Holiday Extras is rethinking what it can build with Codex

Why it matters

Holiday Extras, a UK-based travel firm led by CEO Matthew Pack, rebuilt its main mobile application using Codex, OpenAI's software-building tool, completing in weeks a project that previously would have occupied its team for the better part of a year. The company credits the rebuild with a substantial rise in open-to-book conversion, a sharply reduced error rate, and a shift from an annual release cycle to frequent weekly updates. The story matters because it illustrates a broader organizational shift rather than a single engineering win: with company-wide ChatGPT Enterprise access, staff outside traditional engineering roles, including a finance expert and design leadership, are translating years of customer and operational knowledge directly into working software. Engineers retain responsibility for architecture, security, and reusable packages, providing guardrails for experimentation. Customer feedback now moves into fixes far faster, as shown when a complaint about a missing feature was resolved and the customer revised a poor review. Pack frames the ambition as administering more of the business's systems through AI, with employees directing outcomes.