Holiday extras leverages Codex to revolutionize app development and customer experience

Holiday Extras is transforming its operations and product development by integrating Codex, moving beyond its initial use of ChatGPT Enterprise. CEO Matthew Pack noted that this shift enables staff who possess deep customer and operational knowledge to directly improve the business. The company utilized Codex to rebuild its main mobile application, achieving a fully functional iteration in just two weeks—a process that previously would have taken over six months. The rebuilt application delivered significant performance gains: the open-to-book conversion rate rose by 32.5%, and the app's error rate dropped from 19% to 9%. Furthermore, the development cadence accelerated dramatically, shifting from annual major releases to weekly updates within the first month post-rebuild. Liam Thompson, VP of AI Innovation, facilitated this by translating customer insights into reusable software packages. Beyond the app, the AI integration extends to internal processes. David Lee, Director of Innovation and Growth, highlighted an automated system that converts customer chats regarding airport transfers into actionable tickets for supplier network issue identification. Pack emphasized that leadership's role is to encourage experimentation while establishing necessary guardrails, allowing employees to apply years of operational expertise directly to the tools they use.