Despegar teamed up with Digifianz to modernize their hotel partner onboarding, consolidating fragmented processes into an integrated HubSpot environment. The migration automated key tasks, reduced operational friction, and positioned the team for scalable, data-driven growth.
About Despegar:
Despegar is a leading online travel agency in Latin America, offering travelers and businesses access to flights, accommodation, packages, car rentals, and more. The company connects customers with an extensive network of travel and hospitality providers, supporting millions of users each year and enabling them to plan, book, and manage travel across the region and beyond.
Project and Goal:
To modernize and standardize its customer service operations, Despegar sought to migrate from its previous ticketing system to HubSpot Service Hub. The goal was to leverage HubSpot’s full capabilities to manage hotels, communication, ticket workflows, and reporting from a single unified platform. By centralizing all key operational activities in HubSpot, Despegar aimed to streamline processes, improve visibility across teams, and enable a scalable service model capable of supporting high-volume operations.
Despegar acquired Marketing Hub Pro, Sales Hub Pro, and Service Hub Pro, but this project focused specifically on Service Hub and ticket processes. The priority was to migrate all historical service data—hotels, clients, and tickets—into HubSpot through a structured CSV-based strategy coordinated jointly by Digifianz’s development team and Despegar’s technical team. This ensured a clean, controlled migration without friction. For that, we had to create many properties to align and define how we wanted the information to flow from their previous CRM to HubSpot.
In parallel, the goal was to build a standardized, replicable ticketing workflow, while preparing the foundation for potential future integrations between HubSpot and Despegar’s existing system.
Main Challenges:
Before adopting HubSpot Service Hub, Despegar faced several operational challenges:
- Ticket management dispersed in another CRM, limiting visibility across customer-facing teams.
- Reliance on manual, email-based processes without proper tracking or centralized control.
- The need to migrate large volumes of historical service data while preserving accuracy.
- Team members with varying levels of CRM experience, requiring foundational training and alignment.
- High ticket volume with complex post-sales and support workflows, demanding a scalable structure.
- The necessity for automated routing, ownership assignment, and notification systems to ensure timely follow-ups.
Implementation Approach:
Digifianz partnered closely with Despegar through continuous implementation sessions, focusing entirely on Service Hub setup and ticket process optimization. Key components included:
- Full initial configuration of HubSpot.
- Recurring structured CSV migration of hotels (companies), contacts, and tickets in collaboration with both development teams.
- Creation of several customized ticket pipelines with stage-specific properties organized into intuitive cards.
These ticket pipelines were built to centralize and standardize multiple hotel-related service processes that previously lived in emails, spreadsheets, or isolated tools. Although Despegar began with two pipelines, the structure was intentionally designed to scale as new service processes are formalized.
Each pipeline groups together similar customer service workflows that share the same stages, allowing the team to handle a high volume of hotel requests in an organized and consistent manner. By structuring each stage with required properties and organizing fields into intuitive cards, service advisors can work end-to-end within the ticket record, ensuring accurate data entry, clear ownership, and complete traceability throughout the entire service process.
- Automation workflows assigning ticket owners, tasks, and stage-based responsibilities.
- Email templates and workflow-driven communication for consistent follow-up.
- Slack notification setup to alert advisors and executives when a new ticket or task was assigned.
- Training teams to work end-to-end within the ticket record—sending emails, logging notes, completing required fields, and associating hotels with contacts.
- Adoption of supporting tools during onboarding, including Telegram for urgent communications and Trello for tracking requests and project visibility.
- Weekly working sessions plus additional short touch-base meetings and on-demand calls, supported by meeting recaps and shared documentation.
Results and Outcome:
- Historical service data successfully migrated into HubSpot in a clean, structured manner, including more than 80,000 hotel records to date.
- Unified visibility of tickets improved operational clarity across customer service teams.
- Scalable, standardized pipelines enabled consistent handling of high ticket volumes.
- Automation and notification systems enhanced internal coordination and response times.
- Advisors and executives fully adopted HubSpot for ticket management, reducing fragmentation across platforms (they are getting used to using it). For several weeks, the team conducted tests before the go-live to ensure they understood everything, and with our support, to clarify any questions they had.
- The new framework can now be replicated for additional service processes that were also within scope. They can map and implement them on their own, with our guidance and support.
Guidance & Continuity:
Our collaboration with Despegar continues beyond the initial setup. Together we:
- Expand and refine ticketing processes as requirements evolve
- Support upcoming service workflows to maintain standardization
- Provide ongoing training, onboarding, and optimization
- Maintain consistent alignment through weekly sessions and ad-hoc support
- Since the team already has knowledge of the platform, they now come to us with more specific or more advanced questions.
This continuity ensures that HubSpot Service Hub becomes a long-term operational foundation for Despegar’s customer service organization.
Conclusion:
With Digifianz’s support, Despegar transitioned from its legacy ticketing system to a unified and scalable HubSpot Service Hub environment. The structured migration, custom pipeline architecture, automations, and team training empowered Despegar to manage customer service with clarity, consistency, and operational efficiency. The foundation now set also enables seamless growth and future integration possibilities.
If you’re looking to optimize and centralize your customer service processes with HubSpot Service Hub, we’d be happy to help.