Challenge
Buying a plane ticket from Uzbekistan in 2019 was a project of its own. International services searched well but asked for a card the buyer did not have, and local agencies worked by phone during office hours.
A wall stood between finding a flight and paying for it, and plenty of people never got over it.
Solution
The service joined the two halves: search across every destination, and payment in soums with a local card.
The hard part turned out to be the seam rather than the search. A price in a booking system lives for minutes, payment by local card needs confirmation from the bank, and between those two events a ticket can rise in price or disappear. That calls for a hold, an exact order of steps, and a refund path the buyer can understand.
Architecture and implementation
Flight search across every destination came with filters, and booking placed a temporary hold on the seat. Payment was taken in the national currency with local cards, after which the ticket was issued and sent to the buyer.
When a booking failed to confirm after payment, a refund path took over rather than a support conversation. The buyer's own section kept the order history.
Result
The service ran from 2019 and closed the full path: found, held, paid with your own card, ticket in hand. It has been shut down for a long time — the skill stayed. Connecting somebody else's booking system to a local payment system so that the money and the ticket never part company is still the same problem.
