I don't know why it's crossed my mind to count the number of organisations involved in taking the three of us on holiday. Here we are sitting in a hotel in Istanbul looking at the Marmara Sea from the hotel balcony. It's glorious.
But what has it taken to get us here? The list organisations with direct involvement includes: Megabus, Transport for London, Uber, British Airways, Expedia, Istanbul Transport, PayPal, First Direct, Passport Office, (for one-day expedited passport issuance as one party member didn't notice her passport expiry date), Insure and Go, and the Turkish evisa organisation.
The list of indirect involvement includes organisations behind various websites that we've consulted on currency exchange, weather, info on Istanbul, flight comparisons, hotel reviews, travel experiences, safety in Istanbul, and so on.
Then there are the add-on organisations who touched our travel in some way: suitcase manufacturers, telecoms providers – getting our devices working here, retail outlets in the airport , the third parties providing snacks on British Airways, the organisation making the check-in kiosks, air traffic controllers, security checkers, passport and border controllers, cleaners of locations ...
Each of the direct and indirect 'customer touchpoints' comprise a web of systems, processes, policies, compliance, interactions, interdependencies and other connections that together make our holiday logistics work. Beyond these back office 'technical' aspects of it, are the 'human' aspects of making it work - how many people does it take to get one person safely to a holiday destination with luggage and connected mobile devices? I'm guessing that it must run into several thousand.