Company

A global travel technology company powering bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide — connecting airlines, hotels, rail and car rental companies with travel agencies and online booking platforms. Operating across more than 165 countries, the company had spent decades running the infrastructure that underpins the global travel industry, processing an enormous volume of transactions daily through a next-generation travel marketplace.

Situation

The billing systems at the core of the company’s operations were more than 30 years old. Built for a simpler era — when there were hundreds of travel products rather than tens of thousands — they had been held together through decades of patches and workarounds. The data they produced was inconsistent, the processes around them were heavily manual, and the siloed architecture made it nearly impossible to introduce change without risk. Replacing them was not optional. The question was how to do it without disrupting a business that ran on them every day.

Challenges

• Decades of accumulated complexity had made the legacy systems difficult and expensive to maintain. Every change required deep specialist knowledge, and the risk of regression was high enough that teams were reluctant to touch anything.
• Siloed data systems produced inconsistent outputs. Without a unified processing layer, reconciling data across systems was a manual exercise — slowing billing cycles and introducing opportunities for error.
• The existing infrastructure could not adapt to changing business needs. With travel product complexity growing — from roughly 500 options in 2010 to an estimated 10,000 by 2024 — the billing architecture needed to scale and flex alongside the business.
• High compliance and resiliency requirements left no margin for error. Any replacement solution had to meet the same standards the legacy system had been held to for decades — while also being easier to operate and extend.