Forsta – Building Cost-Efficient Meeting Opportunities

Building cost-efficient team travel

Forsta provides leading technology for researching human experiences that breaks down the silos between customer experience, employee experience, and market research.

With 600+ employees in 14 offices around the world, Forsta needed a travel solution to bring company teams together in person simply, safely, and affordably.

For Simon Reed, VP of Finance FP&A at Forsta, the best solution is one that specifically ensures group travel and physical meetings make sense from a cost perspective.

“We have to make sure that there’s a return on investment for the travel that we do.”

Reed chose Spotnana after considering the Travel-as-a-Service Platform’s ability to ensure travel policy compliance and help manage spend.

“It’s fantastic that we have an efficient tool that we can use to book travel and get out and meet people,” said Reed. “At the same time, we are trying to make sure that there are clear objectives set for travel, as return on investment is important.”

Facilitating key business functions

Like many Spotnana customers, Reed was looking for an all-in-one travel solution that includes a modern, easy to use online booking tool and a travel management company with great customer service.

“Spotnana’s user interface is very clean and straightforward for travelers and travel managers,” said Reed. “Everything on the back end is easy to manage, including card payments. Customer service is excellent at handling deployment, complex bookings, and changes.”

Spotnana’s APIs enable Forsta to integrate other applications and services that they already use. This eliminates the need to perform mundane tasks, saves valuable time, and allows Forsta to work within a singular, streamlined system.

“We use ADP Workforce Now, and to have that linked directly to Spotnana is much more helpful than sending individual updates,” said Reed. “Now we can get new staff automatically added in and close off the access for departing staff.”

Trusted to aid executives

Reed trusts Spotnana to deliver exceptional travel experiences for Forsta executives. Traveler profile personalization has added crucial flexibility to what used to be burdensome situations.

“Our COO has had to make a couple of changes to his itinerary,” said Reed. “He’s a Gold Card holder and what he booked was a non-refundable ticket. He was able to make adjustments easily having all the profile information and loyalty cards already loaded in Spotnana.”

With Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service Platform, Reed is able to build more complex trips that allow him to facilitate in-person meetings with Forsta’s global network of teams. 

“We had a Sales Ops session in Oslo, and then I traveled to see the Finance teams in Illinois and Indiana,” said Reed. “I couldn’t fly direct out of Oslo, I had to get the United flight out of Frankfurt. With the help of Spotnana, I had a couple of days with the teams in Chicago and South Bend, and it was very successful.”

Reed believes people form stronger connections  when they gather together in person. “I’m a great proponent of meeting face to face, especially when building a relationship. It’s terrific that Spotnana helps us deliver people to the right places, at the right time so that the travelers can focus on delivering their objectives, knowing the travel logistics have been sorted in a cost-efficient and effective manner.”