Direct Travel is a leading travel management company (TMC) serving thousands of customers worldwide. Over several decades, Direct Travel has built a reputation for consistently providing customers with exceptional service. Today, it is setting a new standard for what it means to be a modern TMC—combining a high-touch service model with the speed, scale, and intelligence of a truly global platform.
In 2024, Direct Travel decided to adopt Spotnana Cloud for TMCs as the core travel infrastructure for its next-generation Avenir product suite.
Avenir is Direct Travel’s modern travel platform, built on Spotnana and backed by decades of service excellence. It enables travel programs that are easier to manage, loved by travelers, and ready for the future.
With Avenir, Direct Travel has been able to quickly win new customers by offering a combination of world-class service and industry-leading technology. Spotnana has helped Direct Travel address a wide range of customer pain points, including content fragmentation, leakage, and traveler satisfaction, by providing a solution that meets the demands of today’s corporate travelers.
“Deploying Spotnana at Direct Travel has been transformational and given us a new perspective on what’s possible as a TMC,” said David Breslin, EVP of Customer Experience for Direct Travel.
Through its partnership with Spotnana, Direct Travel has access to:
- Global content coverage – including content sourced from GDSs, direct NDC integrations, low-cost carriers, OTAs, and aggregators, all of which is delivered through a single, unified platform for travelers, agents, and TMC operations teams.
- Modern OBT experience – a consumer-grade user experience for travelers combined with powerful self-service tools for travel managers.
- TMC management tools – configurable features for managing content, rates, fees, payments, email notifications, invoicing, unused ticket handling, mid-office tasks, and back-office integration.
- Agent productivity tools – built-in tools for agent task management, AI-assisted issue resolution, and automated quality control checks.
- Global-first architecture – technology that enables any agent to service any traveler from any location, supports rapid global customer deployments, and enables real-time global travel analytics.
Direct Travel has transformed these capabilities into a differentiated customer experience through Avenir, giving clients faster access to innovation and dramatically reducing time-to-value.
In the first two months after launching its Avenir: Travel Edition solution in May 2025, Direct Travel has quickly launched more than 30 customers, with deployment times measured in a few short weeks. In fact, many customers went live in under 10 business days, underscoring the agility of the Direct Travel team and scalability of the Avenir model.
“Modern technology and top-tier customer service is what our customers are looking for,” said Sarah Kuberry Martino, Direct Travel’s Chief Product Officer. ”They want to get program adoption, they want to stop leakage, and they need to be able to get a handle on duty of care. They’re looking for a new platform that is built for the future that can take advantage of new technologies as they come to life.”
Direct Travel aimed to solve fundamental customer challenges and deliver a “travel program for the future, not a travel program for 2005” through its Spotnana partnership, according to Kuberry Martino.
A transformative partnership
Spotnana has helped Direct Travel modernize its infrastructure and transition to a “much simpler and yet more elegant and sophisticated way to service our customers,” said Breslin. “We’ve been able to retire many legacy systems; Spotnana has replaced our mid-office, so we’re no longer required to use five different systems to do file finishing or quality assurance.”
“Both the agent’s ability to serve the customer and the overall customer’s experience are greatly improved. Spotnana’s agile, cloud-native architecture can serve the customer in real time with better context for what they’re doing and provide access to the content that they’re looking for. That’s an incredibly powerful combination.”
This is where Direct Travel’s expertise shines; quickly enabling agents, rolling out at scale, and elevating both service quality and client satisfaction.
Deep collaboration defines the relationship between Direct Travel and Spotnana. Breslin lauded the implementation as world-class, noting the expertise of the Spotnana team. “We’ve had access to so many Spotnana experts to guide us on how to optimize our investment and quickly bring the value of Avenir to market,” noted Breslin.
The global nature of Spotnana Cloud for TMCs allows Direct Travel to deploy Avenir with remarkable speed, sometimes in just a week or two.“Spotnana provides one instance for all of your countries, for all of your needs,” said Breslin. “That means we can support our customers consistently, no matter where they operate, while reducing overhead and streamlining operations.”
The product development relationship is exceptionally close, with teams meeting often to accelerate innovation. Spotnana has benefitted from deep insights into opportunities for improving agent efficiency, and the evolving needs of travelers and travel managers. Direct Travel has become an “engine that can consume innovation” by working with Spotnana to quickly “train, enable, test, launch, and get things out the door,” according to Kuberry Martino.
Futureproof technology
With Spotnana’s technology, Direct Travel has found it can be more proactive when it comes to servicing travelers. Agents using Avenir are able to identify travelers immediately on contact and leverage data to predict why they might need help. This enables agents to quickly assist travelers in distress, proactively reaching out to offer rebooking options or other solutions via chat, email, and phone support.
Travelers feel the difference, receiving faster help, more relevant recommendations, and proactive service when it matters most.
Direct Travel has also been able to create a new, cleaner data model, since Spotnana’s modern architecture provides high-quality, well-governed data. Using data tools like Snowflake, Direct Travel can combine decades of historical data with this new, clean data stream. This unlocks advanced capabilities like benchmarking and actionable policy recommendations.
“I’m excited about the future, because we’ve done the hard work to integrate every single data element, giving us the ability to build technologies and additional solutions on top of Spotnana,” said Kuberry Martino.
This enables Direct Travel to move from reactive reporting to predictive insight—empowering customers with tools that help them steer, not just track, their programs.
Direct Travel’s vision for the future of the partnership focuses on reducing servicing costs, achieving greater scale and allowing agents to service more customers with higher efficiency but with the same level of customer service for which the company is known. Advisors using Avenir benefit from the ability to see the exact same content and itinerary as the traveler, which fosters a more collaborative and positive service experience.
“The same amount of people can service more customers, or an agent can help even more people,” said Breslin. “There are a lot of opportunities to uplift the impact and productivity of the team, because of the automation Spotnana supports and how self-service-oriented Spotnana is.”
Agents are empowered by the automation of complex tasks to focus on more complex scenarios, VIP service, and international travel, ultimately enhancing the impact and productivity of the entire team.
Looking forward, Direct Travel is working to build additional tools on top of Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform and expand servicing capabilities to more global points of sale to support the needs of its large multinational customers. The goal is to ensure the future of travel is personalized, data-driven, and global—and that Avenir is leading the way.
