Operations for a hand-built offer model

Business context

The agency does not sell fixed packages. Customers describe a trip; the team assembles flights, hotels, transfers, and insurance into a single offer. That personalization is the product — and the operational bottleneck.

What failed in email

• Trip requests arrived as free-form emails, often missing fields needed to quote.
• Offers lived in threads — no reliable answer to where a request stood.
• Customer history was scattered; repeat clients restarted from zero.
• Volume increased dropped balls rather than throughput.

What shipped

Customer: Six-step request wizard with saved progress and required fields.

Operations: Queue, assignment, New → In Review → Offer Sent → Accepted → Closed pipeline, messaging, documents.

Data model: Offers as first-class objects with lifecycle — intended extension point for Stripe and booking APIs.

Changes at launch

• Every submission uses a structured wizard with enforced fields.
• Each request has an assignable owner and explicit status.
• Messages and documents attach to the request, not an inbox.
• Customer profiles retain past requests for returning travelers.
• Offers are modeled as objects with a lifecycle — the seam for payments and booking APIs.