Building tech alone won’t make an impact, says company co-founder. Products must be business-first.

You’ve heard of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), but Travel-as-a-Service is a term uniquely coined by Spotnana – a service provider that calls itself a cocktail of ‘Online booking tool provider, Travel Management Company (TMC), content aggregator and tech provider.

The company introduced Travel-as-a-Service while aiming to modernise the travel industry’s infrastructure by providing a cloud-based platform with open APIs. For corporations, Spotnana provides a unified platform for managing business travel, offering integration with preferred vendors and analytics tools. For TMCs, Spotnana’s platform enables collaboration between agents and travellers, and by utilising Spotnana’s tech stack, TMCs can reduce costs and focus on the traveller experience.

Shikhar Agarwal, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Spotnana, says the main issue here is the gathering of data from multiple sources. In one of his blog posts, he wrote – ‘Pulling content together from so many sources in real-time – with all inventory aggregated, deduped, normalised, sorted, filtered, and marked up with customer-specific business rules for what is considered in and out of policy – rival the complexity of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms.’

WiT caught up with Shikhar recently to chat about the complexity of industry entry due to required licenses and regulations, Spotnana’s solution to democratise travel through a platform approach and the potential for disruption in the industry, advocating for collaborative innovation.

Q: What is the purpose of Travel-as-a-Service and what gaps in the market does it solve?

I come from a non travel background. Prior to this, I was at Google and ThoughtSpot. So when I started learning about corporate travel, what I realised is, data was the single biggest blocker that’s segregated all over the place, segmented all the place, right? There’s no single place where all the data is shared. 

It became apparent that to innovate in this space, you had to stitch all that data together. And you have to own the system of records and profiles on trips. And there were lots of hurdles to entry. It’s mind blowing that you have to take ARC and IATA and BSP to understand all those things. 

So, if it’s such a closed industry, how do you enable ease of innovation? You democratise travel so that anyone can innovate on top of it. And we didn’t want to just solve this for corporate travel, we knew we should create a platform so that others don’t have to worry about anything other than focusing on business, and not worrying about the complexities of taking licenses. Whether they want to go B2C or they want group travel, or they want to connect traveller data to OpenTable for restaurant bookings… once you provide this travel platform, and democratise travel, the scope of innovation is infinite. 

Our platform is inspired by AWS and how Amazon uses the same platform for ecommerce. Similarly, we developed a travel platform which we call Travel-as-a-Service (TaaS). Spotnana uses the TaaS platform, both are independent but under the same company. We want people to use our platform either through the API white label solution – and we are the first customers of our own platform, in that sense.

Q: You basically went out to solve a problem that you were personally facing with the business…

Exactly. If you want to offer credit card payments on your website, you go to Stripe. You don’t worry about how to connect to MasterCard or American Express or how would a Bank of America credit card transfer money to a Chase customer. Everything is taken care of by Stripe. That’s why payments have become so easy. And that has led to more innovation. We wanted that for travel and hospitality. 

We also have customers like CWT who want to have their own BCC, they want to do their own invoicing, and our platform is capable of supporting them. So, you can be as hands on as possible or as hands off as possible.

Q: You built this platform from the bottom up. What does that experience entail in terms of figuring out the platform’s tech ecosystem?

We take a platform-first approach. It takes years of work and a lot of belief. It takes time, money and people – it’s always a function of these three things. If you have a lot of money, you can hire a lot of people and reduce the time. So, it’s sort of interrelated. 

We were fortunate to be supported by some amazing investors who believed in the vision, even though we did this during COVID, and people said travel had gone to zero, but they still believed in the vision. 

We were able to hire an amazing set of engineers, both from travel and non-travel industries. And we took our time to establish a solid foundation. It’s like growing bamboo, right? It takes some time for it to get to some height, and then it rapidly expands. So we’ll do it slowly but surely, then it’s easier for us to scale rapidly.

Q: Is disruption Spotnana’s ultimate aim at the moment?

Yes, disruption is the ultimate goal. But disruption needs context, right? We want to move the industry forward. That’s why we have this platform that we isn’t tied to just us. It’s an open platform. And so this is disruption of the technology space, I won’t deny it. But we want to invite everyone and anyone to start leveraging it and see how they can leverage the technology to move their business forward.

Q: There’s also plenty of movement in the corporate travel space, like AMEX buying CWT for $570 million…

CWT is actually using Spotnana as their tech platform for many of its Fortune 500 companies and we are very happy for CWT that they’re now joined the AMEX team. And I think consolidation will be able to make the industry stronger. We are still waiting to see how it impacts us, but I would like to congratulate both of them for this merger.

Q: What’s the one glaring gap in corporate travel you want to fix but cannot because the tech just isn’t available yet?

I don’t see people focusing on the productivity of the agents or the customer agents, how do you make them more productive? How do you save their time? We heavily use agents for everything – whether it’s chatbots or adding PSAP numbers, or adding vegetarian, augmenting or matching images hotel rooms.

We’re stitching all that together AI-first to make our own agent desktop, which we feel would be really unique in the industry, in a platform-like manner that others and call centers can also use. Similarly, disruption management is a big gap – if an earthquake happens and suddenly your flight gets cancelled. Say, a hundred people are impacted by it. How do you manage, because it’s all pretty manual now. So how can you do it self serve in a manner does all offerings of our agent desktop disruption management rattles AI first. 

I think the technology is there right now but as you will have to train your own LLM, it takes a lot of energy and time and sometimes out of budget for a startup, right? We don’t have that kind of money to actually train it. 

Also – giving suppliers more control. I believe it’s really important, right? Airlines want to offer dynamic pricing and they want to offer ancillaries like WiFi and lounge passes… it’s a huge market. So again, how does all this data get stitched together? I think that would improve the traveller experience. The technology is still not there because the entire charge is still on a legacy stack. If they want to change something, it’s a lot of work and processes. Airlines are now realizing that the ancillary business and general upselling is a huge industry. And they’ll have to improve the technical staff and streamline data movements.

Spotnana CTO and founder, Shikhar Agarwal (left) with CEO and founder, Sarosh Waghmar

Q: When do you think the tech will get there?

I think the tech is there. It’s more about adoption of the tech. For example, one of the core offerings of Spotnana is NDC. We are heavily reliant. There’s so much fragmentation and we are trying to converge content by connecting all the airlines. NDC gives airlines the ability to innovate on their end without relying on a lot of third party systems. And we are NDC-first. 

With NDC, airlines can start selling all their ancillaries as part of upselling opportunities, because NDC connects travellers directly with the airlines. 

So, it’s now a matter of leveraging and adopting technology and applying it. And we are at the forefront of it. If we are a platform, we will have to be ahead. When NDC started giving us the ability to purchase WiFi, it’s available on the platform.

Q: You operate in a unique space because you basically coined the term Travel-as-a-Service. Who’s your competition and do you see more players entering this space?

There are definitely a lot of people in this space. I would say in terms of the platform, it is a little bit fragmented. For example, Booking.com has amazing hotel APIs, right? Skyscanner has amazing flight APIs. Meaning, API’s to get content is available. 

But then companies are limited if they want to now customise those APIs for their own needs. If you want to have negotiated rates coming in the API, you won’t get it in the OTA APIs. That’s why we are even trying to partner with all these OTAs so they provide content via us – we’ll become the platform. We’ll connect to it like we are connected to Expedia. We become the central platform and we consolidate the industry, at least on the platform side.

Q: There’s this notion that Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI, and newer tech, is mostly accessible to larger players due to cost, and not so much for startups or newer companies. Do you think that’s true?

There are two parts of AI – one is data and the access to data. Second is training the model. Training is expensive – GPUs are very expensive. But with ChatGPT and Gemini and Mistral, you don’t even have to train them anymore. So really, now it’s all about data and startups have to just figure out how to get that data. Startups have less money, so they have to do more with less, even if they have less data, they have to do more with less and start solving industry problems from there. 

Accessibility after ChatGPT is there. You don’t have to train your models. Start leveraging APIs? The main resource crunch is with people, not so much tech.

Q: Let’s wrap-up with a personal question. When did you start becoming a tech enthusiast and since you’re not from a travel background, when did you decide to apply that tech affinity to travel?

I grew up in India. You might find it cheesy, but when my parents got me my first computer, I was just fascinated when the Microsoft logo would come on with all those colors. What I realised is that, with computers and tech, an individual can make a lot of difference without a lot of capital. 

Most businesses are capital-intensive. But if you own a laptop, and you have an idea, you can actually do something with it. You can create an app. And maybe the money will come. 

Obviously, everything needs a little capital but it’s not capital upfront – with a computer, you can do something on your own. To me, that was a very strong motivation to go and make an impact. Over the last few years, before joining Spotnana, I also learned that tech is a means and not the end in this market. If you’re just developing technology to solve a problem, people might not adopt it. Yes, it has to solve someone’s problem, but it also has to have a business angle to it. 

So, when I met Saroj Waghmar (CEO and founder, Spotnana), I found travel is a large enough problem to solve with tech that can make a huge Zero to One impact, like a disruptive impact. That was my motivation. I am definitely interested in tech, but I’m very business-first. Travel is a huge area which is ripe for disruption. It’s high time and a huge trillion-dollar industry.

Arvindh Yuvaraj