Travelia's user adoption rose by 31,6% and maintenance costs fell by 40%

The Software House was tasked with migrating Travelia's dual native mobile apps to a unified React Native solution to eliminate technical debt and enable faster, more consistent product development.

Travelia built their travel assistance app as two separate native applications for iOS and Android, which created growing pains as the product scaled. Each feature required double development, the codebases diverged, and UX inconsistencies frustrated users. The technical debt was holding back the company's growth and burning resources.

Travelia

Founded in 2016, Travelia offers a white-label mobile app for travel agencies and tour operators. The platform gives travelers access to booking systems, flight information, car rentals, document storage, photo journals, activity tips, and an AI assistant. Travelia's mission is to provide personalized, contextualized support that makes every trip safer and more enjoyable.

INDUSTRY

Travel

COUNTRY

Netherlands

SERVICE PROVIDED

React Native migration, mobile app modernization

Challenge

Travelia was hitting a wall. They had ambitious plans for new features, but their tech stack was getting in the way. Running two native apps - one for iOS, one for Android meant every single feature had to be built twice. This wasn't just inefficient; it was actively hurting the product.

The problems kept stacking up. The two codebases started behaving differently, which meant users on iOS had a different experience than those on Android. For a travel app where consistency matters, this was unacceptable. And from a business perspective, the technical overhead was bleeding time and money that should've gone into growth.

The Software House had previously provided DevOps support and implemented security improvements for Travelia's AWS-based architecture. When Travelia decided to address their scaling challenges, they trusted TSH again with this critical migration.


The main challenges included:

-> Lack of consistency – Every feature developed twice meant the codebase drifted, making it harder to maintain uniformity

-> UX fragmentation – Different behavior across platforms created confusion and hurt the user experience

-> Scalability constraints – Technical debt slowed down development and made new features expensive to implement

-> Growing maintenance costs – Managing two separate native apps meant double the resources for updates, bug fixes, and improvements

Solution

The answer was React Native. By consolidating both native apps into a single cross-platform codebase, Travelia could build features once and deploy them everywhere. This wasn't just about cutting costs - it was about unblocking the entire product roadmap.

React Native made sense because it would eliminate the dual-development burden while maintaining the performance and user experience they needed. Critically, the migration had to happen without disrupting the live service - travelers were actively using the apps, and any downtime would directly impact bookings and customer trust. The team could move faster, maintain consistency, and actually ship the features Travelia had been planning.

“Their role in the project turned out to be critical.

They’re actively trying to make everything work better. The designer and QA inspired us to consider many changes to the product’s UX/UI that could improve the user journey down the road.”

Rick ter Laak

CEO of Travelia

Process

Team Composition

The Software House fielded a fully autonomous team on short notice:

• 1 React Native lead developer

• 3 React Native developers

• 1 designer

• 1 QA engineer

• 1 project manager
  
  

Technology Stack

• React Native (cross-platform framework)

• AWS (existing infrastructure - previously supported by TSH)
  
  

Travelia app

Development Process

The development process focused on two major areas: rebuilding the application itself and overhauling the entire deployment pipeline.


Application Development: From Dual Native Apps to Unified React Native

The team migrated Travelia from two separate native mobile apps (iOS and Android) to a unified React Native codebase. The React Native lead developer guided the architectural decisions while the development team rebuilt the application.

The new React Native app didn't just match the old apps - it outperformed them. One standout improvement was eliminating a major UX friction point: the old Android and iOS apps included a progressive web app (PWA) loaded within them, which forced users to log in again and deal with web screens that didn't work well on mobile. The new React Native app eliminated the PWA entirely and introduced single sign-on.

The development resolved all consistency, maintenance, and legacy debt issues. Maintenance costs for the mobile app dropped by 40%, and production environment costs fell by 25%.


Deployment Pipeline: Automation and Quality Gates

The previous deployment setup struggled with consistency between the two apps and offered limited automation. The team rebuilt the pipeline to be largely automated, powered by the fastlane platform, which minimized manual tasks.

The new pipeline includes test procedures that prevent faulty deployments, allowing for frequent updates without disrupting service. All deployments now require approval, and users can request app builds on demand. While the pipeline remains complex, the automation dramatically improved time-to-market.

Outcome

In 10 months, Travelia resolved all its scalability, deployment, and UX issues—and the new React Native app quickly outperformed the legacy apps in user adoption.