Travelden

Selling travel offline and selling it online are different businesses wearing the same name. Offline, an agent absorbs the complexity: fare rules, routing, what to do when an airline changes a schedule. Online, the customer meets that complexity directly, and anything the platform cannot answer becomes an abandoned booking or a support call that costs more than the margin on the ticket. The platform also had to hold up on the first day it was open, because a booking engine that quotes a fare it cannot ticket damages a reputation built over years offline.

We connected the platform to the GDS so search returns live inventory and fares rather than a cached approximation, and built booking and payment on top of that as a single flow the customer can finish in one sitting. The platform is a set of services, which keeps the parts that talk to the GDS and the payment provider separate from the parts that render the site. Search traffic and booking traffic behave nothing alike, and neither should be able to take the other down. Round trip, one way and multi-city share one search path. Curated deals on the routes the business already knows sit alongside open search, so the offline expertise shows up in the online product rather than being replaced by it.