Consolidating scattered spreadsheets into one Travel operation platform.

The client's travel team moved 300+ people a season across dozens of events, spread across spreadsheets, itinerary software, email, WhatsApp and Smartsheet. Workshops mapped how the team actually worked, not how the process was meant to look on paper, and auditing their live sheets uncovered the real data model behind it.

That work set the brief for success: retire the old tools completely, surface answers and deadlines instantly instead of on request, flag expiring documents early, and keep finance's own reconciliation process intact.

I used Figma prototypes to pressure-test the structure with the travel team before building anything, covering travellers, events, flights, versioning and suppliers.

Separating people from trips meant a passport or visa only needed tracking once, against every future trip. I replaced the team's old habit of duplicating spreadsheet tabs (V1, V2, V3) with a direct comparison view, and turned costs into a live property of each booking rather than a report built after the fact. Testing with full-squad data early exposed scaling issues, and the traveller-facing app was reduced to one clear timeline: where next.

Useful spreadsheet habits, like colour-coded changes, stayed. Anything that only existed because of the old tools' limits got redesigned properly. I prioritised density over hiding information, using typography and spacing to keep dense screens scannable for expert daily users.

The desktop platform and the traveller app share one design language and data model despite serving very different audiences. Risk, expiring documents, unbooked legs, looming deadlines, is surfaced in the interface rather than left for someone to notice. Design and build stayed connected throughout, so the product could adapt as real usage revealed what actually needed to change.