Teams were finding business-as-usual a challenge, let alone delivering innovation. The post-COVID travel boom was threatening to pass them by, in a haze of missed opportunity and dwindling competitiveness.

ClearRoute empowered Collinson to stamp their feet on the accelerator.

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Before:

A travel giant stuck in turbulence

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Collinson has big ambitions to become the world’s most valued travel ecosystem. But three decades of bolt-on tech, local customisation, inconsistent processes, and patchwork fixes had left them with a mountain to climb.

• System failures. A major incident was happening every 1.5 days on average.

• Teams fighting fires. Engineers were constantly firefighting; Ops was overrun with issues; Commercial teams were bogged down with customer calls.

• Rising costs. Support and engineering costs were mounting just to maintain the status quo.  

• Zero quality testing. Overrun teams and bolted-together technology meant quality testing wasn’t happening, pouring oil onto the fires.

• Fragmented customer data. Disjointed tech was delivering fragmented data, driving disconnected customer experiences.

• Snail-pace innovation cycles. Teams were fighting to deliver business-as-usual, with virtually no capacity to innovate.

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Collinson knew these problems were mission-critical. But the organisation had been banging its head against the wall with costly, discrete change initiatives that couldn’t overcome the sprawling systemic challenges they faced.

They needed a holistic approach, first to tackle their near-term issues: to stabilise their infrastructure; introduce QA best practices; reduce major incidents; repurpose engineering capacity; and deliver client commitments.

But beyond that, they needed a new way of doing things from the ground-up – a new platform for innovation that would position the organisation for the next thirty years of market dominance.

That’s where ClearRoute came in.

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How we helped:

A unified cloud platform

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Collinson didn’t need another Band-Aid fix. They needed a fundamental shift in how they built, deployed, and operated technology, so they could enhance delivery of their current offerings and empower the lightning fast innovation the future demanded.

We mapped Collinson’s current Routes to Live and visualised the ideal future state. Then we outlined a clear roadmap to get there, plotting near-term wins and

longer-term strategy. This phased approach is core to how ClearRoute operate.

Phase 1: Stable foundations

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The first thing Collinson needed was stability, so they could deliver against critical commitments and heal strained relationships. We wanted fast results where it mattered most, to get buy-in across the business.

• Created visibility. Introduced fortnightly C-suite reports and meetings on key metrics, failures, and improvements, to keep the project front-of-mind.

• Overhauled monitoring and observability. Implemented readable dashboards, anomaly alerts, codebase standards, and improved SLAs.

• Improved performance. Identified and resolved critical bottlenecks, simplified database queries, reduced network calls, and upgraded tooling.

• Strengthened release confidence. Introduced release process templates, comprehensive testing, rollback strategies and failed release reviews.

This stabilised Collinson’s platform, slashed major incidents, and freed up engineering teams to focus on innovation.

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Phase 2: A springboard for innovation

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Once the initial crises were under control, our team got our teeth into the really exciting bit: building a new platform from the ground-up that could power fast, future-ready innovation.

• Developed a unified platform. Built a secure API, data, and device platform to enable a 360-degree customer view and support fast development.

• Empowered real-time personalisation. Delivered segmentation to power real-time dynamic offers for customers, to boost engagement and loyalty.

• Connected experiences. Integrated physical lounge devices with digital platforms to create seamless, modern omni-channel customer journeys.

• Expanded innovation capabilities. Introduced live business indicators and enabled experimentation to address customer pain points.

• Opened new revenue streams. Developed a suite of APIs to enable commerce capabilities and create new revenue opportunities.

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This gives Collinson a springboard, with the confidence and capabilities to deliver on their vision.

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After:

Clear skies ahead

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Armed with a strong, scalable and unified platform, Collinson has moved from backwards-looking firefighting towards true, future-focussed innovation.

An organisation with world-leading ambitions needs a world-leading platform:

• 75% reduction in change-related incidents. No more daily meltdowns, happier teams, and fewer frustrated customers.

• 30% decrease in required engineering capacity. Teams now build, not fix. Productive, cost-effective development that earns its keep.

• 2x increase in release frequency. Faster new features, to capitalise on market opportunities as they come up (not watch them pass by).

• Innovation in weeks instead of years. Lightning-fast new offerings for Collinson’s flagship Priority Pass product.

• Unlocked revenue growth. A platform to power new retail propositions and drive customer adoption – opening new revenue streams.

• Rebuilt trust. Clients now trust Collinson to deliver — and keep delivering — for customers, shoring-up loyalty and boosting retention.

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