Guide to becoming a travel seller

The market for travel sales is massive

Over $11 trillion is spent on travel every year as billions of people fly around the world to connect with customers, build stronger teams, and explore the world.

This guide is designed to help you quickly get up to speed on how the travel industry works and how you can generate revenue through travel sales.

Overview of travel content sources

First, it’s essential to understand where travel inventory comes from. “Travel content” is an industry term that describes everything that goes into creating an offer for a traveler. This includes listings of available travel inventory for flights, hotel rooms, etc. along with pricing, scheduling, photos, amenities, and fare rules.

There are many sources of travel content that need to be aggregated, normalized, de-duped, and presented to travelers in a unified fashion to create a competitive travel solution. Here is a high level overview:

• Global Distribution System (GDS) – these companies aggregate travel content from participating air, hotel, and car rental suppliers. The leading GDS providers were founded in the 1960’s and 70’s  and provide access to only a portion of the content needed for a competitive travel solution.
• Low-Cost Carrier (LCC) – LCCs include airlines like Frontier Airlines, EasyJet, and RyanAir that focus on selling low cost fares with ancillaries like baggage and seat assignments charged separately. To reduce costs, they distribute their inventory through specialized content aggregators instead of GDS providers.
• New Distribution Capability (NDC) – NDC is an XML-based data standard for airline offers that was introduced in 2012. It was created to give airlines the ability to package and price their offers with greater flexibility as well as provide better experiences to travelers. Leading travel platforms have developed direct NDC integrations with major airlines to gain access to the best content, rates, and traveler experiences.
• Direct connection – some airlines require a direct integration  to access all of their inventory and benefit from the best prices, but do not offer an NDC API. 
• Online Travel Agency (OTA) – major OTAs like Expedia and Booking.com aggregate hotel content and support integrations with travel platforms.
• Hotel aggregator – some companies specialize in aggregating and distributing hotel content, typically in a specific region of the world.
• Car service aggregator – aggregators exist for limos, black car services, taxis, and buses.
• Rail aggregator – some companies specialize in aggregating local rail content.

Each of these content sources has different data structures, APIs, and supported payment methods. In addition, to sell travel it’s necessary to negotiate distribution agreements with each travel content source and integrate these disparate sources into a single, standardized online booking experience.

Spotnana simplifies this complexity by providing access to all of these travel content sources through a single travel platform with open APIs. We focus on providing the widest range of content sources to our partners.

I think of it as kind of like the “Stripe for travel.”

– Henrique Dubugras, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Brex

Overview of core travel technology

To effectively sell travel, you need to assemble a comprehensive technology stack that includes the following components:

• Online Booking Tool (OBT) – an OBT provides the user interface that travelers, arrangers, and non-employee guests use to book their travel. It also provides the user interface for travel admins to manage users, policies, payment methods, suppliers, duty of care, sustainability, analytics, and more. Modern OBTs include both a desktop and mobile app booking experience.

• Profiles – profile tools provide a single source of truth for traveler data and  need to be integrated across all travel technology components. 
• Agent Desktop – travel agents require tools to provide assistance to travelers. This includes technology for managing queues of tasks to handle traveler requests, a unified interface that eliminates the need to go into separate booking tools for each content source, tools for manually handling any parts of the booking process that aren’t fully automated, and analytics on agent performance.
• Contact center – in addition to tools used to manage bookings, agents need technology that makes it easy to service travelers over chat, email, and phone.
• Emails – travel solutions require an email tool that supports itineraries, change notifications, invoices, configurable data elements, agent notes, and more.
• Mid-office – this is technology that automates tasks involved with bookings, cancellations, and exchanges by using scripts to populate unstructured text into booking records called Passenger Name Records (PNRs) that are passed through a GDS to execute a booking. Mid-office tools also trigger  email communications, including booking confirmations, and automate the tasks that get sent to agent queues for manual processing and quality control.
• Analytics – automation is needed to extract the right data elements from unstructured text in PNRs and deliver analytics and reporting capabilities through third-party tools.
• Payments – a long list of payment gateways and integrations are needed to support central, virtual, and individual credit cards as well as travel payment methods that are unique to airlines for vouchers, credits, and cash payments.
• Duty of Care – to keep travelers safe on the road, technology is needed to track where travelers are and enable rapid outreach if an emergency occurs.
• Carbon calculator – a growing number of companies need to report Scope 3 emissions or want to achieve net zero emissions goals. Carbon calculators help travelers estimate emissions for specific travel options. This data can be fed into analytics tools to provide travel managers with insights into overall carbon emissions for their travel program.
• Price assurance – to help companies get the best possible price for bookings, price assurance tools periodically check to see if prices have dropped post-booking and automate the process of canceling and rebooking a hotel or flight.
• Unused ticket management – this technology tracks unused ticket credits for flights, so a workflow can be developed that enables a traveler to redeem a credit toward the purchase of a flight.
• Back office – this is technology that serves as the accounting system for managing financials including booking fees and supplier revenue for bookings, ancillaries, exchanges, and cancellations.
• Customer feedback – to measure customer satisfaction (CSAT), a survey tool is needed to capture feedback after each service interaction.
• Content sources – as described above, content integrations are a key part of the overall travel technology stack.

Spotnana provides all of this technology through a single, unified travel platform with pre-built integrations to key technology partners. 

Spotnana has been an incredible partner. Their technology is easy to integrate, they deliver an exceptional experience for both travelers and admins, and their incredible pace of innovation is only accelerating.

– Naveen Singh, CEO at Center

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Key requirements for servicing travelers

Travelers require assistance for a wide range of reasons. Travelers might have complex booking needs that are unsupported by a booking tool. In addition, some travelers and executive assistants are uncomfortable booking online and prefer to make requests via email or a phone call. 

Sometimes a traveler wants advice on which hotel property to book or assistance finding the cheapest booking option for a costly international trip. In addition, when travel disruptions occur – due to weather, flight cancellations, schedule changes, or other issues – travelers may want the assurance that comes with speaking with an agent to ensure they’re finding the best possible way to reach their destination.

For all these reasons and more, travel sellers need access to enough travel agents to support the volume of travelers that are purchasing trips. Spotnana simplifies this challenge in several ways:

• Advanced self-service capabilities – we enable travelers to manage complex changes and cancellations on their own, which often drive the majority of post-ticketing service requests. On average, corporations using our travel platform manage 95% of bookings without agent assistance.
• Turn-key servicing – Spotnana has a growing network of TMC partners who can provide servicing to your customers in a seamless white labeled fashion.
• Global servicing – Spotnana’s advanced Agent Desktop allows any agent to service any traveler from any location. This greatly reduces the number of countries where agents need to be staffed.

Travel revenue sources

There are several sources of revenue for travel sellers. The largest revenue opportunities are in the following areas:

• Booking fees – typically travelers pay a fee for booking a trip segment or for booking an entire trip.
• Supplier revenue – travel suppliers may offer a travel seller a flat fee for a booking or a percentage-based fee tied to the amount spent on a booking.
• Add-on products and services – travel sellers can also develop and monetize various add-ons, including VIP traveler services, advanced analytics, advanced duty of care, price assurance, and more.

To learn more about commercial arrangements, please contact our partner sales team. We will seek to understand your business strategy, your goals, and the scale of the opportunity for us to work together.

With Spotnana our goal is to deliver the best of all worlds – industry-leading technology, access to the widest range of travel content sources delivered through a single set of travel APIs, comprehensive servicing options delivered through leading TMCs, and a clear path to generating revenue.

Partnering for long term success

Spotnana’s core strategy is to go to market through channel partners. The only way we succeed is by helping our partners succeed. Should you choose to become a Spotnana partner, we will work with you to develop a joint business plan and help you achieve the goals we set together. 

Our teams will guide you through our deployment process, provide training for your staff, and grant you access to our library of enablement materials. We will also assign resources responsible for ensuring the long term health and success of our partnership. 

Please contact us to learn more about how we can help you become a successful travel seller.