How Alpic helped cottages.com launch Europe's largest holiday rental inventory in AI conversations
B2C
Travel
ChatGPT & MCP App
Awaze, Europe's largest holiday rental provider, partnered with Alpic to build a ChatGPT app for cottages.com that makes their UK inventory discoverable in AI conversations. Alpic delivered a production-ready app in weeks that connects live availability and pricing to conversational AI search. Travelers now search for properties using natural language and seamlessly transition to booking, while Awaze maintains their familiar brand experience and strengthens customer loyalty in this new distribution channel.
Awaze is Europe's largest provider of holiday rental operating premium brands including cottages.com across the UK and continental Europe. Awaze serves travelers seeking authentic holiday experiences while supporting property owners with management services and pricing tools.
Awaze came to Alpic with a distribution problem that's becoming critical across the travel industry.
Their customers were increasingly planning trips in ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI assistants, using natural language.
Awaze needed to:
Make their live inventory searchable through conversational queries across multiple AI platforms
Connect real-time availability and pricing to AI-powered search
Enable complete discovery-to-booking experiences without users leaving the conversation
Deploy not just to ChatGPT, but across Claude and other AI assistants
Move fast: the window for early-mover advantage was closing
Our solution
Alpic helped Awaze build an AI-native app that would work across ChatGPT, Claude & all MCP-compatible agents. The app connects Awaze's live inventory to AI conversations, enabling travelers to search using natural language, view real-time availability and pricing, and seamlessly transition to booking on cottages.com.
Beyond development, Alpic handled the complete deployment process, going from idea to production in weeks. We helped ensure technical compliance and platform approvals, alongisde production hosting and monitoring. No need to manage infrastructure.
The results
Production app in weeks
From initial conversations to live deployment across AI platforms, we delivered in weeks instead of months.
Multi-platform presence
across ChatGPT, Claude, and MCP-compatible AI assistants, giving Awaze distribution where travelers are searching today.
Live conversational search
Travelers search cottages.com properties using natural language and receive real-time availability and pricing, connecting inspiration to booking instantly.
Familiar brand experience
With a custom app featuring a familiar UX and UI, users interact with a brand they trust, allowing Awaze to strengthen customer loyalty while leveraging this new channel.
A full user feedback loop validated in production
Independent UXR combined with Alpic's User Insights confirmed the recommendation model works and gave Awaze a concrete, prioritized list for future versions (pricing clarity, constraint handling) as well as potential gaps in their inventory.
Validated by real users and real usage
After launch, the next question was simple: how was the app performing with real travelers?
Awaze relied on two independent sources to understand.
First, moderated UX research with 20 think-aloud sessions, desktop and mobile found recommendation relevance was a clear strength: the assistant reduced blank-page effort and worked well as a discovery layer when it explained trade-offs and interpreted the brief.
It also revealed several areas for improvement. In particular, pricing clarity cost user trust when per-night vs. multi-night pricing wasn't always handled correctly, and agents tended to loosen a stated requirement to broaden results without making that clear.
Second, production traffic data from Alpic's User Insights brought further information as to how travellers were using the app. It showed that travelers routinely stack five or six constraints into a single brief – dates, budget, pet policy, decor style, property type, and proximity to a specific place. This is much more information than one generally gets from a Google-style search and one that can generally only be achieved via filters.
Example of a traditional search vs. a ChatGPT-style search query.
Drilling deeper into user intents, the traffic showed pet friendly, regional or city searches, and coastal or woodland properties came up most often. Combining this data allows Awaze to see how their app is being used and identify gaps in either the parameters that the underlying search offers or even the inventory itself.
Conclusion
Awaze went from idea to a live app across MCP-compatible assistants in a matter of weeks then monitored performance with real research and real production data on the Alpic platform. Both pointed the same way: the conversational search travelers are already using is genuinely useful, and the specific issues standing between a promising launch and long-term use ( pricing clarity, constraint handling, inventory alignment) are identified and prioritized. With the early success of cottages.com, Awaze is now expanding its AI-native strategy to other vacation rental brands and building apps across its portfolio.
"AI is changing how customers discover and book holidays, and demand for AI-powered planning tools is growing rapidly. Launching inside ChatGPT means we can now do this for customers with an easy to use and conversational tool that feels a lot like talking about your next stay with a friend or relative."
Matthew Price, CEO of Awaze