Northbound Travel modernises IT landscape for sustainable growth and acquisitions

In a world where travellers increasingly seek authentic experiences and sustainable holidays, Northbound Travel positions itself as an innovative player in the travel industry. This Dutch travel organisation, which brings together several brands focused on Northern European destinations, is pursuing growth through technological modernisation and IT system integration.To make this possible, a robust, flexible, and future-proof platform is essential. For the technical realisation, Northbound Travel turned to NetRom, a trusted partner they’ve worked with for over fifteen years. Read on to discover how, with our support, Northbound Travel is transforming its IT infrastructure and preparing for future expansion in a fast-evolving travel market.

Almost everyone knows Stena Line for its ferries, but the Swedish family-owned company does much more than just crossings by sea. One of its divisions is the Stena Line Travel Group – a business line active in numerous countries and operating under several brands, including Bureau Scanbrit, VoigtTravel, Motoerit Motorreizen, and Scandinavian Wintersports. Since early 2025, these four brands have been brought together under one name for the Dutch market: Northbound Travel. 

Northbound Travel faces the challenge of integrating and consolidating its various brands – including in terms of IT. This is essential to respond more quickly to market developments and is also a key priority because the company aims to grow through acquisitions. Travel organizations that are acquired must be seamlessly integrated into the new platform. This integration effort is no small feat, as each travel brand comes with its own history and legacy systems. “IT is a major challenge across the travel industry,” says Arjan de Ruijter, Change Lead for Northbound’s four brands. “Many backend systems date back to the pre-internet era. Over the years, they’ve grown incredibly complex and at some point, you have to address that. Integration poses an additional challenge: it’s about connecting to the systems of partners within your ecosystem.”

Travel companies offering ferry services face additional complexity, explains De Ruijter. While airline offerings are often clearly defined and easy to standardize – a seat is a seat – ferry services deal with vehicles in varying sizes, sometimes with trailers. The offering also includes extra components such as different types of cabins for overnight stays. There are other challenges too. On one hand, platformization is a growing trend: all offerings are aggregated on major platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com, which everyone must connect to; and vice versa, anyone can sell everything. On the other hand, these platforms often lack specialized knowledge about destinations and travel routes, which is particularly important for more complex and customized trips like round tours. “Specialists like Northbound Travel can tell you about that charming little six-room hotel in the far north of Sweden,” says De Ruijter.

“There is a growing demand for Scandinavian destinations. We want to respond quickly and with a targeted offering – for instance, by rapidly scaling up when we see a surge in interest for city trips to Sweden. That means our IT landscape must be ready for it.”

“The travel industry uses a wide range of standards, which leads to a broad spectrum of technologies,” De Ruijter explains. “To keep integrations and connections possible, travel providers must regularly adapt their existing infrastructure. The only viable solution, and what’s crucial for us as an organization, is to define an internal standard and adopt a composable software stack. This allows us to easily add or remove components. And as mentioned, that uniformity will also make it easier to integrate future acquisitions.”

Erik Pasterkamp, Head of Technology at Northbound Travel, has been responsible since 2023 for the IT integration of the brands Voigt Travel, Scanbrit, Motoerit, and Scandinavian Wintersports. Pasterkamp explains that real-time functionality is becoming increasingly important. This means that all components of a trip, including pricing and availability, must be visible on the frontend for the consumer. “Real-time is especially challenging for more complex travel products such as self-drive tours. These include multiple travel components – think excursions, hotels, ferries, car rentals, insurance products – which are interdependent. However, not all information about prices and availability can be accessed in real-time and online.”

Northbound Travel’s IT strategy focuses on creating a centralized backend from which new integrations can be made for all brands. Pasterkamp explains: “We are moving from three architectures to one. Besides the backend system and the financial administration system, we also want to build a single new frontend architecture, so we can create unique websites for all brands on one foundation.”

“NetRom was already involved in 2010 in developing a cloud-based calculation system for ScanBrit,” De Ruijter elaborates on the long-standing collaboration. NetRom was later brought back in because Scanbrit lacked in-house development capacity for web applications. Even now, NetRom plays a role in realizing the new web stack.

Pasterkamp on this choice: “We’re under time pressure: we want to move to new technology as quickly as possible. A year has been allocated for the integration and new build project. Choosing a new partner takes time to learn how to collaborate – something we no longer need to do with NetRom.”

Moreover, developing the new frontend is a project with a clear start and finish. “It all has to work and look good for the consumer. We need a platform where we can organize new activities. The platform must be flexible and deliver good performance. That’s why we’re opting for new development instead of refactoring.”

Another argument is that Northbound has outsourced all development work completely. “If we wanted to do this internally, we would need to maintain competencies across many areas. You’ll see that someone who just got trained leaves or starts their own business. We’re good at selling travel, but we’re not a tech company. That is a deliberate choice. However, we are dependent on technology.”

“We engaged in conversations with NetRom about our ideas: moving everything to the cloud, a composable architecture, and using the back office as a data hub. In that regard, they fully collaborated with us: given the challenges and available resources, is this the best approach? Working with NetRom is not one-way traffic. Right from the start, they delivered a prototype based on limited information that fit well. I find that impressive, and it immediately gives confidence that they will get it done,” says De Ruijter.

As Change Lead, De Ruijter gathers the business requirements and discusses them with the development teams. A complicating factor is that NetRom is responsible for the frontend work, while another partner is simultaneously modernizing the backend. This leads to more interim questions that need quick answers, requiring a lot of flexibility and creativity from the NetRom team, which consists of four developers.

“What we’re doing now is ‘waterfall,’” says De Ruijter. “These are all projects with a clear beginning and end. Even though we work agile, it’s focused on one epic. Of course, we have weekly stand-ups and reviews, planning sessions, and retrospectives. This keeps interaction ongoing and helps us know where we stand. But on the other hand, in this setup, there isn’t continuous interaction with the business. That will change, in our view. Once the platform is in place, we will work more agile, continuously improving and expanding, for example based on new questions, needs, and opportunities from the business.”

De Ruijter: “Of course, the cost advantage plays a role for us. But even more important is that after fifteen years, we work very well together. The NetRom team has deep knowledge of the travel industry. You don’t find that level of expertise easily elsewhere. Their knowledge is truly high: you can bring them a question and get a solid answer. And it’s always an honest answer: they won’t hesitate to advise against something if needed. Their problem-solving skills are excellent, and it’s easy for us to communicate with our contacts, right up to the executive level. There’s no bureaucracy or constantly changing account managers. I’ve had the same project manager for fifteen years.”

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