Build In-House or Partner Up? A CTO’s Guide
Why Scaling Digital Products in Travel Is So Hard
Travel is changing quickly. Customers expect real-time information, personalisation and seamless bookings across every touchpoint. According to McKinsey, 71 percent of travellers now expect digital experiences to mirror the convenience they get from leading retailers and fintech apps.
That’s a high bar, especially when you’re dealing with:
- Old infrastructure that struggles to scale
- A long list of third-party integrations to manage
- Sudden surges in demand that are hard to predict
- A hiring market where senior engineers are difficult to find
If you’re working in hospitality, tours, aviation or mobility, you probably feel the pressure more intensely. You’re expected to improve operational efficiency, launch new features and modernise infrastructure while keeping costs predictable. This is why many CTOs spend months debating whether to boost internal hiring or partner with a specialist team that already understands travel tech.
When Building In-House Makes Sense
Creating an internal team can be the right choice when you want full ownership and deep product knowledge embedded in your organisation. You keep control over architecture, development pace and day-to-day decision-making, which can be crucial when the product is strategic to the business.
Building internally can help when:
- You already have a strong technical culture
- Long-term domain expertise matters
- You’re planning a multi-year roadmap
- You want complete oversight of quality and security
However, the trade-offs are real. Hiring senior engineers is expensive, especially in markets where salaries have risen sharply. In the UK, for example, senior developer salaries have seen increases of 8% in one year based on data from ONS. For many travel teams, that cost sits on top of onboarding and management overhead.
The ramp-up speed can also slow you down. Even a well-run recruitment cycle can take months, and travel products rarely have that kind of buffer. If you’re integrating a new payment provider or fixing performance issues before peak season, internal hiring may not keep up with commercial deadlines.
When Partnering With a Software Studio Gives You the Edge
Working with an external team can remove a lot of pressure. A good software studio offers immediate capacity, flexible engagement and the ability to scale up or down without the risks of permanent headcount. For travel businesses, this often means you move faster while protecting your core team from overload.
Partnering externally is particularly effective when:
- You need quick delivery windows
- You lack specific technical skills
- You’re modernising or replacing legacy systems
- Your internal team is blocked by maintenance work
- You want to experiment with new features without committing to long-term roles
Speed is the most obvious advantage. A ready-made team with travel experience can start delivering in weeks instead of months. That pace is hard to match if you’re still hiring.
You also gain access to specialists who know the travel ecosystem. They understand search and booking flows, rate management, inventory syncing, complex supplier APIs, and can manage unexpected issues that arise. That knowledge reduces mistakes while helping your team avoid problems that often surface later in production.
Finally, management overhead is lighter. Instead of running recruitment, performance reviews and internal processes, you focus on outcomes. This is why many CTOs use a hybrid approach: keep core engineering in-house and partner with a studio for velocity, innovation or complex integrations.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
At atEnbi, partnering with us is a common turning point for our clients. For example, one travel marketplace came to us after struggling with performance issues during peak season. Their internal team was stretched thin fixing urgent bugs instead of progressing the roadmap.
By embedding an atEnbi-led squad alongside their developers, we stabilised the booking engine while modernising key integrations and shipping long-delayed features.
How to Choose the Right Route for Your Team and Product
There’s no universal answer to this question. What works for a booking platform with millions of annual users won’t be the same for a boutique tour operator or a mobility start-up. It helps to look at your decision across several criteria.
1. Timeline
Ask yourself how quickly something needs to happen. If you have deadlines tied to seasonal demand or commercial partners, external support is usually the faster route. For long-term roadmap features, building in-house can make sense if time is on your side.
2. Skill Gaps
List the capabilities your team already has. If you’re missing senior engineers, cloud expertise or product design capacity, an external partner can fill those gaps immediately. If you already have depth internally, hiring may be enough.
3. Budget and Total Cost
Remember that salary is only one part of internal hiring. Factor in recruitment, onboarding, tooling and management time. External teams may look more expensive at first glance, but often cost less over a 12-month period because you’re only paying for delivered work.
4. Technical Risk
High-risk projects benefit from experienced hands. Completing projects such as restructuring your search architecture or fixing performance bottlenecks requires people who’ve done it before. For lower-risk enhancements, internal teams can grow into the work.
5. Company Priorities
Some companies want full ownership. Others want speed. Others want to reduce the load on internal teams so they can focus on strategy instead of firefighting. Your organisational priorities should guide the decision more than any industry trend.
Bringing It All Together
Scaling a digital product in travel is demanding. You’re dealing with high expectations, complex integrations and teams that rarely have unlimited resources. Taking the time to think clearly about your structure is one of the most strategic choices you can make.
Perhaps you’re building internally or maybe you decided to partner with a studio. Either way, the goal is the same: a stable, fast, modern product that keeps your travellers coming back. When you choose the path that fits your team, your roadmap and your constraints, you give yourself the best chance of shipping meaningful improvements without losing momentum.
Want to explore how straightforward partnering up can really be? Get in touch with atEnbi today to get started.