It didn't start in a boardroom. It started in an agency in Kuwait, watching one travel agent do by hand the thing the whole industry still assumes a confirmation number already covers — and it ended up a secret project, a pandemic-timed launch, and, by 2023, a stage at Phocuswright.
The idea behind rePUSHTI didn't start in a boardroom. It started in an agency in Kuwait, watching one travel agent do, by hand, something the whole travel industry still quietly assumes a confirmation number already covers: actually calling the hotel to check the booking was real.
A problem the industry didn't have a name for
More than twelve years ago, that was just how it was done — one call at a time, one booking at a time, by someone whose entire job was making sure a confirmation number wasn't the end of the story. The industry didn't have a word for what that agent was actually doing. Confirmation was assumed to be enough. It wasn't, and every travel business still living with that gap knows it, whether or not they've ever put a name to it.
We put a name to it. We called it rePUSHTI.
The AI available then was bots — we built on it anyway
This was years before “AI” meant what it means today. What existed then was closer to bots — rule-based, narrow, nowhere near what an agent can actually do now. We started building on it anyway, quietly, as a secret project inside Qtech Software. Rahul Kathet, co-founder, built the product from scratch.
Why COVID was, unexpectedly, the moment it fit
By the time the idea had a name and a working product behind it, the travel industry was living through its hardest stretch in decades. COVID had every travel business restricting spend, cutting costs, and re-examining every process that used to run on headcount. rePUSHTI was already built for exactly that moment — automated, AI-driven booking re-verification, at a fraction of the cost of doing it by hand. The timing wasn't planned. It was just right.
rePUSHTI launched in 2021, with roughly 10,000 bookings re-verified in its first year.
The idea didn't come from a strategy deck. It came from watching one agent do, by hand, a job nobody had thought to automate.
From 10,000 bookings to more than a million
That first year's 10,000 bookings is now more than a million a year, with over two million re-verification logs behind it — every one of them a call, a check, a problem caught before a guest ever found out about it the hard way.
Presenting it to the industry, at Phocuswright
In November 2023, both co-founders — Paresh Parihar and Rahul Kathet — took rePUSHTI to Phocuswright's Innovation: Launch programme in Fort Lauderdale, one of eleven companies chosen to present in front of the travel industry's own research authority. rePUSHTI's own listing that year described it plainly: the world's first booking re-verification platform built on automation and AI.
rePUSHTI at Phocuswright's Innovation: Launch, 2023.
Beyond hotels: transfers and flights too
What started as a fix for one kind of booking didn't stay there. rePUSHTI's re-verification now runs agentically across hotel bookings, transfers and flights — not just checking a status, but genuinely automating what a person used to do by phone, at a scale a person never could.
The agent in that Kuwait agency was solving a real problem the only way anyone could, at the time: by hand, one booking at a time. Twelve years later, that's the one part of the job rePUSHTI was built to take off anyone's plate for good.
