AI can sometimes make mistakes or hallucinate. Having to book a new hotel abroad on the day of departure because the AI travel bot accidentally booked the reservation for a year later causes stress that you can do without on vacation. Every part of the itinerary must therefore be thoroughly checked. At TravelEssence, AI agents check specific parts of what their fellow AI agents have put together, and human supervision is also provided. The entire process requires a team of AI agents, which can be time-consuming, but TravelEssence believes it has found the right partner in OutSystems to get the AI project up and running quickly.
“Oh, is the first quarter already over?” It sounds like an almost impossible question in the travel industry, where the first quarter is traditionally the busiest season. Yet this was exactly the reaction of TravelEssence employees in their third year with OutSystems. While revenue grew by 20%, no one had to work overtime. The hectic pace that normally had everyone on their toes? Gone.
For Rick Hoebée, CTO of TravelEssence, this was the moment when he could finally show what automation can really do. “During that period, we were able to really demonstrate how automation can help to get labour-intensive tasks done more efficiently.”
A unique journey for every traveler
TravelEssence was founded in 2006 out of frustration with travel agencies. A New Zealander who had come to the Netherlands for love was dismayed to see how vacations to his native country were being offered: mass tourism, wrong itineraries, no attention to detail. He knew there had to be a better way.
The company he founded focuses on customized travel in the mid-range and higher segments to Australia and New Zealand. Later, the sister brand Little America was added for travel to the United States and Canada. TravelEssence now has nine offices in Germany, four in the Netherlands, and the company is also active in England, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland.
But customization comes at a price, which is paid in the high number of working hours that each individual trip requires. Each trip is unique, put together during a two-hour session in which travel advisors really get to know their customers. “We want to know what people find important, what they like and dislike,” explains Hoebée. This personal process is TravelEssence’s strength, but also its challenge. How do you scale up without losing the human touch and without recruiting too many staff?
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A solution for a hopeless project
TravelEssence was just able to park its IT assignment with freelance consultant Hoebée before the coronavirus shook up the world. He was asked to look at an automation project that had been running for three to four years without results. “IT was really a dirty word,” he says of that period. The organization had few people with an IT mindset, so it was very difficult to implement a project.
OutSystems was chosen, partly because the costs of Microsoft systems are often on the high side for SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). The results followed quickly: after six weeks, the first version of Travelvity, a platform developed for TravelEssence, went live. “And actually, we haven’t stopped developing since then. We develop according to the agile scrum methodology, and a new version goes into production every two weeks.”
AI as a new competitor
After three years of building on OutSystems, a new challenge emerged for the travel industry. “With the advent of AI, we may see completely different competitors in our playing field within a few years.” In that future scenario, a ChatGPT-like solution emerges that allows travelers to share their travel plans in order to receive a customized itinerary.
This insight set TravelEssence’s AI strategy in motion. Not AI for AI’s sake, but a strategic choice to stay ahead of the competition. Hoebée puts it clearly: we look at AI on three levels. At the strategic level, the travel machine is central: can we use AI to fundamentally improve the process of putting together trips? At the team level, it’s about optimizations, such as automatically sorting the thousands of emails that come in every night. Finally, at the individual level, employees receive awareness and AI training.
A few small AI automations were followed by a large-scale project with AI agents. The plan was to make them usable for devising travel routes. Hoebée quickly realized that AI agents are not magical IT in which you dump all available data and the answer magically rolls out. There are important nuances, such as the complexity of multitasking. This is a skill that a travel advisor has mastered. They combine flights, cars, activities, and accommodations for a trip, check that everything meets the customer’s wishes, and check the feasibility of the planning. All in all, this is a complex process to replicate.
At first, there didn’t seem to be an immediate solution within OutSystems that could be used to realize this vision. “At that time, OutSystems was still fully committed to Mentor.” Mentor is OutSystems’ AI tool for generating applications. However, Hoebée refused to believe that the company had not yet made any developments with AI agents. In April 2025, Hoebée flew to Portugal to meet with the team responsible for Agent Workbench, a platform that became generally available in September 2025.
51 agents for a complete itinerary
For Hoebée and TravelEssence, the added value was immediately clear: “The great strength of Agent Workbench is that it runs entirely within the platform. This makes it much easier to link all your data together. You can make it part of your workflows.”
According to Hoebée, the complete travel plan drawn up by a TravelEssence advisor required the equivalent of 51 sub-agents. “It’s quite a challenge in terms of how you describe your prompting and how you decide that those agents should work together,” Hoebée says from his own experience. In addition, the technology must also make sense to the travel advisors. Hoebée emphasizes that TravelEssence in no way intends to replace human resources. The travel advisor still adds creativity and expertise. However, they save time on “the rough collection of information that they have to include anyway.”
“We are aiming for the summer of 2026 to have all 51 agents ready,” Hoebée says cautiously. “Maybe it will take much longer. Or maybe not.” According to the agile methodology, there will be no Big Bang release. “As soon as a sub-component is ready and proven, we will put it into production.” Of those 51 agents, three have now been built and are in the testing phase.
Wish Collector
The Wish Collector contains everything TravelEssence knows about the customer. When does he want to travel? What does he like? What is important to him? How many hours of driving per day is acceptable? Based on these preferences, the other agents search for the most suitable accommodation at each stop. They then write that to the application.
Different agents communicate with each other for this purpose, which brings with it new potential pitfalls. What if information is lost in communication between agents? What if an agent takes a rule too literally?
Biblify
The Biblify agent partially mitigates these risks. It is not an executive agent, but an agent that monitors the big picture. This is an agent that constantly checks whether TravelEssence’s “secret sauce” is being respected. This is knowledge and experience that makes a TravelEssence trip better than that of the competition.
Wish Weaver
The Wish Weaver (still in development) checks whether all the customer’s wishes have been incorporated into the trip. An example: a customer indicates that three to four hours of driving is acceptable, and that one seven-hour drive is also okay. An executive agent could interpret this as “seven hours is OK” and apply this repeatedly. The Wish Weaver must identify and correct this.
Making time for the traveler
A unique trip tailored to the traveler’s wishes means taking time for each customer. Scaling up traditionally means hiring more people or lowering quality. Agent Workbench offers a third way: augment your people with AI agents that take over routine, time-consuming tasks.
From an organization where IT was a dirty word, TravelEssence transformed into a company where employees actively participate in demo sessions and come up with IT ideas themselves. “Now everyone is a fan of IT again,” concludes Hoebée.
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