Case study · Travel technology
A booking journey travellers finish, and a servicing desk that can keep up.
Appnox built the TravelPlus platform across both halves of the problem — the customer-facing search and booking journey, and the servicing workspace where changes, cancellations and exceptions are actually handled once the sale is done.
The client problem
The sale was digital. Everything after it was email.
Plenty of travel businesses have a decent booking front end and no equivalent for what happens next. Changes, cancellations, re-issues and exceptions fall back to a mailbox and a spreadsheet, which is where the cost and the customer experience both quietly collapse.
The booking journey abandoned at the point where policy or approval entered the picture.
Post-sale servicing ran on email threads, with no shared view of a case’s state.
The same traveller detail existed in the booking, the CRM and the finance export, differently.
Approvals were chased manually, so a trip could be booked before it was authorised.
Agents had no reliable way to see what a traveller had already been told.
Reporting on servicing load was guesswork, so it could never be staffed properly.
What we built
One platform across the sale and everything after it.
The booking journey was rebuilt around what actually causes abandonment: unclear policy, hidden fares, and an approval step that appears without warning at the end. Policy and approval are surfaced during search rather than after selection, so a traveller sees what they can book while they are still choosing.
The servicing side was the larger half of the work. Changes, cancellations, re-issues and exceptions became first-class cases with state, ownership and history, worked in a console rather than in a shared inbox.
Underneath both sits one traveller and booking record, integrated with the supplier and finance systems, so what the traveller sees, what the agent sees and what finance exports are the same facts rather than three reconciliations.
- Policy-aware searchWhat a traveller can book shown during search, not enforced as a surprise at checkout.
- Approval workflowAuthorisation as a tracked step with delegation, reminders and a record of who approved what.
- Servicing consoleChanges, cancellations and exceptions as cases with state, ownership and full history.
- One booking recordA single record behind the traveller view, the agent view and the finance export.
- Supplier integrationContent, availability and fulfilment connected against the interfaces each supplier actually exposes.
Operational effect
What changes when this work lands.
Ranges below describe what engagements of this shape typically move. They are Appnox delivery figures, not this client’s audited results — your own baseline is established before any commitment.
25–35%
shorter first-response window on inbound enquiries
Typical range30–45%
less time per enquiry before a consultant can quote
Typical range40–50%
fewer manual re-entries between systems
Typical range2–3×
more frequent releases after modernisation
Typical rangeIndicative ranges observed across comparable Appnox engagements. Not audited client results. Outcomes vary with scope, data quality and starting point.
How it was delivered
Ship the servicing side early.
The instinct is to perfect the booking funnel first. The operational cost is almost always on the other side of it.
01
Map the post-sale reality
Sit with the servicing team and record what actually happens to a changed booking today, including the parts that run on memory and goodwill.
02
Model the booking record once
Agree a single representation of a traveller, a trip and a booking that both halves of the platform can use, before either is built.
03
Build servicing first
Give the operations team a working console early. It is the half that pays for itself fastest and the half that surfaces the modelling mistakes.
04
Rebuild the journey around policy
Bring policy and approval forward into search, then measure abandonment against the previous funnel rather than against a hope.
05
Integrate and hand over
Connect suppliers and finance, document the operational runbook, and hand the platform to the team who will run it.
Before we talk
Questions this usually raises.
No. This was a bespoke platform engagement. If you want something closer to a product, the honest conversation is about what you would be giving up in fit and what you would be gaining in time to launch — we will have that conversation rather than sell you a build by default.
Yes, within the limits of what each supplier exposes. Connectivity is assessed per project rather than asserted in advance, and we say what is and is not reachable before the scope is agreed.
As configuration rather than code. Policy varies enough between customers that hard-coding it guarantees a rebuild within a year.
Keep exploring
Related work
Start with a conversation
Bring us the workflow, not the technology.
If something here describes your operation, twenty minutes with a solutions architect is usually enough to establish what is worth doing about it.
Free · 20 minutes with a solutions architect · No obligation to commission an audit · sales@appnox.ai