I’ve been thinking a lot about booking engines recently, and it reminds me of renovating an old house yourself.
You start with good intentions. You think, “This will be manageable.” And for a while, it is. But then you decide you want something more modern. Better heating, smarter lighting, a kitchen that actually works the way you live now. Suddenly you realise the wiring was never designed for it. Every improvement uncovers another limitation, and before long you’re juggling workarounds, half-finished jobs, and a to-do list that never quite gets shorter.
That is where a lot of travel marketers find themselves today.
The Gap Between Ambition and Execution
There is no shortage of good promotional ideas. Flash sales for loyalty members. Targeted mid-week offers. Incentives designed to nudge undecided customers at exactly the right moment. The challenge is what happens when those ideas meet a legacy booking engine or a heavily customised DIY build.
Most of these systems were designed for a much simpler definition of promotion:
- A fixed discount.
- A basic code.
- Limited variation.
When teams try to layer more sophisticated logic on top, things slow down quickly. Requests go into development queues. Dependencies pile up. By the time the capability exists, the opportunity has often passed.
The DIY Trap: Freedom vs. Maintenance
DIY systems can be even harder. In theory, you can change anything. In practice, every new promotion becomes another item on a long backlog. And just like at home, the urgent jobs tend to crowd out the important ones. The system works, but only if you keep lowering your ambitions.
There is also a real risk element to this. Forcing modern campaigns into systems that are not designed for them often leads to compromise. Either the customer experience breaks, with inconsistent pricing or invalid offers, or teams stop pushing altogether.
Promotions become generic, safe, and predictable, not because marketers lack ideas, but because the technology cannot reliably support them.
A Strategic Constraint, Not a Technical One
Looked at this way, it is less a technical inconvenience and more a strategic constraint. Markets move quickly. Competitors adjust pricing and incentives in days, sometimes hours. If every meaningful change requires a mini build project, agility becomes impossible.
Modern marketing depends on precision and speed. If launching a campaign feels like a DIY project every time, the technology is no longer helping. It is quietly limiting what the business can do, and that limitation often costs more in lost opportunity than investing in the right foundation would in the first place.
Most teams already know this. The question is not whether the to-do list is long. It is whether it is ever getting shorter.
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