Smartrav
A ten-year-old travel business rebuilt as a single booking surface — flights, hotels, transfers, car rental and eSIMs — instead of a trip assembled across five sites.
The problem
Booking a trip means visiting a flight site, then a hotel site, then a transfer service, then a car rental desk, then finding connectivity on arrival. Each has its own account, its own payment step, and no knowledge of the others. The traveller does the integration work by hand, and any change to the itinerary means redoing it in five places. The aggregators that solve part of this generally solve flights and hotels and stop there.
What we built
A single search surface covering five booking categories — flights, hotels, transfers, car rental and eSIMs — with round-trip, one-way and multi-city itineraries handled in the same flow. Alongside the standard path, a request route for travellers who have found a better price elsewhere, so a booking is not lost to a fare the platform could have matched.
Stack
Architecture decisions
Treat eSIMs and transfers as first-class, not upsells
Connectivity and ground transport are where trips actually go wrong, and they are usually sold as an afterthought at checkout. Putting them in the same search as flights means the itinerary is complete before payment rather than patched afterwards.
Build an explicit route for beating a found price
A traveller who has already found a cheaper fare will otherwise leave silently. Capturing that as a request keeps the booking in play and produces a continuous signal about where supplier pricing is uncompetitive.
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