Interview: How platform thinking is reshaping a traditional travel brand
And why strong platforms start with empowered teams
Investing equally in tech and people has set Travel Counsellors up for a strong start to 2026. Here’s how you can do the same.
Although best known as a UK travel business, Manchester-based Travel Counsellors is increasingly a tech company, relying on its in-house innovation and technology function, TC Labs, to drive business value.
Historically, the company’s technology “focused on enabling travel services - giving our business owners the tools to book flights, hotels and manage leisure customer and corporate client trips,” says CTO Jon Bauer.
“Over time, we’ve evolved into a platform business. Today, our franchisees run and scale their businesses using a suite of products and services that go far beyond simply booking travel.”
Much like RLB Digital in the construction sector, TC Labs builds out Travel Counsellors’ core platform capabilities (like TC Co-Pilot, a proprietary digital assistant) as well as developing new revenue-generating and sector-specific innovations.
“This approach has helped us deepen relationships with major airline partners, hotels and cruise lines, to name but a few.”
Those stronger partner relationships are underpinned by an equally deliberate investment behind the scenes: the teams designing, building and evolving the platform itself.
How a hackathon boosted female leadership
With women making up around 20% of its tech team and 25% of the product and engineering team, Travel Counsellors is committed to creating more opportunities for women to lead and collaborate on meaningful projects – like its first-ever hackathon.
The recent TC Labs hackathon aimed to identify real pain points in the company's ecosystem and rapidly prototype workable solutions. Women were encouraged to lead and collaborate.
Delivery manager Victoria Tracey said the hackathon became “more than just a two-day exercise - it’s about what we do next with the solutions and how we support our teams to take the lead.”
The event proved so popular and productive that people who didn’t take part “really want to get involved in the next one,” says product delivery lead Jennifer Annely - “including colleagues in the digital product team who don’t have deep technical experience.
“The positive of this is that it proves everyone can absolutely bring something to the table.”
“Our colleagues spoke loud and clear, and they’re now empowered to progress their hackathon ideas from prototype into production-ready solutions,” says Victoria. “The energy across the team was incredible, and with leadership’s full backing, the next hackathon is already lined up.”
What does a hackathon look like?
If this sounds appealing, Victoria describes how TC Labs ran the event:
“The theme was 'from friction to flow,’ and we purposely kept that open so a wide range of the tech team could get involved. It gave participants freedom to identify pain points that mattered to them. Interestingly, many teams gravitated toward the same challenges, which highlighted shared issues.
“Common opportunities centred around software regression testing, bug testing and reporting. The winning solution alone indicated a 45% reduction in regression testing time, while others offered more robust approaches to testing and reporting bugs.”
Five teams took part, each presenting to a judging panel with a Q&A session at the end.
“You could see how much everyone enjoyed working on their solutions and how closely they collaborated. People who had never worked together before were suddenly united and genuinely proud of what they’d built.
“The atmosphere afterwards was incredibly positive, with many asking when the next hackathon would be.”
Jon, who is passionate about diversity, was thrilled with the outcomes. He says the “highly considered, purposeful approaches” women bring to Travel Counsellors teams “can be a huge advantage when delivering large platforms or multi-million-pound programmes.”
“Since a female colleague took on leadership of our release management team, productivity has increased by around 10–15%. It’s a strong demonstration of how diverse leadership can drive performance.”
Travel Counsellors aims to carry that theme on into 2026, “leveraging the best of emerging technology while keeping our approach focussed on people at the very heart.”
Jon says, “TC Labs is a space to experiment safely... Innovation matters, but only if it amplifies the human relationships our business is built on. That has always guided our technology strategy, and will continue to do so.”