August 2025 - Release Notes

Here are the most recent enhancements to Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service Platform. The features are grouped by functional category (Content, Self-service, etc.).

Content

Deutsche Bahn (DB) Rail

Deutsche Bahn rail content is now reactivated for travelers. Travelers can book all German domestic and international fares via Deutsche Bahn and apply any relevant railcards. 

For details on how to book a rail trip, see Book a rail trip (Europe).

Traveler Experience

Personal upgrades

We've introduced a new "Traveler Pays First" model for personal upgrades, enabling travelers to book higher airline cabin classes than allowed by company policy – directly within the platform. This option is only available when enabled by a company administrator through policy settings. When enabled, travelers can pay the full fare amount upfront using a personal card and will be provided with documentation to expense the policy-approved portion later. 

Key capabilities of this feature include:

• Clear shopping guidance: A new modal explicitly shows when personal upgrades apply and highlights the associated costs.

• Enhanced checkout transparency: A dedicated component at checkout clearly indicates the policy-approved amount that can be expensed and the portion of the fare that the traveler will not be able to submit for reimbursement.

• Mandatory cost acknowledgment: A checkbox ensures travelers understand the implications of personal upgrades before completing their booking.

For more details, Book an air cabin class higher than allowed by policy (pay with personal card).

Travel Management

Policy settings for personal upgrades

Company administrators now have the ability to configure cabin class policies with the new "Traveler Pays First" model for personal upgrades. A self-service toggle in policy settings allows administrators to enable personal upgrades directly. This new payment model greatly reduces the need for manual agent processes for upgrades.

For more details, see Allow air cabin upgrades with a personal payment method.

Centralized trip management and enhanced navigation

We've released significant enhancements to our trip management capabilities, transforming the Trips page into a centralized hub for efficient travel oversight. This update introduces dynamic search, improved sorting, and a streamlined navigation, enabling travel coordinators, arrangers, agents, and administrators to quickly locate and manage trips.

Key enhancements include:

• Streamlined navigation: The Trips page now features a “tabbed” experience for improved clarity and easier access to:

  • My trips: Displays all trips associated with a traveler's personal bookings.

  • All trips (visible to administrators and arrangers): Displays all trips for all travelers within your organization.

  • Events: Centralized access to event-related travel.

  • Approvals (visible to administrators, managers, and approvers): Displays all trips with bookings that require approval.

• Dynamic search for “All trips” tab: Users can quickly find trips by entering keywords such as trip name, traveler name/email, trip ID, booking ID, or source PNR. 

• More prominent display of the "organization" selector: For TMC users, the organization selector is now prominently displayed next to the page title and remains selected across tabs, providing clear context of the data being viewed.

• Trip stages and approval filters: Users can now easily filter My trips, All trips, and Events by Upcoming, Completed, and Canceled stages. For Approvals, users can filter and view trips by Pending and History.

• Column sorting: The All trips table can also be sorted by Trip name, Trip start date, and Trip end date.

These updates are intended to provide a more intuitive and efficient experience for managing travel at scale. For more details, see View trips.

Tax configuration for hotel rate caps in policy

We've enhanced hotel policy settings to provide greater flexibility for global companies. Administrators can now configure location-specific tax settings for hotel rate caps. This allows for the inclusion or exclusion of taxes and fees based on geographic region. 

Key capabilities include:

• Location-specific tax configuration: Hotel rate caps now support location-specific tax inclusivity settings, with each location-specific rate cap featuring an option to include or exclude taxes and fees.

• Hierarchical application of settings: When multiple rate cap settings apply to a specific location, the system applies the most geographically specific setting (city-level,  country-level, regional).

• Search results experience: The out-of-policy notice in hotel search results now specifies the violated rule, location, tax/fee option, rate cap amount, and nightly rate when a location's rate cap is exceeded.

This enhancement provides company administrators with increased flexibility to configure precise, location-appropriate hotel rate caps that align with local business practices and regulatory requirements.

For more details, see Set a maximum price for hotel bookings.

HR feed error notifications

We have implemented automatic email notifications to alert administrators about user profile sync failures from HRIS (ADP, BambooHR, Workday) and SCIM (Microsoft Entra) integrations. These notifications are sent to the designated administrator contact and include the user ID, timestamp, and reason for the failure. This feature is enabled automatically for all customers with these integrations, requires no configuration, and provides immediate alerts to help minimize issues such as new employees being unable to book travel or profile updates not syncing properly.

Payments

Diners Travel Account Card (TAC) now supported

Spotnana now supports Diners TAC as a payment method for air bookings. Diner TAC is often used by companies in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. 

Diners TAC is a specialized lodge account system issued by SEB bank, where the TMC passes the account number directly to the supplier for payment collection from SEB bank. The TMC then provides booking details to SEB for customer invoicing.

TMC or company administrators can add Diners TAC as an air supplier program and select the specific GDS and NDC airlines for which they want to use it. Diners TAC is configurable by country, legal entity, department, and cost center, offering the same flexibility as other central payment methods. Trip fees cannot be charged on Diners TAC and must be paid via a central card that works with a payment gateway (e.g., Stripe) or through delayed invoicing.

Integrations

New expense management integration: Ramp

We are pleased to introduce a new integration with Ramp, a leading corporate expense management and bill pay platform, designed to automate and simplify travel expense management for our shared customers.Through this integration, Ramp connects with Spotnana via APIs to automatically import travel expense data into the Ramp platform. This eliminates manual data entry and enhances both the accuracy and speed of expense reporting.

To activate this integration, please reach out to your Partner Success Manager.

TMC Management

Automated processing of HX segments

We have introduced automation for handling HX (Holding Cancelled) segments on Sabre PNRs, thereby reducing manual tasks for agents.

HX segments occur when a flight segment is canceled by the traveler directly with the airline or by the airline. Prior to this release, HX segments required agents to manually check bookings. With this update, Spotnana now automatically accepts full PNR cancellations where all segments on the record have been cancelled and sends an email notification to the traveler with the updated confirmation. This automation also applies to:

• HX segments on unticketed PNRs.

• Cancellations made by the airline or traveler on ticketed PNRs, including upgrades or modifications.

• HX segments resulting from an airline upgrading a traveler to a higher cabin (for American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines only).

Additionally, audit logs record when automation has processed a PNR, providing transparency in the agent activity feed. 

To enable this feature for your TMC, please contact your Partner Success Manager.

Corporate Travel Department (CTD) functionality

CTD functionality enables our TMC partners to onboard and manage organizations that have their own dedicated travel departments, fostering a collaborative service model.

Key features include:

• Flexible service arrangements: CTDs can manage operations during business hours with their dedicated agents, while TMCs provide after-hours support and escalation handling, ensuring continuous service. Both teams share access to supplier relationships and content.

• Complete data segregation and access control: CTD agents have dedicated access to their organization's data, ensuring complete privacy, while TMC agents maintain full visibility across all clients. Separate authentication and user management provide robust security.

• Enhanced queue dashboard with CTD filtering: This provides CTDs with a pre-filtered dashboard showing only organization-specific tasks, while TMCs have the ability to toggle between TMC and specific CTD organization views.

• Comprehensive booking and servicing capabilities: Both CTD and TMC agents can create and manage bookings, utilize shell PNR functionality, and handle frontline customer interactions. CTDs also benefit from Spotnana’s automated booking failure processing and mid-office support workflows.

• Granular admin controls: Both CTD and TMC administrators can manage company settings. TMCs can further manage supplier settings, including rate codes, suppliers, and mid-office rules, while CTDs can manage custom fields and email template rules.

This new functionality is available to our TMC channel partners through backend configuration. Please contact your Partner Success Manager to enable.