By Vicki Goodin, Head of Sales
For leaders in travel, the real risk isn’t making the wrong technology decision, it’s not making one at all. And the cost of that hesitation in an era of AI is accelerating faster than most leadership teams realise.
Every travel business has them: the integrations that were ‘temporary’ three years ago, the workaround that your team has quietly built their entire workflow around, because the underlying platform can’t quite do what you need it to do.
These are stopgaps. And in the right moment, a stopgap is exactly the right call.
The problem isn’t the quick fix, it’s when the underlying issue quietly gets worse and nobody checks. In today’s technology landscape that’s being reshaped by AI, problems left unaddressed can severely limit your options, not just drag on.
The case for the quick fix
Short-term solutions are not always a failure, sometimes they’re exactly the right call. Travel is a highly volatile and ever changing industry.
- Booking windows shift overnight
- Destinations can be cut off at short notice
- A new competitor enters the market
- A distribution partner changes its API
- A regulatory change rewrites how you need to display your pricing
In these moments, the ability to patch, adapt and keep the operation running, is genuinely valuable. The companies that insist on perfection before they act often don’t act at all.
There are clear situations where a fix, not a transformation, is the right answer:
When the business case is unproven
If you’re testing a new customer segment, a new market, or a new product line, building infrastructure to support something that might not work doesn’t make sense. Patch it together, validate the model, then invest properly if it holds.
When the timeline is non-negotiable
Peak season doesn’t wait for a platform migration. If your booking engine has a critical flaw in March and your peak is April, you fix it fast and schedule the proper review for October. Timing isn’t an excuse, it’s a legitimate constraint.
When the scope is genuinely contained
Not every problem is a symptom of something deeper and sometimes something broken in isolation and can be fixed in isolation. The skill is in knowing the difference.
The short-term fix, used well, buys you some time. The mistake is when that time is treated as a gift to spend on other priorities, rather than fixing the underlying issue.
What delaying actually costs and why AI changes everything
Here is what most travel businesses underestimate. Technology problems don’t stand still. The longer you leave them, the more they cost you and AI is amplifying this.
The costs add up
Each workaround added on top of a fragile foundation makes the next change harder and more expensive. What would have been a six-month project in the past, is now a twelve-month one, because the system has become so tangled that any intervention means unpicking years of workarounds before you can even begin. Critically, a fragile technical foundation cannot support the AI capability layer that modern travel businesses need to compete. You cannot build the AI capabilities that matter on top of systems that weren’t designed to work together.
AI exposes data debt, not just technical debt
AI also exposes a problem that legacy thinking misses entirely. If your customer, product, pricing data is scattered across multiple systems that don’t talk to each other, you cannot deploy AI in any meaningful way. Not in the ways that will actually move the needle commercially. The problem was previously a technical one. In the age of AI, it also becomes a data problem and that is considerably harder to fix under pressure.
Your team absorbs the friction
The real cost of a system that doesn’t work properly is the product managers who spend 40% of their time navigating around platform limitations, not just the IT budget line. It’s the commercial team that can’t launch a new promotion or incentive without a three-week development cycle. It’s the revenue managers who could be working with AI-assisted demand signals but are instead manually reconciling exports in spreadsheets from three different systems. Talented people quietly walk out the door too, when they decide they’d rather work somewhere that gives them the right tools, taking their knowledge with them.
Competitors don’t pause while you deliberate
The travel landscape has shifted dramatically in the last three years. Smarter pricing, personalised customer experiences, intelligent itinerary building – these are not future capabilities. They are being delivered right now by businesses who made the right investments two or three years ago. Businesses with modern foundations can move fast and add new capabilities as they emerge. Those weighed down by years of technical debt cannot. Every month spent maintaining old systems is a month not spent building the competitive advantage that will define this industry’s next chapter.
The window for transformation is narrowing and AI is closing it faster than most realise
Businesses that move decisively now can build foundations that power the next decade. Those that keep deferring may find the gap becomes very hard to close. What might once have been a five-year window may now be two.
Five questions worth asking
The difficulty for most teams is not a lack of will, but a lack of a consistent way to assess which situation they’re actually in. The following questions aren’t a formula (context always matters) but they’re a good place to start:
- Is this problem getting smaller or larger over time?
Some constraints are temporary and others grow with you. If the problem is larger today than it was eighteen months ago, the quick fix is not working. If AI-enabled competitors have emerged in that same period, then acting quickly matters.
- What is the full cost of staying where we are?
Most organisations are good at modelling the cost of change, but few are as honest about the cost of standing still. Build the case for both, including what your current technology stops you from doing with AI in the next three years.
- Are we making this decision or are we avoiding it?
There is a difference between a considered decision to defer and one that never gets made because it’s uncomfortable. If it’s been on the agenda for more than two planning cycles without resolution, it’s the latter.
- What does this constrain in three years that we haven’t yet admitted?
Technology decisions made today shape what you can do for years. The question isn’t just whether your systems work today, but whether they let you compete in the world that’s already arriving.
- If we had to make this decision with no legacy constraints, what would we build?
Something built around clean, connected data. Automation embedded in how the business operates, not bolted on afterwards. And flexible enough to integrate tools and capabilities that don’t yet exist.
You don’t need to have solved for AI today, but you do need a foundation that doesn’t close the door on it. The gap between that answer and where you are now is worth taking seriously.
Creating the right conditions for change
Technical debt rarely builds up through bad decisions, but rather through good decisions made in a different time.
What’s changed is the environment those decisions now sit in. AI is moving fast enough that foundations built five years ago may no longer be fit for the next five. That’s not on past leadership, it’s a challenge for the people in the room today.
The most important thing leaders can do right now is create space for an honest conversation. Not about what went wrong or who owns the problem, but about what it takes to move forward.
Because technology strategy in travel sits at the heart of how you compete and the decisions made in the next year or two will shape what your business is capable of for the decade that follows.
A final thought
The quick fix is not the villain of this story. Speed, pragmatism and the ability to keep moving are real virtues. The discipline is in being honest about what a short-term fix is buying you and at what cost.
Because the question in the boardroom is never really quick fix or long-term solution, it’s “how much is delay costing us and when does it start costing us more than the change itself?”
In a pre-AI market, that crossover point arrived gradually and you had time to see it coming. In the market that exists now, it arrives faster, in the form of capability gaps that your competitors are already exploiting.
The businesses asking this question clearly and early have the most options. The ones that wait find themselves asking it under pressure, in a market that has moved on without them.
If you’re navigating a decision about your technology foundation and how it positions you for an AI-enabled future, we’d welcome the conversation.