One puzzle at a time.

Last week, we hosted an onboarding induction session. Sitting in front of the grid of video feeds — faces joining from London, Bangalore, New York, San José and Cape Town — we had to pause for a moment. A decade ago, none of this existed. There was no unified global engineering organisation, no follow-the-sun delivery model, no shared tech culture. There was just a collection of separate businesses, each with its own local IT setup, running at different speeds, treating technology as a slow, uncertain project delivery team.

In those early days — a decade or so ago — getting a laptop to a new joiner in India meant someone driving to an Apple Store or buying one off Amazon, setting it up by hand, and physically handing it over. Today, a new engineer logs on from home, keys in their email, and the whole configuration — from security tooling to developer environments — sets itself up. The tech just works.

But the tech is the easy part. The real story of the last five years isn't the software or the move to cloud. It is the slow, deliberate building of a high-performing global remote culture. One puzzle at a time.

01The jigsaw of scaling.

You do not build a 180-person engineering organisation overnight by writing a grand strategy deck or ordering a restructure. You do it piece by piece. One brand, one value stream, one squad at a time. When we reorganised, we moved away from the traditional, project-driven model. Projects come and go, taking people and hard-won knowledge with them. We chose instead to line our squads up directly with the long-term outcomes of our travel brands.

This needed a shift in mindset. We are not Booking.com. We are not a technology company that happens to sell travel. We are a travel operator. We own expedition ships, private jets, yacht bases and luxury tours. Our guest experiences are world-class — regularly earning Net Promoter Scores of 90 and above. Technologists on our team cannot sit in a central tower writing code in a vacuum. They have to build real empathy for the brand's physical operations, and brand leaders have to commit to a shared digital path. That two-way relationship is the only way real transformation takes hold.

02Combining our DNAs.

To bridge the gap between central group functions and independent travel brands, we created the Brand Tech Partner (BTP) model. A BTP is not just an IT manager. They sit as a senior leader on the executive team of each business unit, co-owning its strategic roadmap. They are the single, clear point of contact into the entire tech group.

Where this model came from is personal. When we first came together to lead this transformation, we came from different worlds. Sree was deeply focused on engineering, product architecture and execution. Chris's strength was strategic planning, business partnership and governance. Instead of trying to make one of us more like the other, we combined those two backgrounds into a blueprint. Chris was, in spirit, the first BTP — showing how a tech leader can partner with business leaders as a true peer. By scaling that blueprint across our brands, we broke down the barriers that usually keep central functions walled off from business units.

The BTP model came from combining engineering execution with strategic business context. It proved that technology is a growth accelerator, not a cost centre.

03Flat culture and the act of pause.

A global, remote team working across every timezone can easily become fragmented. We fought that by keeping the organisation flat. Anyone can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. More importantly, we built a strict no-blame culture. In a high-performing team, people have to feel safe to fail, learn and try again. If the room is not safe, hard problems simply get swept under the rug.

This links directly to how we think about information security. During the induction, a new joiner asked what they should do if their laptop suddenly breaks right before a critical production push. The developer instinct — the “act of doing” — is to rush, get past the friction, and use whatever is at hand, like a partner's laptop. But policy says no. Why?

Sree shared a story from a few years ago. During COVID, his four-year-old son was playing with his Android banking phone. Without anyone noticing, the boy was downloading game after game. Sree only realised what was happening when the credit card charges started appearing. The child wasn't malicious — he was four. He had no idea about attack vectors or financial risk. When a developer uses an unmanaged family device to push code, they are doing something similar: bringing an unchecked environment into our production systems. Security is not about slowing engineers down. It is the “act of pause” — taking a breath to weigh the risk before we act. In a no-blame culture, a broken laptop is met with immediate support, not pressure, so a developer can take that pause safely.

04The AI ripple effect.

Our technology group was the first team to embrace AI. We started at the individual level, using tools like Copilot, Claude and Gemini to automate our own manual work, write up meeting notes and speed up software development. This was Level 1 and Level 2 adoption — getting personally fluent, earning that fluency day by day.

Now the tech team is inspiring the wider travel brands to adopt AI. But this isn't about applying AI to everything just to chase the hype. It is a structured path, lined up with each brand's operational strategy. We start by building a strong data foundation — making sure all sales, operations and marketing data sits in our BigQuery data lake, so our own insights platform, Radar, can generate baseline metrics. From there, we help brands design efficient agentic workflows, so they can see how to serve guests faster, reduce sales friction and run leaner. Tech is the catalyst here, inspiring brands to picture lean, modern, AI-enabled ways of working.

05Humbled, and just getting started.

In three weeks, our DevSecOps team will finish decommissioning our last physical data centre in the UK. We are now cloud-only, SaaS-first and highly automated. The modernisation phase of our tech transformation is effectively complete.

Yet, looking at the faces of our new engineers on that onboarding call, we felt a deep sense of humility. Everything we have built over the last several years — the squads, the BTP model, the remote culture, the AI fluency — isn't the destination. It is just the foundation. The jigsaw pieces are finally in place, the barriers are down, and the engine is running. It feels, in every way, like we have only just started. The real work of building the future of travel begins now.