The work that happensafter the demo.

Most travel technology landscapes weren't designed - they were accumulated. Systems were added incrementally, each solving a specific problem at a specific moment. The result is a stack where nothing integrates cleanly, decisions are made without clear data, and every modernisation conversation starts from scratch because nobody has a coherent view of the whole.

Before you can fix anything, you need an honest picture of what you're actually working with.

The cost of a fragmented back office is rarely a single catastrophic failure. It's the accumulated cost of a thousand small inefficiencies: the margin that leaks between quotation and invoice, the reporting that's always two weeks late, the finance team spending month-end assembling data rather than interpreting it.

Most mid-market TMCs are effectively running several separate businesses sharing a P&L — because their systems were never unified.

Airlines crossed the point of no return on NDC in 2025. Major carriers restructured GDS incentives and began surcharging EDIFACT-only content. The organisations struggling most aren't the ones who failed to connect NDC content — they're the ones who connected it but didn't rebuild the operational infrastructure behind it.

Ticketing, modifications, cancellations, queue management, and reconciliation in an NDC environment behave differently per airline, per API. Without engineering built for that complexity, the gains at the front end become losses at the back.

Manual ticketing, reconciliation, and queue management consume disproportionate agent time for transactions that are, in most cases, entirely rule-based. Every hour an experienced agent spends on routine queue processing is an hour not spent on complex bookings, client relationships, or exceptions that actually require judgement.

The travel companies winning on margin aren't the ones with the best negotiators. They're the ones whose operations are so efficient their competitors can't match their cost structure.

The cost of system fragmentation is rarely a single catastrophic failure. It is the accumulated cost of a thousand small inefficiencies — the manual data transfers, the reconciliation spreadsheets, the batch files that occasionally fail silently, the finance team that can't see what the operations team is doing in real time.

Effective integration in travel requires practitioners who understand the domain — who know what a PNR contains and why it matters for accounting. Generic IT integration is rarely sufficient.

Every travel company has an AI story. Almost none of them are about operations — which is exactly where the real value is. AI cannot reconcile data that isn't integrated. It cannot automate workflows that aren't defined. It cannot learn from signals that aren't captured.

Before AI can help, most travel organisations need to solve a more fundamental problem: their systems don't talk to each other. The data foundation comes first. Everything else follows from that.