From phone calls to a self-service booking platform

Context

A multi-site premium hospitality operation took every reservation by phone or email. Availability lived in local spreadsheets, pricing decisions sat with individual site managers, and confirming a single booking involved several people across two systems. The commercial team could not see demand until after it had been served.

Challenge

The obvious project — a full self-service platform covering every booking type, tariff rule, and customer segment — carried a multi-year timeline and a business case built entirely on projection. Meanwhile every site had its own operating conventions, so "the process" did not exist in a single form anywhere.

Three constraints shaped the work:

• Back-office staff had to keep operating during the transition; nothing could be switched off.
• Availability data had to become trustworthy before it could be exposed to customers.
• The programme needed a defensible commercial result early enough to secure the next tranche of funding.

Approach

Mapped the real process, not the documented one. I spent time in back offices during peak periods to capture how bookings were actually confirmed, including the exceptions handled informally. Those exceptions became the hard requirements.

Scoped an MVP around one closed loop. The first release let a customer check availability, reserve, and pay without any internal intervention — for the highest-volume booking type only. Everything else stayed on the existing process, deliberately and visibly.

Integrated front and back office from day one. Rather than a standalone booking site that created reconciliation work, the MVP wrote directly into the operational workflow so a digital booking appeared to staff exactly as a phone booking did. This was the decision that made adoption a non-event.

Ran a site-by-site rollout with a feedback loop. Each site onboarded with an explicit list of what was not yet supported, plus a fortnightly review where that list was re-prioritised using real usage data.

Outcome

• €800K in revenue through the digital channel within six months of the MVP launch.
• A single source of truth for availability, replacing per-site spreadsheets.
• Back-office confirmation work removed from the highest-volume booking type entirely.
• The commercial case for subsequent phases moved from projection to reported performance, which changed how the programme was funded.

What I would carry into another engagement

The integration decision mattered more than the interface. A booking channel that creates parallel work for operations will be resisted regardless of how good the customer experience is — and a channel that slots into existing workflow gets adopted without a change programme.