How loveholidays is making everyone a builder with Codex

loveholidays⁠(opens in a new window) is a leading online travel agent operating across eight European markets, using its technology to process 60 trillion package combinations every day to help millions of people find their perfect holiday. Behind that scale is a technology platform the company has spent years building to make finding and booking a holiday faster and more flexible.

Now, Codex is changing who gets to build on it.

Product managers, designers, and commercial teams are increasingly contributing directly to loveholidays’ codebases. Teams can prototype customer experiences, make data and infrastructure changes, and turn ideas into working software without every request first having to enter an engineering queue.

“Everybody is a builder,” says Dmitri Lerko, Head of Engineering at loveholidays. “Making changes to our applications, infrastructure, and deploying code is no longer an engineering-only activity. Product managers, designers, and commercial stakeholders are driving value and making deployments.”

For Mike Jones, CTO at loveholidays, that’s part of a bigger ambition: building what the company calls the general intelligence for travel by combining its technology with the expertise of its people—and making both more accessible through AI.

“At loveholidays, our platform vision is to build the general intelligence for travel. That’s bringing together the great technology we have with our people’s expertise—and democratising that with AI and Codex.”

—Mike Jones, CTO, loveholidays

From an idea to a live customer experience

One of the clearest examples is Search Playground.

Previously, someone elsewhere in the business with an idea for a new customer experience would need to persuade an engineering team to prioritise a prototype. Every experiment therefore came with an opportunity cost: engineering time spent testing one idea was engineering time unavailable elsewhere.

loveholidays wanted to break that dependency.