[UPDATE, Mar. 29, 2021: Pana was acquired by Coupa.]

At a time when corporate employees, much less non-employees, are not really traveling, guest travel specialist Pana last month announced it raised $3.6 million to support its “next” product. Appearing on The Company Dime’s Teleconference last week, Pana CEO and co-founder Devon Tivona said the new direction had something to do with balancing savings, safety and satisfaction.

“We want end traveler technology that makes managing those three variables easier,” said Tivona.

He was more specific in describing what Pana has learned and what it would not become. Although the company is hiring travel agents, including a VIP specialist, it does not “want or intend” to be a travel management company, he said. Pana doesn’t have an ARC number and typically partners with clients’ TMCs to access the relevant GDS, policies and negotiated rates. For a small number of customers, Pana delivers related functionality in partnership with BCD Travel unit Adelman Travel.

Pana hires its own agents for the guest traveler service. “So if the traveler has a question or if they need help along the road, when they chat, email or text into the product, it’s our travel agents who are responding,” said Tivona. “On the guest product, that was particularly important because one of the pain points that we heard from our customers — but also travel agencies — was that managing that guest traveler is very different than servicing a traditional employee.


Teleconference 41 with Pana CEO and co-founder Devon Tivona and co-moderator Karoline Mayr from Get Travel Solutions, Jan. 28, 2021.

Click for timestamps. Slide the player above to hear comments on specified topics.
  • 02:10 – New funding, previous profitability, surviving 2020, future viability
  • 11:00 – Pana’s new vision: Going beyond guest travel and finding balance
  • 17:35 – The challenges of and opportunities for managing non-employee travel
  • 23:45 – Current and expected product demand
  • 28:00 – Non-employee travel rights and legal issues
  • 32:30 – Surveying potential customers, hiring travel agents
  • 36:55 – Meetings and group travel
  • 41:45 – Traveler profiles
  • 45:00 – Integrating with TMCs
  • 49:30 – How open are APIs?
  • 54:00 – Investing in NDC

“Guest travelers have no idea what the travel policy is,” he said. “They have no idea how to travel on behalf of that business, so we get far more questions and it’s a far higher servicing burden.”

The new service also will not be a full solution for meetings and groups, at least to begin with.

“Meetings travel — and this is not going to come as news to anyone on the call — is hard,” Tivona told the audience of mainly corporate travel buyers and TMC and travel tech personnel. “Small meetings travel is usually organized by an executive assistant who is trying to get maybe 15 or 20 [workers] in the same room at the same time. There’s a ton of back-and-forth via email [and] spreadsheets that keep track of arrival and departure times.

“The small meetings problem is one that’s really interesting to us,” said Tivona. “Probably in the first version of our new product, we won’t solve for it in a way that’s at least satisfactory to my standards. It’s a problem that mirrors guest travel in a lot of ways — lots of email back-and-forth [and] this concept of a coordinator who’s responsible for the logistics. There’s a ton of logistical complexity and when you really think about what we’ve gotten good at with the guest travel product, it’s managing logistical complexity and kind of that three-way conversation chain between the traveler, the hiring manager and the recruiting manager.”

Pana CEO Devon Tivona

Tivona sees more opportunity in this sort of coordination resulting from the pandemic and the growth in remote work. “Who needs to be traveling?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s a great question. We are certainly thinking about that problem and I believe that it’s a problem that will become more important as we start looking at how companies travel post-Covid.”

Pana had to cut about 30 percent of its staff as the pandemic set in and now has about 40 full-timers. The company in January said that last year was the best yet for its guest service. Pana signed its nine largest clients in 2020.

Before narrowing its focus four years ago to the often inefficient area of supporting non-employee or guest travel — such as recruits, contractors and interns — Pana was among a clutch of startups attempting to attract mainly small businesses and those without managed travel programs. It had a membership fee model for a chat-based concierge app.

While guest travel seems like a niche within a niche, Tivona said the associated technology and processes could apply to more use cases. What the company initially thought applied mainly to recruits turned out to be helpful for new hire training trips and contingent workers. The pain points were similar, including the traveler not holding a company card or knowing the travel policy.

“We continue to be surprised about the broader applications of the technology we built,” said Tivona. “Underlying all of it was a corporate travel infrastructure — connections with GDSs, travel policy rules engines, things like that. [The platform is] deeply integrated with a virtual payment technology and deeply integrated with a wire transfer service that can get travelers reimbursed within 24 hours.”

He described the “brand risk” for companies that may face competition in hiring or may be managing the travel of a guest VIP.

“You need to make sure that it’s a really seamless experience and so that’s where we’ve invested heavily,” said Tivona. “In Pana, there’s not really a concept of an online transaction or an offline. It’s a technology and service experience that has been baked together.

“Originally, we thought that [guest travel was] probably around 8 percent to 10 percent of corporate travel,” he said. Including those in healthcare, “a lot of our customers are looking at using us for that contingent work population and that can be up to 40 percent to 50 percent of a company’s travel spend. There’s a huge movement towards contingent labor, particularly in the tech space but across a lot of professional industry. We were talking to a large professional services accounting firm and they plan on having half of their professional service providers as contingent workers in the next couple of years. The requirements of a more flexible workforce — a different employment relationship with the company — continues to expand our opportunity even further. So, we think, with our guest travel product alone, easily anywhere between 20 percent to 25 percent of corporate travel spend is addressable with our products as they exist.”

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