This week will see a number of leaders and innovators from the global corporate travel industry gather in London for the annual BTN Group Business Travel Show Europe - and while I sadly am unable to attend in person this year I wish a fantastic show for everyone attending with lots of business and networking value being generated
Interesting - today marks the 3 year anniversary since I joined the Spotnana rocket ship on 18th June 2021 - and this milestone made me reflect a little on what has happened since Spotnana came out of stealth mode at the BTS conference in September 2021 - back then in the "coming out of Covid world" we were immediately asked what we meant with our #cloudnative #travelasaservice platform given that this was a new term for the industry - and it was hard to explain in an "easy to understand way"
Fast forward to today, and there is a long list of hard evidence projects demonstrating the #travelasaservice potential - driven by customers across all segments of the industry and with more to come during the remainder of 2024 - so in many ways we are now able to give examples of what we meant back then 😀
While Spotnana will be absent from the 2024 BTS event, we will actually be represented in the form of a number of TMC's, Expense Solutions, Travel Tech Solutions, Travel Suppliers and Buyers who all use our platform in different ways - and this is the perfect illustration of how the vision has become reality by letting others build smart solutions on top of the Spotnana platform
Back in 2021 I also talked about saying "goodbye to the PNR" for the first time - and while we certainly still use the PNR when booking in the GDS, we have indeed stopped using the PNR as the default order management system and replaced this legacy system with a modern open order management system designed to handle complex multi-source trips with instant data validation and easy integration to other relevant systems
Finally, we have launched several features aimed at solving the sustainable travel challenge, but as stated by Elizabeth West yesterday in her excellent article about the state of sustainable travel we are still waiting for customers to start making tough decisions in their travel policy about how to enforce greener travel and reduce the carbon footprint whenever possible
A final observation before BTS 2024 kicks off has to be how much focus there will be on International Air Transport Association (IATA)'s latest initiative - "Offers and Orders" - in the breakout sessions. If you think NDC was a challenge then get ready for more disruption at a faster pace - a number of airlines have committed to moving away from the PNR and replace the legacy order system with a new modern airline retailing infrastructure and this will no doubt create significant challenges once again for the TMC's who are operating in the old tech world
Have a fantastic BTS show - enjoy London - and you can always meet a Thorsen at the FCM booth Glenn Thorsen
Partner Marketing @ TravelPerk || 🇺🇦🇬🇧
1mo🤘