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The modern travel industry relies heavily on software: from travel agency websites and mobile apps to CRMs and booking engines. Today’s travelers are accustomed to planning, booking, and paying for their trips seamlessly, without the need to go anywhere or contact anyone directly.
However, the industry has been technology-resistant for a long time, and, despite everything, it still is. Many hotels, airlines, and other travel service providers operate using legacy software despite the existence of new efficient and convenient tools, and lots of agencies aren’t sure if they need a mobile app, or how to make their existing one unique, useful, and appealing to their audience.
At the same time, more and more advanced software solutions appear, allowing to automate and quicken tedious processes or solve new challenges — think of how chatbots can save time for everyone, or how dynamic pricing tools can ensure the best deals for travelers and companies.
Software developers and travel experts generally exist in separate worlds, and bridging that divide is not easy. Finding a company that knows how to build a certain type of software and understands the problems travel companies deal with can be a real challenge.
On this note, we contacted Zoftify, a travel software development company, to gain insights into their strategies in today’s market and learn how to leverage industry-specific expertise to upgrade clients’ businesses.
What it takes to build great travel software
It is not enough to just build good software. Lots of software development companies can deliver beautiful designs and decent solutions, but they still won’t work for the client. A successful app and a successful travel app are not the same thing — the latter demands not just great execution, but a deep understanding of what works in the current market, and how one can drive bookings and business value through the solution.
Well, how can you ensure success? A huge part of it is conducting a proper product discovery, and there are two aspects to consider.
First of all, industry knowledge — the software exists in a larger context, so it needs to accommodate new trends and expectations, and the only way to know these is to keep in touch with the industry at all times.
You need to visit thematic conferences, gather and analyze relevant information, and work with dozens of travel companies, learning about their pain points and requirements.
All of this ensures that the new client won’t have to explain the current landscape — sometimes it might even be the other way around. Isn’t it great when a development team can offer you specific ideas based on a proper analysis of the latest industry trends?
Secondly, understanding the client — each company has a unique workflow, team composition, budget, and set of goals, all of which should be analyzed before the development process even begins. You need to study all of the client’s integrations and tools, and then propose the best solution, and not just do whatever is expected of you.
For example, recently Zoftify’s CEO has spoken with a travel agency owner interested in utilizing ChatGPT to automate some of their processes. During the conversation, the agency owner mentioned that his team didn’t have any sort of automation for inquiries, and instead emailed them from their website to the manager, who then manually forwarded the email with a deal to the relevant agent.
It would be simple to just build some decent AI tool for this company as they asked, but it would not benefit them in the slightest. Instead, the developers suggested ways to actually improve business workflows based on the team’s expertise and previous case studies. In this example, a proper CRM would solve most of the issues the client has without any need for AI solutions.
The discovery process
For travel software developers, the discovery process is one of the most important parts of the whole project. It’s basically a way to figure out what the client wants and how to make sure the software is successful for their specific needs. Here’s how it might look in practice:
Initial workshops
Everything starts with a few collaborative workshops with key experts and stakeholders from the client’s side to establish a clear vision for the project’s direction. As a travel development company, you need to help with developing the business idea and project scope, as well as prioritizing key features for the product.
Market research and user interviews
Then, you have to explore new industry trends, emerging technologies, and unmet needs by gathering industry reports, customer feedback, user insights, and the latest news. This will help you reveal crucial travelers’ pain points and uncover business opportunities.
Competitors analysis
During the next stage, you should analyze the solutions that exist among the client’s competitors, identifying strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for differentiation. This way you can find areas for innovation and improvement, enabling the client’s solution to stand out in the market.
Defining user personas
At this stage, user personas are created to represent different segments of the market based on shared motivations, behaviors, and preferences. This user research is then used to create archetypes, which are fictional characters that help you design for specific user needs
Traveler journey mapping
After establishing user personas, the next step is mapping out the end-to-end user journey, including the various touchpoints at which the product can elevate the travel experience.
Your team visualizes travelers’ interactions with different features to spot the pain points and finds opportunities for improvement within the client’s existing software solutions. This way you can learn what exactly should be improved and how effective that would be.
Wireframing and prototyping
Designers create a clickable prototype of the solution, demonstrating the product’s features, functionality, and UI interactively. Prototyping enables you to get a clear project vision and refine the user experience.
High-fidelity UI/UX designs
Then, your team creates detailed designs that showcase the product in full. The team showcases screen states and conditions, prepares UI kits, and specifies the components, simplifying the work for development teams.
Usability testing
The product should work not just for the business owners, but for users as well. At this stage, usability tests are conducted with potential customers to collect feedback on how convenient and effective the software’s design and features are to use, and how real users interact with it. This helps with identifying usability issues and refining the product before the development starts.
Technical analysis
This stage involves assessing the technical feasibility of specific features and integrations, considering system architecture, data sources, and APIs. The software product discovery team evaluates the compatibility of proposed features with existing infrastructure and other technical aspects to optimize the build time.
Development roadmap
Finally, it comes down to creating the project’s roadmap. The roadmap sets out the goals, milestones, timeline estimates, and the development team composition, serving as a guide for the development phase.
Turning industry expertise into successful travel software
Building travel software is a complex task that requires a dedicated team of experts who know how to introduce the latest technologies to an industry that is traditionally reluctant to change. This discovery process is just one of the useful examples, but it showcases how travel industry expertise and attention to each client’s unique workflows, goals, and challenges help with correctly setting the priorities and achieving the best outcomes at every step of the development process.
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