Arts & Leisure operates in the high-touch, high-margin world of bespoke luxury travel. Every booking is custom. Every itinerary is handcrafted. And every one of those itineraries was taking their designers around six hours to produce — manually, across disconnected tools.
That operational drag was hard enough in a forgiving market — but the market had shifted. The post-COVID revenge travel surge that carried many agencies through 2022–23 had normalized: close to 60% of tour operators reported a noticeable slowdown in bookings through 2024, with some segments down as much as 20% year-over-year. At the same time, OTAs and AI-powered self-serve planning tools were raising the bar for speed and response: 40% of global travellers now use AI tools for trip planning, and boutique agencies increasingly need to justify their value by responding faster and serving clients better. For A&L, a slow response isn't just a frustration — it's an abandonment. That's not a sustainable model for a business trying to grow. Their prior process compounded the problem: what hadn't been done manually was cobbled together across disconnected tools, and the parts that were "automated" were breaking down and no longer functioning reliably.
Kablamo ran a structured 3-week Discovery phase to deeply understand A&L's workflows before writing a line of code. The 12-week MVP build delivered a cloud-native AWS platform covering the full booking lifecycle: itinerary creation, interactive traveller review and sign-off, digital payment, supplier management, multi-currency invoicing, and operational reporting across three markets. Built for white-labelling from the start. This wasn't a proof-of-concept or MVP in name only — the platform was stable, fully functional, and operating in production from day one.
Itinerary creation time dropped from ~6 hours to 20–30 minutes — a 95% reduction. A&L's travel designers now focus on what they're best at: building extraordinary experiences, not wrestling with spreadsheets. Responding in minutes rather than hours means A&L meets clients in the moment of intent — reducing abandoned inquiries and, in turn, driving more bookings. The efficiency gains also expand capacity: the team can serve a meaningfully larger volume of clients without adding headcount. Ongoing operational support runs on just a few hours per month — a reflection of platform stability, not ongoing maintenance burden. Because the solution is fully custom with no off-the-shelf licensing, the total cost to operate remains lean and appropriate for a growing independent business. The platform is live in production and Kablamo continues on Product Care.
