CTO Perspective: What I Look At When Reviewing a Travel Company's Operations

Most operations reviews I do start the same way. Someone sends me access to a booking system, a supplier spreadsheet "for context," and a short note that says something like: "we think we need to automate more." Rarely does it come with a clear idea of what "more" should look like.

First of all, what I look at is how a booking moves. Where it starts, who touches it, how many tools it passes through before it's confirmed. Although I'm not looking for something broken. What I actually want to see is how the operation works today, instead of how everyone assumes it works.

That's where the hidden cost can often be found. A step that looks simple on the surface, like an agent ticking a box or entering a confirmation ID from a supplier, can actually be hiding a much more expensive operation underneath it: manually checking a third-party system, reconciling its status, making sure it actually matches what's being confirmed. The visible step is cheap, but the amount of effort hidden underneath is not. And it's exactly the kind of issue that can easily slip through the cracks when a clearer view of the process is missing.

Starting with a reframe

The instinct is almost always to treat operational friction as a tooling problem. If proposals take too long, the assumption is that the CRM is outdated. If supplier coordination feels chaotic, the assumption is that someone needs a better system to replace the spreadsheet. I understand the instinct. It's the same one most of us had early in our careers.

But by the time I'm actually looking at a client's operation, the tools are rarely the core issue. Most companies I've reviewed already have decent systems. What they don't have is one place where the whole flow, from inquiry to confirmation to delivery, is visible end to end.

So instead of asking "what should we replace," I ask a simpler question: where does this process lose time, and why does nobody notice until it's already a problem? That's a different question, and it leads somewhere different. Usually the answer isn't a system that needs rebuilding. More often it's a missing piece of data, or a step that only makes sense because it always has.

The questions I ask first

Where does a booking actually get confirmed, and how many people touch it before that happens?

I trace this literally, step by step. An inquiry comes in, then what? Usually there's an email, a phone call to check availability, another email to confirm with a supplier, a document sent somewhere, a payment step that lives in a separate tool. Seems like each step is small on its own. But together, they add up to days of manual coordination for something that should take hours. If a booking touches more than two or three people before it's confirmed, that's usually where I start.

Where does supplier information live, and is it one source of truth or five?

This is almost always the same story, just with different tools. Availability lives in one supplier's portal, rates live in a spreadsheet someone updates manually, confirmations live in an inbox, and the person who actually knows which supplier is reliable right now is a person, not a system. None of this is wrong exactly, it's just fragile. It works until that person is on vacation or the spreadsheet gets out of sync.

How long does it take to turn an inquiry into a proposal, and how much of that time is actually thinking?

This is the question that tells me the most, because the answer is rarely about speed. It's about where the time goes. If most of the time is spent assembling information that already exists somewhere, that's a structural problem. If most of the time is spent actually designing a good itinerary for the client, that's not something I want to automate away. I want to know the ratio before I suggest anything.

What happens the next time volume doubles?

This one I ask directly, because the answer usually reveals whether a team has been growing its process or just growing its headcount. A lot of operations run fine at current volume because there are enough people compensating for gaps in the system. That's fine until it isn't. If the honest answer to "what happens at 2x volume" is "we'd need to hire," that's worth pausing on before it becomes urgent.

Where has the team already tried automation, and why did it stop working?

The answer to this question is often more useful than anything I'd find looking at what's fully manual. Almost every team I talk to has tried something: an automated flow that someone set up two years ago, a script an old developer wrote, an integration that worked for the first few months. The cause of failure is rarely the idea itself. More often, nobody owned the automation once the person who built it moved on, or the process around it changed while the automation stayed the same. Finding out where that happened tells me more about the team's actual constraints than starting from scratch would.

What doesn't need fixing

From talking with travel executives over the years, I know operational reviews can sometimes sound like the setup for a pitch to replace everything. That's not the point, and it's not usually the reality either. If every recommendation coming out of a review is "rebuild this" or "replace that," it means one of two things: either not enough attention was paid to what's actually happening day-to-day, or the review was really just a pitch for more tooling wearing a diagnostic label. 

So it's worth saying plainly: most of what I look at doesn't need to be replaced. The booking system a team has been using for years usually does what it was built to do. The spreadsheet everyone complains about often holds genuinely good judgment, built up over time by people who know their suppliers and their clients well. None of that is the problem.

More often than not, what's missing isn't better software, but a connection between the pieces that already work. The booking system doesn't talk to the supplier list. The proposal template doesn't pull from the data that already exists. The team's hard-earned knowledge lives in someone's head instead of somewhere the next hire can access it. Fixing that is a much smaller job than it sounds, and it's rarely the one people expect to hear.

A fresh perspective

This is roughly the process I go through in the operations reviews we run at Rebbix. We’re looking at where your booking flow, your supplier coordination, and your team's time are actually going, and where a small fix would save you more than a big one would.

If any of this sounds familiar, that's usually a good sign there's an easy win somewhere in your operation, not a sign that something is fundamentally broken. Sometimes it just takes a second set of eyes, ones that have seen the same patterns across enough travel platforms to know where to look first.

If you'd like that second look, the operations review is free. We go through your operations the same way we would diagnose our own, and tell you honestly where things are breaking down and what's worth fixing before you scale further.

‍