How JENZA Avoided €1M+ in Tech Costs with a Scalable Solutions
JENZA, a global work-and-travel company, emerged from the merger of several well-established travel and visa organisations, including BUNAC in the UK and USIT in Ireland. While this consolidation created a single, unified brand, it also brought together a wide range of fragmented legacy technology stacks, each with its own limitations and maintenance challenges.
With limited internal technical resources to manage these inherited systems, JENZA needed external expertise to stabilise, modernise, and streamline its digital infrastructure. The company’s priority was clear: build a scalable, modern platform capable of supporting global operations without the complexity, cost, or heavy maintenance burden associated with traditional enterprise rebuilds.
JENZA partnered with Ardanis to find a pragmatic, cost-effective modernization approach—one that avoided an unnecessary €1M+ investment while delivering a flexible foundation for future growth.
JENZA faced several challenges as it transitioned into a modern, agile travel company. Its inherited technology stack was outdated, fragmented, and difficult to maintain, creating significant obstacles for integration and scalability. Without an internal team capable of managing or upgrading these systems, operational efficiency suffered, and innovation was limited. Many of the proposals JENZA received for modernisation were overly complex and failed to reflect the company’s practical, growth-oriented approach. At the same time, JENZA required a flexible platform that enabled rapid deployment of new travel and visa services without the overhead of a large technical team. The business also needed an effective B2C platform to engage students, professionals, and travellers across multiple marketing campaigns and programs. These challenges underscored the need for a modern, unified, and scalable technology foundation.
JENZA’s journey to a scalable travel & visa platform
JENZA, a global work and travel company, emerged from the merger of several travel and visa organisations such as BUNAC in the UK and USIT in Ireland. While the consolidation created a unified brand, it also brought together multiple fragmented and legacy technology stacks, each with its own limitations, resulting in a clear opportunity for modernisation.
With limited internal technical resources to manage and evolve these inherited systems, JENZA needed external expertise to stabilise its platforms, reduce technical debt and prepare the business for global growth. The company partnered with Plain Concepts to define a pragmatic modernisation strategy that avoided an unnecessary €1M+ rebuild while prioritising scalability, efficiency, and long-term sustainability.
During this transformation, JENZA encountered several challenges: outdated and fragmented systems, a lack of in-house technical expertise, and the need for greater business agility to launch new programmes quickly.
Plain Concepts designed and built a modular, intuitive platform allowing non-technical staff to manage destinations, visa types and work-and-travel experiences via a component-based CMS. The platform integrates seamlessly with Hanover, JENZA’s visa management system, and its travel CRM. Deployed on scalable AWS cloud infrastructure, the solution enables JENZA to launch new brands and campaigns in minutes while significantly reducing operational and maintenance costs.
Results
- Unified all legacy brands onto a single modern tech stack, eliminating fragmentation and technical inefficiencies
- Enabled the launch of new brands, services and campaigns in minutes, significantly increasing business agility
- Reduced operational costs through a streamlined platform that can be maintained by a single junior developer
- Accelerated time-to-market with a reusable, component-based CMS for all travel and visa programmes
- Built a scalable AWS cloud infrastructure supporting JENZA’s long-term global expansion
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