Every date a trip depends on, on one screen.
A travel agency runs on dates that cannot be missed. A deposit deadline, a final payment, a passport that runs out too close to the flight. This is the screen she opens on a Monday to see which of them is closest to biting.
Travel · built for a travel agency · in build, not live
Eleven of the twenty screens are built. The other nine are named in the menu and nothing more.
Read this before you look
[ 01 ] Monday morning
What a travel agent opens the week on: what needs her in the next few days, what is departing, and how far out the next one is.
travelling tunia — today
Next departure
Lisbon and the Douro Valley
4–14 Sep 2026 · the Halverson party, 6 travellers
26
days out
Needs you this week
Final payment due — Halverson party, Lisbon and the Douro Valley
12 Aug · in 3 days
Passport expires within six months — one traveller on the Kyoto group
14 Aug · in 5 days
Deposit deadline — Okonkwo honeymoon, Amalfi Coast
18 Aug · in 9 days
Insurance decision needed — Nakamura family, Costa Rica
21 Aug · in 12 days
9
Trips in flight
4
Departing in 60 days
6
Deadlines cleared
this week
[ 02 ] The trip board
Every trip, sitting in the stage it has actually reached. One card, one column at a time, so nothing is booked in someone's head.
travelling tunia — trips
Patagonia, shoulder season
Feb–Mar 2027 · client
Newfoundland road trip
Jul 2027 · client
Iceland ring road
Mar 2027 · mine
Kyoto in autumn
2–15 Oct 2026 · client
Amalfi Coast honeymoon
7–18 Nov 2026 · client
Lisbon and the Douro Valley
4–14 Sep 2026 · client
Costa Rica with the kids
21–31 Dec 2026 · client
Banff and Lake Louise
3–6 Oct 2026 · client
Vancouver Island, west coast
5–12 Aug 2026 · client
Mexico City food week
Returned 2 Mar 2026 · client
Reykjavík long weekend
Returned 15 Jun 2026 · mine
Lisbon and the Douro Valley
the Halverson party · 6 travellers · 4 legs · 3 documents outstanding · departs in 26 days
[ 03 ] While they are away
Which leg a party is on right now, which nights are behind them, and which are still to come.
travelling tunia — Vancouver Island, west coast
The map is an illustration.
Leg 2 of 3, in progress
Tofino, British Columbia
Day 4 · Pacific time · last check-in 6 hours ago
The route
Victoria
Arrived 5 Aug · 2 nights
Ucluelet
7 Aug · 1 night
You are here
Tofino
8 Aug · 3 nights
Port Renfrew
11 Aug · 1 night
Victoria, departure
12 Aug
Every name, figure and date on these screens is invented. The layout is exactly what the software does.
[ 01 ] The problem
The whole year was a list of dates, and one person was holding it.
Booking a trip is the easy part. The hard part is the eleven months afterwards. A deposit is due on a date. A balance is due on another. A passport has to have six months left on it when the plane leaves, and nobody finds that out at the airport without it costing somebody money.
All of it lived in a spreadsheet, an inbox and a memory. It worked, in the way that a spreadsheet works right up until the day it stops. There was no screen anyone could open and see the whole picture on, which meant there was nobody who could cover a week off.
[ 02 ] What we built
One screen for this week, one board for the year.
The week opens on the deadlines closest to biting. The year sits on a board where every trip is in the stage it has genuinely reached, and a card only moves one column at a time.
Twenty parts of the job are named in the menu. Eleven of them are built. Naming all twenty first is deliberate: it is far cheaper to agree the shape of the work on a menu than to find the missing piece halfway through building the expensive one.
A trip, start to finish
Enquiry
someone asks
Researching
options priced
Planning
dates held
Booked
deposit taken
Travelling
they are away
Home
follow up
The part worth reading
Not one real traveller's details have gone into it.
Screens like these end up holding passport dates, home addresses and who is travelling with whom. So the sign-in and the locked-down store of records were built before a single real booking was typed in, and nothing real goes in until the whole thing is somewhere other than a laptop.
It would have been quicker to put the screens up, fill them with real bookings and add the sign-in afterwards. Plenty of software gets built in exactly that order. We would rather say this out loud now than explain it later.
[ 03 ] What is working
What it does today.
Opens on what bites first
A final payment in three days. A passport that runs out inside six months of the flight. The nearest deadline is the first thing on the screen, and one that a client has asked to push back can be pushed back a week.
Every trip in the stage it has really reached
One board, six columns, one card per trip. A card moves one column at a time, so a trip cannot quietly jump from an idea to booked without anyone taking a deposit.
A day-by-day plan she can rearrange
Drag a day up or down and the day numbers fix themselves. Nobody retypes "day 4" eleven times because a flight moved.
Where a party is, while they are away
Which leg they are on, which night they are on, and when they last checked in. She can answer a worried parent without ringing the hotel.
Points and memberships in one list
Sorted however she wants, so the programme that is about to expire gets used before the one that is not.
Twenty parts of the job, named in one menu
Nine of them have no screen behind them yet. They are named anyway, so the shape of the whole job is agreed before the expensive half gets built.
What it does not do yet
- —Nothing is live. It runs on a laptop and nowhere else, so nobody has signed into it but us.
- —The sign-in is written and the store of records behind it is built, but neither has been switched on anywhere, and no real traveller has been put into either.
- —The buttons that change something have been written and checked line by line. They have not been clicked through one at a time on a running copy, so treat them as built rather than proven.
- —Nine of the twenty screens are named in the menu and not built.
- —It has never been opened on a phone. It was drawn for a desk and is expected to look poor on anything smaller.
- —The website she has today is untouched by this. It is still on the builder it was always on.
- —The logo on it is a placeholder made from ordinary typefaces, waiting on the real artwork.
This list is on the page on purpose. A build this young has one, and a page that hides it is asking to be found out.
[ 04 ] What it cost to run
It was added for nothing a month.
Standing this up on its own would have started a bill of about ten dollars a month, forever, before a single traveller was on it. That figure was checked against a real account rather than guessed at, which is the only reason it is worth quoting.
Instead it keeps its records in their own walled-off part of machinery that was already paid for and already running. That is deliberate, and it is temporary. The day paying customers depend on it, it moves out and gets its own, because putting one business back together after a bad day should never be able to disturb another.
[ 05 ] Where it goes next
The shape is settled. The plumbing is not.
The screens are built and the way the work flows through them is agreed, which is the part that usually takes longest and costs the most to get wrong. What is left is putting it somewhere other than a laptop, moving the real trips in, making it work on a phone, and then the website.
There is no outcome to write on this page yet, and inventing one would tell you more about us than it would about the work. Come back for that part.
Something like this?