Novasol is Europe's leading holiday home specialist, part of Awaze, with an inventory spanning dozens of countries, from Tuscan farmhouses to Scandinavian coastal cabins. Where cottages.com serves travelers looking mostly at UK homes, Novasol presents a different order of complexity, connecting any traveler to any property, anywhere in Europe.

The challenge

Awaze's cottages.com app proved that a conversational, discovery-to-booking model works within a single market. Extending it to Novasol meant scaling that same model to an entire continent, where each local market carries its own inventory, pricing, and booking rules.

"Alpic created a foundation we could confidently build on. When our needs became more ambitious, they transformed it efficiently into a richer and more sophisticated experience."

Matthew Price, CEO of Awaze

Getting from “somewhere in Sicily in September” to a short, relevant list of bookable properties still needed to happen in one simple, conversational exchange. Early user testing on the cottages.com app suggested the model would hold up under that added complexity. Travelers said the back-and-forth helped them weigh trade-offs and narrow down what actually mattered, rather than feeling like extra work.

The solution

Alpic worked with Novasol to design and build a ChatGPT app on the Skybridge framework, hosted on the Alpic platform and now live across both ChatGPT and Claude.

A traveler can start with whatever's already in mind: fixed dates, a specific destination, or just the urge to get away. When the destination is still open, the assistant asks about the country, region, or town first, the way a seasoned travel agent would before ever opening the catalog.

A prompt like “somewhere quiet by the sea in Croatia” narrows down through two or three follow-up questions rather than a long form. Once a destination is set, the app returns live, bookable properties with photos, pricing (including any current discounts), ratings, and capacity, all inside the chat. Travelers can stay in list form or switch to an interactive map that plots every match by price, so comparing a coastal town against the village ten minutes inland never means leaving the conversation.

Because the catalog spans so many markets, the app also has to work across languages. A French speaker asking about a house in Sicily gets Italian inventory pulled, priced, and described back in French, with no separate translation step. Type “une maison avec piscine en Toscane” and the reply reads as naturally in French as the listing itself would in Italian. From there, booking continues through Novasol's own branded experience, keeping the look and trust of the site travelers already know.

What Alpic built

A booking experience that spans the continent

The app resolves a holiday request against Novasol's full catalog, thousands of homes across dozens of countries, and offers both conversational lists and full interactive maps so travelers can browse however suits them. Novasol's branding carries through the interaction, and booking hands off to novasol.com in the traveler's own language, so the trust they already place in the brand holds.

Built and backed by the Alpic platform

Alpic's expertise took Novasol from prototype to live in weeks. The company now runs its MCP app on Alpic's hosting platform, drawn by a feature set that includes:

• A live playground for testing the app in a production-like setting, with internal and external stakeholders.

• Automated audits with Beacon, which check for protocol compliance and completeness, verify ChatGPT and Claude requirements, and catch regressions that could get future versions rejected.

• A submission helper that auto-generates resubmissions, so the team isn't rebuilding the same screens release after release.

• Analytics and user insights that track day-to-day performance, from session volume to traveler intent, and point the team toward the features users need.

Conclusion

56% of leisure travelers used AI to help plan a trip in the past year, up from 43% just nine months earlier, according to Phocuswright. In other words, planning happens more and more inside a conversation, not a search bar.

Novasol is meeting that shift on its own terms, putting one of Europe's largest and most trusted holiday rental catalogs right where travelers are already dreaming up their next trip.