One puzzle at a time.

Last week, Chris and I hosted an onboarding induction session. Sitting in front of the grid of video feeds, looking at faces joining from London, Bangalore, New York, San José, and Cape Town, I had to take a moment. A decade ago, this did not exist. There was no unified global engineering organisation, no follow-the-sun continuous delivery engine, and no joint tech culture. There was just a collection of separate businesses, each with its own local IT setup, running at different speeds, viewing technology as a slow, uncertain project delivery team.

In those early days—around 2011 when I first consulted, and 2018 when I came on full-time—getting a laptop for a new joiner in India meant someone driving to a local Apple Store or buying it off Amazon, setting it up manually, and physically handing it over. Today, a new engineer logs on from their home, keying in their email, and the entire configuration, from security tooling to developer environments, runs like clockwork. 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 cloud transitions. It is the slow, deliberate assembly 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 mandating a restructuring. 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 institutional knowledge with them. We chose instead to align our squads directly with the long-term outcomes of our travel brands.

This required 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 in our team cannot sit in a central tower writing code in a vacuum; they must develop deep empathy for the brand's physical operations, and brand leaders must commit to a shared digital journey. That symbiotic relationship is the only way real transformation takes root.

02Combining DNAs (The BTP Model)

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 their strategic roadmap. They act as the single pane of glass into the entire tech group.

The genesis of this model is highly personal. When Chris and I first came together to lead this transformation, we came from different worlds. I was deeply focused on engineering, product architecture, and execution. Chris's DNA was strategic planning, business partnership, and governance. Instead of trying to make me more like Chris or Chris more like me, we combined our DNAs to create a blueprint. Chris was effectively the first BTP in spirit, modelling how tech leaders can partner with business leaders as true peers. By scaling that blueprint across our brands, we broke down the barriers that traditionally keep central functions siloed from business units.

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

03Flat culture and the act of pause.

A global, remote team operating across all timezones 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 environment, people must feel safe to fail, learn, and iterate. If the room is not safe, complex problems simply get hidden 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 before a critical production push. The developer instinct—the "act of doing"—is to rush, bypass the friction, and use whatever is at hand, like a partner's laptop. But policy says no. Why?

I shared a story from a few years ago. During COVID, my four-year-old son was playing with my Android banking phone. Unknown to me, he was downloading multiple gaming apps. I only realised what was happening when credit card charges started appearing. He wasn't malicious; he was four. He had no concept of attack vectors or financial risk. When a developer uses an unmanaged family device to push code, they are introducing an unvetted environment into our production systems. Security is not about slowing engineers down; it is the **"act of pause"**—taking a breath to assess risk before we act. In a no-blame culture, a broken laptop is met with immediate support, not pressure, allowing developers to make 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, compile meeting notes, and speed up software development. This was Level 1 and Level 2 adoption—getting personally fluent by 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 for the sake of the hype. It is a structured journey aligned with each brand's operational strategy. We start by building a strong data foundation, ensuring all sales, operations, and marketing data sits in our BigQuery data lake so our custom insights platform (Radar) can generate baseline metrics. From there, we help brands design efficient agentic workflows, helping them see how they can serve guests faster, reduce sales friction, and improve efficiency. Tech is acting as the catalyst, inspiring brands to imagine lean, modern, AI-enabled business processes.

05Humbled, and just getting started.

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

Yet, looking at the faces of our new engineers during the onboarding call, I felt a deep sense of humility. All that 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 hummed. It feels, in every way, like we have only just started. The real work of building the future of travel begins now.