Operations is a product, not a cost center
· 2 min read · Operations, Travel Tech
Every travel company I've worked in over the last two decades had the same org chart logic: technology builds the product, operations cleans up after it. The companies pulling ahead right now have quietly inverted that.
The tell
Watch where exceptions go. In most travel businesses, a failed exchange or a supplier mismatch becomes a queue item that a human resolves, and the resolution disappears into a closed ticket. In an operations-as-product company, that same exception becomes a data point: how often, which supplier, what did the fix cost, can the fix become code.
The first model scales linearly with headcount. The second compounds.
Three changes that matter more than any tool
Measure operations like a product. Not "tickets closed" — that rewards volume, and volume is the disease. Measure touches per booking, time to resolution, and the percentage of exceptions that recur. A recurring exception is a bug you've chosen to staff instead of fix.
Give ops a roadmap, not a queue. If your operations leaders spend 100% of their time on today's exceptions, nobody owns making next quarter's exceptions impossible. Carve out real capacity — we protect a fixed slice of every sprint for automation work sourced directly from the exception data.
Put ops in the room when the product is designed. Every booking flow decision creates or removes thousands of future manual touches. The cheapest automation is the exception you never ship.
What this looks like in practice
At FlyAkeed we started treating our highest-volume manual workflows — ticketing changes, exchanges, supplier reconciliation — as a product backlog. The interesting part wasn't the automation itself. It was that the exception data told us which supplier integrations were quietly costing us the most, which changed how we negotiate.
That's the real payoff: operations stops being where problems go, and starts being where the next advantage comes from.
If you're running this playbook — or arguing with someone about it — I'd like to hear how it's going.