BKG
Booking and reservation platforms
Anyone can build the happy path. The money is in the other forty cases.
The short version
The system your revenue actually passes through — search, availability, quoting, payment, confirmation, amendment, cancellation. Built to survive the edge cases.
Booking looks simple until you write down what has to be true at the moment somebody pays. Availability held but not yet committed. A deposit taken in one currency against a supplier cost in another. A group where one person books and four more are added later. This is the work.
What is included
Concretely, this is the work.
- Search and availability with holds, expiry and clean release of unconfirmed inventory
- Quoting and dynamic packaging across multiple components and suppliers
- Deposit, balance and instalment payment flows with reconciliation against supplier costs
- Amendment and cancellation logic — the part that breaks almost every off-the-shelf platform
- Group bookings where the lead passenger books and the rest are named later
- Multi-currency pricing with the exchange rate fixed at the right moment, not the convenient one
- Confirmation, voucher and document generation, delivered reliably and logged
- B2B agent portals with their own logins, rates and credit terms
Approach
What you should expect to change
- Fewer abandoned bookings at the steps where people currently leave
- Amendments handled in the system instead of by email and memory
- A reconciliation you can trust at month end
How we build booking systems
We map the state machine before we write a line of code. Every booking is in exactly one state, every transition is named, and every transition has an owner — customer, agent, supplier or scheduled job. Most broken booking platforms are broken because nobody did this, and the code accumulated conditions until nobody could say what a booking actually is.
Where money is involved, we assume failure
Payment providers time out. Webhooks arrive twice, or out of order, or three hours late. Suppliers confirm after your session has expired. We build for that: idempotent operations, an event log you can replay, and reconciliation that surfaces the mismatch rather than swallowing it.
Where we start
Almost always with a Discovery Sprint. A booking platform quoted from a conversation is a booking platform quoted wrong, and neither of us benefits from finding that out in month three.
Questions about booking and reservation platforms
Should we build or buy?
Buy, if a platform fits the way you already work. Most operators outgrow off-the-shelf in one specific direction — an unusual product structure, a supplier nobody integrates with, a margin model the platform cannot express. Build when the gap is structural, not cosmetic. We will tell you honestly which one you are looking at, and we have talked clients out of building.
Can you work with our existing system?
Often the better answer. Rebuilding a working platform to fix two problems is rarely the cheapest route. A System Audit tells you what is fragile, what is expensive, and what to leave alone.
How long before we can take a real booking?
We ship in visible increments. A narrow first slice — one product type, one payment route, one confirmation path — is usually live in four to six weeks, and everything after that is widening it.
Also
Other things we build.
AI agents and workflow automation
Agents that carry a whole process end to end — reading the enquiry, checking availability, drafting the quote, escalating the parts a person should see.
Read more OPSOperations and back-office systems
The platform your team lives in all day. Suppliers, jobs, staff, documents, margins, reporting — shaped around how you actually work rather than a generic template.
Read more RAGPrivate AI over your own data
Search and answering across your internal documents, contracts, records and history — running where your data is allowed to be.
Read moreStart a conversation
Have a project like this?
Send us a paragraph describing what the system needs to do and what you are using now. We will come back with an honest view of whether it is a fit and roughly what it costs.