Team Novo Nordisk is the world’s first all-diabetes professional cycling team, headquartered in Atlanta with a roster made up entirely of riders living with type 1 diabetes. Since 2013 the team has raced a global calendar, and it recently extended its sponsorship with Novo Nordisk, one of the longest partnerships in professional cycling.
For a team that competes around the world, travel is inseparable from performance. Riders leave home for weeks at a time, moving from one country to the next across multi-destination itineraries, and a difficult journey can affect how an athlete races.
The team also manages travel from the United States while its riders compete on nearly every continent, so a single change can mean navigating limited flight options, unfamiliar carriers, and a wide spread of time zones. Before Spotnana, global complexity carried real risk.
When a rider was injured in Africa, where few airlines served the route, rebooking a single ticket took a full day. “When you’re trying to get an injured rider home and there are only a handful of flights, every hour matters,” said Sergey Davidenko, Vice President of Operations and Sponsorship at Team Novo Nordisk.
Today, Team Novo Nordisk runs its travel program on Spotnana, with servicing provided by Solutions Travel. The modern travel platform gives the team one system for booking, changing, and reporting on every trip, with 96% of trips now booked through online self-service channels.
“Technology nowadays is everything,” said Davidenko. “Spotnana gives this freedom to the customer. I don’t have to call an agent and wait for the agent to decide whether a flight is good or not. The technology lets us see all the options an agency sees.”
Through Spotnana, Team Novo Nordisk has access to:
- One global travel platform — a single system for booking, servicing, and reporting across every region the team races in, with no separate tools to reconcile by country
- Multi-city bookings across multiple carriers — the ability to book travel journeys across multiple cities, fly multiple carriers, and receive a single itinerary with built-in pricing optimization; a huge benefit given the complex routings the team builds constantly
- Mobile self-service changes — an app that lets the team’s arrangers rebook, cancel, and adjust trips in minutes from anywhere, without needing support from a live agent
- Direct airline connections — direct links to airlines that make it easy to change, cancel, and refund tickets, and that surface the widest possible flight availability on thin routes
- Traveler profiles and preferences — saved seat, airport, and travel preferences that follow each rider and staff member across every booking
- Reporting and visibility — on-demand reports the team can run by airline and by alliance, plus unused ticket credits, automatic visa reminders, and policy controls
“You guys have the best reporting ever,” said Davidenko.
One platform for travel
The hardest part of Team Novo Nordisk’s travel is assembling the plan. A typical race might require bringing twelve people together from different cities so they arrive within the same window, sometimes routing riders through connections to land at the same time. Spotnana’s ability to combine flights from different airlines into a single itinerary, even when those carriers are not partners, has made that work manageable.
“The ability of Spotnana to combine tickets across airlines that aren’t even partners into one itinerary is huge for us,” said Davidenko. “The number of options we see for multi-destination tickets is a real advantage.”
The team changes travel plans from the app. A rider had traveled from Australia to a training camp in Alicante, Spain, when he learned his grandfather had died and needed to get home for the funeral, a journey across nearly half the world on a tight timeline. “He found out at breakfast, and literally within fifteen minutes we were able to change the ticket just by using the app,” said Davidenko.
The change cost about sixty dollars in fees and fare difference. “We looked at each other like, wow, we couldn’t believe we were able to pull it off. If we did not have Spotnana, think about the amount of time we would spend to change a ticket like that.”
Spotnana’s direct connections to airlines make it straightforward to change, cancel, and refund tickets, and they widen the pool of flights the team can choose from. On a route like the one out of Africa, where only a handful of carriers operate, having multiple content sources can be the difference between getting a rider home and waiting another day, and the fares tend to be more competitive as well.
Reporting, credits, and visa checks
Reporting has become one of the tools Davidenko reaches for most. Spotnana empowers the team to run reports on demand, including views by divisions, events, airline and airline alliances.
“Spotnana’s reporting is extremely helpful for the planning and future budgeting but the whole Spotnana interface deserves extra attention; it is extremely user friendly and easy to understand, from booking multi-destination tickets, making any travel changes, to running reports, the interface allows us to do all these functions very fast and easily,” said Davidenko. “I can pull reporting by the airlines and by SkyTeam or Star Alliance. We were missing some airline tickets for the bonus, and I pulled this report and thought, wow, this is amazing.”
The platform also catches the details that are easy to overlook when one person is booking for an entire roster. Spotnana flags visa requirements at the time of booking, a safeguard the team did not always have.
Before Spotnana, a rider from a country requiring a Schengen visa was stopped in transit because no one realized a connection through a Schengen country triggered the requirement. “With Spotnana there’s always a reminder about the visa,” said Davidenko.
Unused ticket credits are also easy to redeem in Spotnana. The team does not generate many, since most travel is locked to specific events, but credits stay visible with reminders, which matters when the team swaps one crew member for another.
“We see the credits to use, and it’s extremely helpful,” said Davidenko.
Policy controls round out the picture, and the team maintains 100% policy compliance. With a program of fewer than 100 travelers, Team Novo Nordisk keeps policy simple, using price limits and approval rules that govern who can see and approve what.
Traveler profiles capture seat, airport, and routing preferences that follow each rider and staff member across every trip, giving the team a data foundation it relies on daily.
“I’d recommend Spotnana to anybody for the peace of mind, the freedom of booking, and the transparency,” said Davidenko. “And they keep surprising us with new features.”
