from other travel technology in a number of key ways:

• Access to comprehensive travel content – Over the past few decades, travel content sources have become highly fragmented, and most of the top travel providers have developed their own APIs. Spotnana integrates huge volumes of content from a large and growing number of APIs to provide the best available selection to travel buyers.
• Independent System of Record – Spotnana has its own System of Record for managing bookings, profiles, policies, analytics, and more. We also have developed an order management system that is independent of the PNR. This is a huge advantage, because it enables Spotnana to integrate more easily with other systems, connect all aspects of a trip through a single trip ID, and service travelers throughout their journey. 
• Microservices-based architecture – Most travel platforms today are optimized to drive automation around text-based PNR files. Spotnana takes a different approach and uses microservices and databases to drive automation. This makes it easy for us to automate complex workflows, and it allows our travel platform to be highly configurable.
• Consumer-grade online booking experience – Spotnana makes it so easy to book and manage travel, that more than 90% of bookings, exchanges, and cancellations can happen without travelers needing to contact an agent for assistance.
• Single platform for travelers and agents – We enable travel agents and the travelers they serve to see the same content and data. This makes it much easier to deliver personalized service and quickly resolve issues.
• Global platform – Spotnana can be rolled out very quickly because we deploy a single instance of our software across all locations. 
• Open platform with an API-first architecture – All of the core components of our system are built with open APIs, making it easy to integrate Spotnana with other systems and build new capabilities on top of our travel platform.

Here is a high level overview of how our Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform is structured:

Here is a summary of our microservices-based architecture:

This diagram shows how Spotnana’s microservices-based architecture functions.

How Spotnana delivers value to travelers

Spotnana’s technology is used by corporate and leisure travelers to book and manage trips, and the traveler will always be at the heart of everything we do. Every day our teams are working to provide access to more travel content, make travel experiences more seamless and self-service, and make it easier for travel managers to optimize their travel programs.

We make our technology available through a growing number of travel sellers and travel providers, including:

• Travel management companies (TMCs) – we have developed a comprehensive product suite for TMCs that includes TMC management tools, contact center tools, and extensive capabilities for increasing agent efficiency, all built on top of the full capabilities of our Travel-as-a-Service platform.
• Technology companies – our open travel platform is designed to be white labeled, embedded, and deeply integrated with other software products, websites, and mobile apps. This means we can enable any company to add a travel shopping experience to their product suite. 
• Travel providers – Spotnana works directly with top travel providers to modernize content distribution and retailing. Our travel platform can also be embedded in a travel provider’s website and used to deliver a modern SMB booking site that supports deep integration with loyalty platforms.
• Leisure travel agencies – TMCs focused on leisure travel and OTAs can use our APIs to power travel experiences for their customers.

Building the future of travel

There are a great number of innovators and innovative companies in the travel industry. Spotnana strives to serve as a catalyst for innovation by providing modern infrastructure that everyone can benefit from and build upon.

While we’ve made tremendous progress delivering on our mission to modernize the infrastructure of the travel industry, the truth is we are just getting started, and the most challenging and exciting problems from a technology perspective are still yet to be solved.

To learn more about working with Spotnana, click here, and to explore career opportunities, please visit this page.