By industry
AI & Automation for Travel & Hospitality
Fill rooms and seats without paying commission twice
We design around
- DPDP Act 2023
- PCI DSS
- GDPR (EU-facing bookings)
- Consumer protection and cancellation disclosure rules
- 22-35%
- Direct booking share increase
- 3 days → 20 min
- Group booking quote turnaround
- 60%
- Guest enquiries handled without an agent
Typical in year one where direct was previously under a fifth
What we hear
The problems that bring people to us
If several of these describe your week, there is almost certainly something worth automating.
- Group and multi-party bookings handled over email and spreadsheets
- Intermediary commission taking a fixed cut of every booking
- Availability and rates maintained separately in four places
- Guest communication inconsistent and entirely manual
- No reliable view of which marketing spend produced which stay
What we build
Where automation pays off in travel & hospitality
Group and complex booking engines
Multi-room, multi-passenger and multi-leg bookings with holds, partial payments, amendments and cancellation logic that survives a payment timing out halfway through. The calendar is never the hard part.
Direct booking channel
A conversion surface you own, priced and packaged on your terms, instrumented so the economics against intermediary commission are visible rather than assumed.
Availability and rate integration
One authoritative inventory source pushed to every channel, so an overbooking is a bug rather than a routine occurrence.
Guest communication automation
Pre-arrival information, upsells, in-stay requests and post-stay follow-up, automated with escalation to a person for anything that carries a decision.
Demand generation with real attribution
Spend reconciled against actual stays and actual margin, not platform-reported conversions. Usually reallocates budget before it increases it.
Two businesses in one sector
Hotels and tour operators look adjacent and their engineering problems are not the same, which is worth separating before scoping anything.
Accommodation is an inventory and channel problem. The unit is a room-night, it perishes, and the central question is which channel fills it at what net margin.
Tour and group travel is an assembly problem. The unit is a bespoke itinerary combining components from suppliers who do not share a system, and the central question is how long it takes to quote and how often the quote is wrong.
Automation pays back in both, in different places. Conflating them produces a platform that does neither well.
Where the money leaks
In the quote gap. For group and complex travel, the time between an enquiry and a priced itinerary is the single largest source of lost business. Three days is common; the enquirer has asked four operators and is buying from whoever answered first with something credible.
In commission on guests who already knew you. A guest who searched your name and booked through an intermediary is discovery you paid for twice. Separating that cohort from genuine discovery traffic is the first analysis worth doing, and it usually reframes the budget conversation.
In manual re-keying between systems. Property management, channel manager, payments and accounting rarely agree. Every reconciliation gap is somebody's Tuesday.
In unmeasured marketing. Spend optimised against platform-reported bookings rather than actual stays and actual margin. See Growth & Demand Generation for how we close that.
What we build first
Rarely the booking engine. The sequence that tends to work starts with whatever is currently manual and repeated — quote assembly, guest communication, availability sync — because those pay back inside a quarter and they clarify the requirements for a platform build.
The platform comes second, specified by what the first phase learned. Building the engine first means specifying it from opinion, and booking systems are unusually expensive to get wrong because the edge cases are all financial.
Where the work overlaps
The build side is Product Engineering — booking flows, payments and the states a reservation can occupy. Guest communication is support automation with a hospitality tone and tighter escalation. The channel and rate reconciliation is back-office automation.
If you run group logistics at scale, the exception handling described under logistics and supply chain applies to supplier coordination in much the same way.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
Can you actually reduce our dependence on booking intermediaries?
Partially, and anyone promising more is selling something. Intermediaries deliver genuine discovery value and you will keep using them. What is achievable is shifting the share of guests who already know your name from a commissioned channel to a direct one, which is a different and much more tractable problem than replacing discovery. We model the economics on your actual commission rate before recommending spend.
What does a first engagement cost and how long does it take?
Two weeks to audit the booking flow, channel mix and where enquiries currently leak, then four weeks for a first automation or ten to fourteen weeks for a booking platform build. Which one depends on whether your problem is the conversion surface itself or the manual work behind it. The audit tells you that rather than assuming it.
Our group bookings are all bespoke. Can that be systematised?
The quoting and assembly can, even where the final pricing stays human. Most operators find that eighty per cent of a group quote is repeated assembly — availability checks, component pricing, itinerary formatting — and only the last part is judgement. Automating the assembly and leaving the pricing to a person is the version that works and the version operators actually adopt.
How do you handle a payment that half-succeeds?
As a designed state rather than an exception. Authorised-not-captured, captured-but-booking-failed, refunded-partially and disputed each get a defined system state with a reconciliation path. This is the single most common source of bugs in inherited booking systems and it is a design decision made once, not a class of defect fixed repeatedly.
We are seasonal. Does the infrastructure cost make sense off-peak?
It should, and if a vendor quotes you flat always-on capacity for a business with a four-month season, question it. Right-sizing outside peak with a rehearsed scale-up before it is the normal pattern, and for most operators in this sector the off-season run cost is a fraction of peak. We quote both numbers.
Can AI write our property and package descriptions?
Draft them, from real attributes, with your brand rules enforced — and a person should edit before publishing. Generated descriptions at volume without editing read as generated, and in a category where the copy is part of the product that costs more than the time it saves.
Talk to someone who has worked in travel & hospitality
Bring a process that annoys you. In 30 minutes we will tell you whether AI helps, what it would cost, and where it would fail — even if the answer is don't bother.
Or email [email protected] · we reply within 1 business day