Spotnana bought Troop to make the meetings RFP a booking
Spotnana acquired meetings platform Troop on August 26, and Steve Singh's stated goal is the RFP folded into the booking pipe — the group inquiry your sales office negotiates is the target
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. Spotnana, the direct-connect corporate booking platform run by Concur founder Steve Singh, has acquired Troop, a meetings search and logistics platform, the companies announced August 26. The price was not disclosed. Troop immediately becomes a standard offering to the travel management companies that run corporate programs on Spotnana's platform. The move underneath the deal: the last corporate business that arrives at a hotel as a negotiation is being wired into the same pipe that already books the transient traveler.
The move. Troop, in hotel terms, does everything around a meeting except the part that involves you. It finds the destination, plans the logistics, budgets the sourcing, manages the RSVPs — and stops exactly where your group sales office begins. It cannot book anything, and it has no RFP process. That is the gap Spotnana bought it to close. Singh told Business Travel News the two products will be combined into one within 12 months, with venue sourcing and booking among the aims, built on Spotnana's supplier connections — "integration all the way down to their inventory systems and property." The RFP, he argues, is a manual process sitting outside travel procurement for no technical reason; the industry isn't there yet, but he sees nothing stopping it. Troop's CEO Dennis Vilovic, who stays on running meetings product, points at the buyer: travel managers are increasingly handed meetings and events as part of their job, and they want one system for both.
Why the group desk. The transient corporate booking became a transaction years ago. The group inquiry is the last one that arrives as a conversation: a proposal written by a person, a site visit, a room block priced against the meeting space and the F&B minimum. That conversation is the whole reason a group sales manager exists — it is where a hotel wins on things a rate grid cannot display. Run the inquiry through procurement instead and it becomes a search: the hotel that wins is the one whose meeting space, block rates, and terms are readable by the pipe. Hotels have seen this rail being built from the other end — Marriott and Hilton wiring direct corporate connections from the supplier side. This is the same rail assembled from the buyer's side, reaching for group business.
The catch. What shipped is the acquisition and the bundling. The venue booking, the automated RFP, the single system — all of it is stated ambition on a 12-month roadmap, from the founders, with no adoption figures attached. And the deal is smaller than the headline. Both companies sat in Singh's Madrona Venture Group portfolio for five years, were already sold as a pair through his travel management company, Direct Travel, and shipped a joint product called Troop One in 2023. This formalizes a relationship that existed.
What it means for hotels. Nothing changes in the group inbox this quarter. The question worth asking now is what survives when the RFP stops being an email and arrives as a form with fields — no cover note, nobody to call back. Your block rates and meeting-space pricing travel through a pipe. The site visit, the flexibility on the F&B minimum, the fifteen years your director of sales has known the planner — none of that does, unless you work out where it lives in a channel a machine can read. Pull last year's group wins and mark which ones you won in the negotiation room. That is the share of your group revenue this deal is aimed at.
Steve Singh turned the expense report into software. He just bought the company that gets him to the last corporate document still written by a person.
Read also: The half of corporate travel that's growing skips the RFP · Marriott built a private pipe for corporate travel. Now it wants the buyers to use it
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