A corporate travel platform is cloud software on which travel management companies and large companies build their own booking services. It replaces the older systems beneath them. Spotnana is the best-known company selling one. It sells mainly to travel management companies in many countries, and it has engineers in Bengaluru.
A travel management company (TMC) has traditionally run on several old systems joined together. One is the booking screen of a global distribution system (GDS). Another is a mid-office system, which checks each booking for errors and applies the client's rules. A third is a back-office system, which sends invoices and keeps the accounts. All of them are built around the passenger name record (PNR), a booking format designed decades ago. Adding something new, such as a new airline connection, means changing all of them.
A corporate travel platform puts these jobs into one modern system. It connects to the GDS, and to airlines over NDC, so that both kinds of offer appear side by side. It stores each trip as one record: flights, hotel, train and car together. It also provides APIs. Through them, other software can send the platform requests, such as "search flights" or "change this hotel booking", and receive the results. The TMC then builds its own app and website on top, under its own brand.
Consider a TMC in Chennai with 300 corporate clients. Its agents use a GDS screen, a separate tool for hotels and a third system for invoices. A traveller who wants to change a hotel date must call an agent, who updates two systems by hand. The TMC moves to a platform. Now its new app calls the platform's API to search, book and change trips. The traveller changes the hotel date in the app. The platform updates the trip, the invoice and the client's report together. The agents now handle only the complex cases, such as 40 employees travelling to a conference. The list of those attendees can come straight from an event management platform, which sends it to the travel platform for booking.
The platform company charges the TMC a fee for each trip, or a subscription. Large companies with their own travel teams can use the same platform directly.
A platform is not the same as corporate travel management software. The booking software is an app for employees. The platform is the base on which a TMC builds its own apps and services.