Overview
Travel Operations and Seat Booking is our product for managing reservations, seat allocation, dispatch, and boarding in one platform.
The scope covers customer-facing booking flows, back-office operational workflows, and mobile usage in the field.
Challenge
The core challenge was not only booking seats, but coordinating seat availability across multiple contexts at the same time: customer booking sessions, operational edits, and boarding actions.
Without a clear domain model and strict state handling, the team risked conflicts, unclear ownership of seat state, and hard-to-debug operational issues.
Approach
We started with domain modeling before feature layering. Reservation, seat, trip, and boarding entities were defined with explicit state transitions and ownership rules.
Then we implemented the platform in slices:
- reservation flow and seat hold behavior
- office workflows for trip and seat management
- field workflows for boarding and verification
Each slice included failure-path handling, auditability, and rollback-safe deployment steps.
Architecture
The platform is built around a shared backend domain used by both the web and mobile clients.
Key architecture decisions:
- centralized reservation and seat state logic in backend services
- API contracts aligned to real operational actions, not only UI screens
- event and log traces for tracking booking lifecycle and incident analysis
- mobile workflow support for partial connectivity and delayed sync
This keeps operational behavior consistent across channels and reduces hidden logic in client apps.
Outcome
The platform keeps evolving as the business grows, with ongoing automation of booking, dispatch, and boarding processes across travel operations.
The team can now expand features on top of a clearer system boundary instead of adding one-off logic per interface.
Lessons
For travel operations products, reliability starts with domain clarity. UI speed matters, but correctness of reservation state and operational handoff matters more.
A single booking model shared across web and mobile reduces rework and makes incident handling more predictable.