Airline · Group booking and admin platform
Spirit Airlines: a group booking and admin platform, live in 10 weeks
We built the group booking and admin platform behind Spirit Airlines' group sales desk: a quote request form with manifest upload, a rules-based pricing engine on live Sabre inventory, a discount approval chain, Stripe deposit and balance payments and an internal dashboard. It went live in 10 weeks, ahead of the spring break booking window. The average group quote for parties of 20 or more dropped from 3 days to 40 minutes, and group bookings grew from 140 to 610 a month within two quarters.
- Client
- Spirit Airlines
- Industry
- Airline
- Built
- Web app
- Timeframe
- 10 weeks
What changed
- 3 days to 40 minaverage group quote for parties of 20 or more
- 140 to 610group bookings a month within two quarters of launch
- 17 hours a weekreturned to the group desk, with no change in headcount
- 84% fewerpricing corrections once fares moved to a rules engine
- 11 days to 4to collect payment, using deposit and balance splits
- 10 weeksto go live, ahead of the spring break booking window
Results as reported for this build after launch.
The challenge
Group bookings for large travel parties needed manual coordination. That caused delays, inconsistent pricing and a lot of work for both the organisers and the airline staff managing the reservations.
Off-the-shelf group modules from two GDS vendors assumed a pricing model the airline does not use, and neither handled the internal approval chain that any discount past a set threshold has to clear.
The group sales desk ran on a shared inbox and one spreadsheet that four people edited at the same time. Any party over twenty passengers needed a manual quote: an agent pulled fare classes by hand, checked inventory, applied a discount from a printed matrix and emailed back a PDF. Turnaround was three days in a good week.
Spring break broke it every year. Sports teams, school groups and wedding parties all book inside the same eight-week window, and the desk simply queued. Organisers who did not hear back within 48 hours booked elsewhere, and nobody could say how many did, because unanswered requests were never logged.
We were introduced through a vendor the airline already worked with, scoped the build in a week, and had ten weeks before the booking window opened.
What we built
We built a group booking system that makes group travel simple for organisers and gives the airline's team control of approvals, pricing and reservations in one place.
Every request now enters a pipeline the moment it is submitted, so nothing waits in an inbox, and pricing follows rules instead of a printed matrix.
Group quote request with manifest upload
A public quote form accepts a CSV manifest, so an organiser pastes a passenger list instead of typing twenty names into a web form.
Rules-based pricing engine on Sabre
The engine checks live fare class inventory through the Sabre integration, applies the discount matrix automatically and flags anything outside policy instead of approving it silently. Quotes carry an expiry timer, so held inventory releases on its own.
Approval chain by discount depth
Approvals run from agent to supervisor to revenue management, and each tier is triggered by how deep the discount is, not by passenger count.
Deposit and balance payments
Payments split into deposit and balance through Stripe, with automated reminders to the organiser at 30, 14 and 3 days.
Internal desk dashboard
Agents see the quote pipeline, expiry, conversion rate and desk workload. Manifests stay editable until 72 hours before departure with seat blocks held, and role-based permissions keep pricing controls with the people authorised to change them.
Screens and design system
The result
The group desk now handles roughly four times its earlier volume with the same six people. The spring break window passed without overtime for the first time anyone there could remember, and the queue of unanswered requests no longer exists, because every request enters the pipeline whether or not an agent has opened it.
Revenue management now has data it never had: which discount tiers convert, which lapse, and what the desk is worth each quarter. That reporting is the basis for extending the same workflow to charter and cargo, the next phase of work.
