Booking modification back office for a Singaporean OTA

Client profile

The client is a Singapore-based online travel agency (OTA) serving leisure and business travelers across Asia-Pacific, with particularly strong presence in Southeast Asia, Greater China, and Australia. Gross bookings in 2025 were approximately $340M. The platform aggregates hotel, flight, and package travel inventory from over 3,200 supplier partners and handles peak seasonal booking volumes of 45,000+ transactions daily during Chinese New Year and summer holidays.

The challenge

The client's back office operation handling booking modifications, cancellations, refunds, and supplier disputes had become a material bottleneck. Average booking modification handle time was 8.4 minutes at engagement start, driven by the complexity of multi-supplier reservations that required manual coordination across supplier systems. Peak daily volume of 42,000+ modifications overwhelmed the client's Singapore-based back office team of 32 agents.

Customer complaint escalation had reached board attention. A 2025 industry survey ranked the client 14th out of 22 APAC OTAs for booking modification quality, and the client's Net Promoter Score had declined for four consecutive quarters. Refund processing time averaged 11 business days versus a competitor benchmark of 4-6 business days. Regulatory scrutiny in three APAC jurisdictions was increasing on consumer protection grounds.

The client had considered building a larger Singapore-based back office team but Singapore back office wage inflation over 2024-2025 (approximately 12% annually) had made this economically difficult. Regional alternatives (Malaysia, Philippines) were considered but the client's supplier network was heavily concentrated in Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, and the client's leadership believed a Vietnam-based back office would have better cultural context for the majority of their supplier interactions.

Why Corpshore Vietnam

Corpshore Vietnam was selected on three qualifications: our multilingual bench covering Mandarin, Vietnamese, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesian, and Thai (matching the client's largest booking source markets), our documented back office automation experience allowing us to bring RPA and workflow automation into the engagement rather than just providing agent capacity, and our proximity to the client's Vietnamese and Thai supplier network for occasional in-person supplier meetings.

The client's chief operating officer specifically cited our proposal's integration plan with their existing booking platform (Zendesk, custom OTA back-end, and 12 supplier direct-connect APIs) as the most technically detailed of the vendors evaluated.

The engagement

94 back office agents split by language desk (24 English, 22 Mandarin, 18 Vietnamese for supplier-side coordination, 12 Japanese, 10 Bahasa Indonesian, 8 Thai), 8 team leaders (2 per major shift), and 4 QA specialists. Team operates 18/7 coverage (5:00 AM to 11:00 PM ICT) with overnight coverage from Corpshore Philippines during peak seasons. All agents completed 5-week paid training on the client's platform, supplier direct-connect protocols, and refund processing workflows. RPA integration completed in month 3, automating approximately 34% of routine modification workflows.

Approach and methodology

Language-native supplier coordination. Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian supplier communications route to native-language agents. This drove significantly faster supplier response times and higher first-contact resolution on modifications requiring supplier confirmation.

RPA-augmented workflow. Corpshore's IT team built and deployed 22 RPA workflows automating routine modification steps (booking lookup, supplier availability check, refund calculation, customer notification). This reduced average handle time on standard modifications by 62%.

Refund fast-track program. Working with the client's finance team, a refund fast-track was established for modifications under $500 that meet specific eligibility criteria (customer account age, booking type, supplier). 68% of refunds now qualify for the fast track, reducing average refund processing time from 11 business days to 3.4 days.

Results

By month 6, average booking modification handle time had dropped from 8.4 minutes to 3.9 minutes, daily throughput per agent had improved by 116%, and the refund fast-track was processing 68% of eligible refunds in 3.4 business days average. Customer NPS improved by 14 points across a 12-month period. The client rose from 14th to 6th in the 2026 APAC OTA quality survey.

The engagement has extended to include Corpshore AI's chatbot development for high-frequency customer inquiry automation, further reducing back office load.

Enduring value

The RPA workflows built during the engagement are the client's operational IP and continue to accelerate their internal Singapore-based team as well. The refund fast-track program has become a documented consumer protection standard the client highlights in APAC regulatory conversations.