The problem, seen from the phone room

We started out standing behind a phone room, not in front of a whiteboard. What you see from there is simple: the phone rings less, and the work that used to come from hotels and companies now starts from an app that is not yours.

The trade’s instinctive reaction was defensive: protests, appeals, demands that the rules be enforced. Those are legitimate fights, but none of them brings a job back into the operation. Meanwhile the technology gap kept widening, because on one side there were hundreds of engineers and on the other a piece of software stuck fifteen years back.

The thing that struck us most, looking into it, is that almost no operator complains publicly about the system they run on. Not because it is fine: because they do not know it could be any different. The problem was not felt as a problem of tools, and that told us where to start.