Booking and availability
Reservation, hold and release logic as the centre of the build, because that is where the failures customers remember happen.
Industry
Travel & Hospitality
Booking systems where inventory is perishable and the price moves while people decide.
What we build for Travel & Hospitality
Travel inventory is perishable in a way almost nothing else is. An unsold seat on a departed flight is worth zero forever, prices move while a customer is deciding, and availability has to be true at the moment of booking rather than at the moment of searching.
That gap between search and confirm is where travel software development is won or lost. Holding inventory correctly, failing gracefully when a supplier says no at the last step, and never showing a price the customer cannot actually buy.
And the customer is somewhere else, usually on a phone, often on a poor connection, in a different timezone from your support desk. We have no published travel case study, so this page describes how we would approach it.
Sector constraints
What makes this sector hard
Availability must be true right now
Overselling and stale inventory are the failures customers remember. Reservation and release logic is the core of the system.
Pricing changes under the user
Rates move mid-booking. What the system does at that moment is a policy decision, and it has to be made deliberately.
Cancellation is part of the product
Changes and refunds are nearly as common as bookings. Treating them as exceptions is what creates support load.
One slow supplier slows everything
Search often waits on several external systems. The slowest one sets your speed unless the design says otherwise.
What we build for this sector
Supplier and channel integration
Connections to the systems that actually hold inventory and rates, behaving sensibly when one is slow or down.
Payments, changes and refunds
Deposits, cancellations and amendments treated as normal paths through the product rather than as support tickets.
Conversion and speed work
A booking journey is a comparison against other open tabs. Latency there is a revenue problem, not a technical one.
Capabilities this usually needs
Questions we get asked
What happens if the price changes mid-booking?
That is a policy decision, and it should be made deliberately rather than discovered in production. The options are to hold the quoted price, ask the customer to re-confirm, or fail the booking, and each has a different cost. We will put them in front of you with the trade-offs and build the one you choose, rather than picking quietly and letting you find out later.
Can you integrate with our existing reservation system?
Usually, but which functions can be exposed depends entirely on that system. The first step is a short technical review of what its interface actually allows, before anything is promised in a proposal. Reservation systems vary enormously in what they will let an outside application do, and assuming is how travel projects overrun.
How do you handle cancellations and changes?
As first-class parts of the product. They happen nearly as often as bookings, and every one handled by a person instead of the system is a cost you carry forever. Designing them properly is unglamorous and it is where a lot of the operational saving actually comes from.
Building something for Travel & Hospitality?
Tell us the constraints you are already aware of. Half of scoping a sector project is working out which of them are real and which are assumed.