Building an automated group travel app

A company conference in Las Vegas or Cancun sounds like a great idea until hundreds of people start buying their flights and hotels, arrive late or on the wrong days, and decide they want to bring family members. What sounds like a fabulous experience can become a corporate travel nightmare.

Enter ITA Group, the corporate travel specialists.

When it comes to corporate conferences, they make sure everything runs smoothly. From event registration to flights, cars, hotels, and outing events, all the way down to the smallest detail, ITA Group facilitates seamless travel experiences.

However, when the ITA Group was formed 20 years ago, corporate travel typically meant booking the same airfare and hotel rooms for 200 to 1000 attendees. Everyone flew into one location, stayed the same number of nights, and flew out again.

But as corporate groups grew in size and requests required escalating levels of personalisation, booking these large-scale events created a lot of time-consuming back-and-forth between ITA’s agents and a client’s employees.

Requests became increasingly more customised, companies would only pay a certain dollar amount per person, an executive wanted to take their family, or someone needed to leave a day early.

This level of personalisation meant that ITA Group’s original business model, where a live person handled everything, couldn’t scale.

ITA didn’t have the resources to build an automated system on time, so they needed an acceleration partner who could fit quickly and easily into their lean development approach. We stepped in as that strategic partner and led the development of ITA’s MVP.

The timing from prototype to final product was a mere six months, allowing ITA to sell to a major tech client early on and bring them along for the ride. This made the corporate client feel heard and invested in the product’s success. All in all, we delivered a comprehensive solution in the specified time period within budget.