No. 001 · Music Touring & Travel
From manual operations to an AI-assisted pipeline.
The problem
Valise books hotels for touring bands across North America — 57 bands and more than 7,100 rooms in 2026 alone. Every tour meant the same manual grind. An itinerary lands: forty days on the road, a dozen cities, group bookings in each one. Each city got its own spreadsheet. RFPs went out to multiple hotels per city. Quotes came back by email — sometimes 150 in a single hour — and every price and term was copy-pasted into the right sheet by hand. Sending the RFPs for one big tour took three to four hours.
Off-the-shelf tools had already failed the founder’s ten-minute test: “If I can’t learn this in 10 minutes, it’s too complicated. I’m out.”
The route taken
Inside the operation: where the hours actually went, mapped and measured.
The system shipped
A custom booking platform, built AI-native. Judgment stays with the team; the grind doesn’t.
Tour Import
Upload an itinerary; the system builds the full tour structure — every stop, city, and date.
Automated RFPs
Quote requests across an entire tour go out in minutes, not hours.
AI Quote Parsing
Hotel replies are read automatically; pricing and terms land structured, not copy-pasted.
Quote Comparison
Every quote in one view. No spreadsheet assembly.
Valise ran real tours through the platform from the first weeks — issues were found and fixed inside actual work, not test scenarios.
Measured outcomes
RFPs for a full tour
3–4 hours→10–15 min
150 hotel emails processed
Hours→15–20 min
Time returned, daily
Underwater→Hours back
“What surprised me most? It just works.”