Meetings search and logistics platform Troop has been acquired by transient travel booking platform Spotnana for an undisclosed price, the companies announced Wednesday.
The two companies have operated as separate entities within Steve Singh's Madrona Venture Group portfolio for five years and have been offered as complementary products of Singh's travel management company, Direct Travel.
The acquisition will make Troop a standard offering to Spotnana TMC partners immediately, while Troop continues to operate as a standalone brand that corporates can contract with separately under a Spotnana umbrella.
Co-founder and CEO Dennis Vilovic will remain as head of product for meetings and events at Spotnana and will report to Singh.
Over the longer term, according to Singh and Vilovic, Troop and Spotnana will grow closer both strategically and technologically as the market demands a single system of record for both meetings and transient travel and as Spotnana's direct-connect content strategy opens new opportunities for Troop to deliver more seamless sourcing and servicing functionality.
"The role of the travel manager is basically changing," said Vilovic. "A lot of travel mangers are actually taking on meetings and events as part of their portfolio. Hence, that came with a lot of opportunity for us to serve that by bringing our technologies closer together."
Spotnana and Troop have been playing in close quarters for a while, though.
Spotnana already has what it calls Spotnana Events—a module meant to manage meetings travel. Where Troop has specialized in identifying meetings destinations, logistics planning and budgeting for meetings sourcing as well as managing RSVPs, it has, to date, stopped short of offering either a native booking solution or actual request-for-proposals process.
While both platforms can be used together to handshake the meetings logistics and travel booking capabilities now—the companies rolled out an integrated concept called Troop One in 2023—Singh told BTN that Spotnana Events and Troop eventually would be combined into one. He said that as a single product the platform would aim to address meeting organizers' "never-ending list of needs" in a travel and meeting platform over the next 12 months.
Spotnana's direct-connect content strategy will be key to achieving those aims, which also include venue sourcing and booking. Whether that is in the form of an RFP, however, is at the heart of what the technology platform is trying to get at.
"If you look at the way content has evolved over the last 20 years, today suppliers are saying that there's a better opportunity to deliver a differentiated storefront [through an agency technology platform]," said Singh. That differentiated storefront is enhanced dramatically in meetings and events. So I think that is a driver for us. We see the work on the content side … We have very detailed integration with many of the travel providers in the world. It's what we have phrased as integration all the way down to their inventory systems and property. ... There's no reason why the [meetings] RFP process has to be a manual process and external to the procurement of travel. … The industry is not there today, but there's no technical reason for us not to get there."
The other user the platform has in its sights, naturally, is the meeting participant or traveler—depending upon what "persona" the individual is using for a booking. The idea, according to Singh is to leverage the holistic set of data from the travel side and the meetings data to allow front-facing users to search and book travel with the context of the meeting existing in the background.
For example, he said, "The user should be able with conversational AI to speak into the app and say, 'Book my travel for the upcoming leadership meeting'’ The platform should be smart enough to understand that there is a meeting that is actually happening and that the traveler is part of the senior leadership team and then go book that. All that contextual information, why should you have it in two different systems? Plus, in a single system, I would argue it's easier for the customer to administrate."
Vilovic, speaking about the overall acquisition, said he was eager to accelerate development and capabilities with Spotnana.
"From a business perspective, we have been focusing the last few years really on solving the problems for the individual planner or executive assistants and other more ad hoc meeting organizers. We've done a great job and we have great usage on the platform," he said. "Now, we see an opportunity to accelerate our access to travel managers and accelerate our value proposition in a way that is really meaningful and can lead the marketplace with the help of Spotnana's infrastructure."