Hays Travel: a travel companion app for a national high-street brand

The challenge

A travel companion app earns its place in the weeks before and during a trip: customers need to manage their booking, receive urgent updates the moment plans change, and stay organised — reliably and on time.

It also made no sense to rebuild the entire holiday-search engine natively. The app had to embed the existing web search seamlessly while keeping the native experience fast, and stay maintainable as one codebase across both platforms.

The approach

A single React Native + TypeScript codebase drives both platforms. The native side owns Manage My Booking, push notifications, urgent trip updates, a pre-travel checklist, and the gamified engagement — games and badges — that keeps customers coming back.

Holiday search and payments are delivered through embedded webviews, reusing the proven web experience instead of duplicating it natively, and integrated so they feel part of the app. Push notifications and deep linking route customers straight to the right screen, including time-sensitive urgent updates.

What I built

• Manage My Booking (MMB)
• Push notifications and deep linking
• Urgent trip updates
• Pre-travel checklist
• Games and badges for engagement
• Holiday search and payments via embedded webviews
• One React Native codebase across iOS and Android

The outcome

The app is live on both the App Store and Google Play, giving Hays Travel customers a companion for managing their booking and staying informed before and during their trip.

Embedding search via webviews and sharing one codebase kept the build efficient — native effort went where it mattered most: notifications, booking management and engagement.

Tech stack