After a three-decade journey, Johnny Thorsen believes he’s in right spot at right time to achieve life’s ambition
EVEN as a child, Johnny Thorsen remembers his interest in pulling things apart and then trying to put them together again in a new and better way.
“That’s what my mother told me I was like as a boy,” he laughed, when I asked him why, after three decades of working in the corporate travel space, he’s onto another startup, Spotnana, which is promising to disrupt the sector by creating an open eco-system for corporates to access micro services.
“I like to break old ways of doing things if it improves the process significantly, and to try and do things to move the travel industry forward,” said Thorsen, who’s been made responsible for strategy and partnerships at Spotnana, which came out of a two-year stealth mode with $40m funding and a team that’s made up of the who’s who of corporate travel.
In all the years I’ve known Thorsen since his days in Concur, then Mezi before it was acquired by American Express, I’ve never seen him as excited as he is about Spotnana and how it is in the right place at the right time to disrupt corporate travel.
There’s the pandemic which completely turned the sector on its head and showed corporates a new way of working, meeting and travelling, which means corporates are now seeking new tools and solutions. There’s the accelerated digitisation on the part of suppliers which means they are also more open to new ideas and products. And there’s the corporate traveller who wants the same freedom, flexibility and assurance of booking business trips as he or she does leisure.
And you could say that his career trajectory has brought him to this startup and this point in his life where he sees the opportunity to finally be able to achieve what he’s been talking about as a travel tech evangelist for the past decade or so – to break down the walls to create an open, accessible and democratic eco-system in which everyone who wants to can help solve different problems in corporate travel, without gatekeepers getting in the way.
The Danish’s passion for travel tech started when, right after he graduated as a software developer in 1987, he landed a job building the first PC-based back-office system for corporate travel agencies (aka TMCs today) in Northern Europe. That experience opened his eyes to how much manual, duplicate work there was with little control on the agency’s part.
In 1989, it landed its first customer in Norway’s largest travel group, Berg Hansen, and Thorsen spent his time making trips to Norway the next 18 months, “implementing travel agencies, one after another”. He later joined Berg Hansen as IT director in 1991, setting up an IT department from scratch, and that was his first exposure to corporate travel from the inside.
First breakthrough into startup world with ConTgo
His next stint with BTI in London gave him exposure to the global corporate travel scene and gave him the jumpstart into online travel when he joined Silicon Valley based GetThere as the first employee outside the US heading up EMEA product development and partnerships from London until Sabre acquired GetThere. He then joined Cendant (now Travelport) in 2003 moving to Sydney in 2004 to lead its expansion into Asia Pacific and be an early mover in the corporate online revolution in the region.
Following the break-up of Cendant in 2006, Thorsen made the decision to launch his own startup in 2007 called conTgo (short for content on the go) together with another Dane – Henrik Conradsen, after several years “in the slow lane” with major travel tech corporations.
“I thought to myself, no more large corporate policy games, time to control my own destiny and innovate as fast as possible without worrying about legacy revenue streams.”
“conTgo started as an itinerary management tool – we sent SMS message based on the itinerary – and I recall when the Icelandic volcano erupted, we had a pilot project with Microsoft in three countries and we were the only solution capable of messaging the traveller directly on the phone – and we ended up developing a new duty of care product in 10 days.”
From that, it created a global messaging and duty of care platform which was sold to Concur in 2013. Thorsen strayed with Concur until its acquisition by SAP in 2015 and then joined SAP’s mobile solutions division and helped launch a new cloud-based offering in early 2017.
By then, he felt it was time to get back into travel and that’s when he ran into a startup called Mezi, an AI chatbot personal assistant service, whose founders invited Thorsen to join the team. “It was game changing technology,” he said. A year later, Mezi was acquired by American Express Card Services and Thorsen joined the Amex Digital Labs team to help innovate in card membership services.
“It had nothing to do with corporate travel,” he said. “I worked on card member services, crypto, blockchain and sustainability projects for more than two years and gained a deeper understanding of the payment landscape.”
During his time with Amex Digital Labs Thorsen also expanded his involvement with other startups. Today he serves as a board member or strategic advisor with eight startups around the world and has effectively built the TravelTopia community he has been evangelising about in presentations around the world the past five years.
Spotnana “consolidates everything I’ve done in my career”
But it was clear the call of corporate travel tech was strong and when Spotnana came calling, Thorsen was more than ready. Thorsen has been involved with the startup since the summer of 2019, helping with fund raising and defining the product vision.
“It consolidates everything I’ve done in my career and it’s building something really valuable from scratch for the whole industry. This is not to compete with anyone but to be a trail blazer, and enable anyone to innovate and build services for the entire industry.”
Likening it to the App store, Thorsen said the idea was to develop a single global open platform of cloud-based micro services for corporate clients, TMCs and suppliers to partake of. “We don’t care how customers book or when they book, there will be no GDS segment fees, the customer decides when they want their booking to be made.”
Since it came out of stealth mode, Thorsen said the response has been overwhelming. It is targeting Fortune 1000 companies, TMCs (about 3,000 small to medium sized agencies), as well as suppliers such as airlines and hotel companies.
Its funding runway of US$40 million will be enough to get the company to phase one where “we will have a scalable working product with enough relevant content to make it viable”.
With his personal passion for sustainability, Spotnana will launch a sustainability module in the first quarter of 2022 to help corporate travellers travel sustainably.
“This is the right product at the right time. The big buyers realise that if they come out of Covid the same way, they would have failed. This is the best time to build a future-proof platform.
“For TMCs, staff costs are very expensive and middle and back office tech has not changed for the most part. It is now possible to reduce costs and improve productivity with new tools. This platform will allow any TMC to modernise and serve its customers. We want to be their tech company.
“For airlines and hotels, it’s difficult for them to build on their old stack and many don’t have IT resources – this allows them to innovate to serve their customers better.”
Of its staff force of 128, almost 100 are in tech. “We are a tech company for travel,” said Thorsen, which brings him back to his roots and how he’s always seen himself – a tech guy who wants to pull things apart and to put them together again for travel in a new and better way.
Note: Johnny Thorsen will be speaking at WiT Japan & North Asia, January 14-15. Sign up here. Programme here.
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