AGIS Business Travel books corporate travel for mostly French and pan-European companies. Hotels, rental cars, plane and train tickets. Their corporate clients hand AGIS Business Travel their travel program; the agency books, pays the suppliers up front, applies the client’s travel policy, and bills back later.

The team has grown from 15 people a decade ago to 40 today, split across three main teams: a travel agency team handling reservations, an online team managing their self-serve booking tool, and an accounting team handling invoices and payments. In March 2026 alone, the team together received 15,000 inbound emails and sent 8,000 outbound. That works out to over 500 inbound a day, every working day.

That volume needs to land somewhere, in front of the right person, without two agents replying to the same customer. Getting that right has been a moving target for AGIS Business Travel. The agency spent its early years independent, was acquired by a billion-dollar US travel group, and was bought back by its CEO in early 2025. Independent twice over. Software stack to rebuild twice over.

While owned by the US parent, AGIS Business Travel used Front for shared-inbox collaboration. The team loved it. After the buyback, though, the agency had to start paying its own software bills, and Front had become uncomfortable. Their previous owner had been footing the bill at roughly $60 per user per month. For 40 newly independent users, that math no longer worked.

“Front was very expensive,” says Ugo Mastrippolito, who runs operations and processes at AGIS Business Travel. “If we had no alternative, we would have stayed. But we started searching.”

“It’s just like Front”: finding Missive

Ugo’s director found Missive, a shared-inbox tool for teams, while comparing options online. They booked a demo with Luis from the Missive team. Ugo’s reaction was almost immediate.

“The minute I saw Missive, I said: it’s just like Front. The things are in the same place, the icons are similar. I just asked for a test account.”

Ugo spent one to two months testing, mostly solo at first. He’s a self-described “settings person” who reads every option in a settings page. After the solo pass, he invited two teammates to stress-test the parts that mattered most: tagging in comments, email assignment, and group team inbox behavior. The bar he was measuring against was specific.

“The advantage for us was that we really knew what we wanted. We just wanted to replicate what we already had on the new tool.”

Mostly, Missive cleared that bar. Layout, icons, shared inboxes, comments, and assignments were all there.

A tool migration on top of a domain migration

Here’s where the AGIS Business Travel switch gets harder to copy than most. The agency wasn’t just changing tools. They were also moving off the parent company’s domain onto a brand-new one. Two migrations, simultaneously.

Ugo’s approach was elegant in hindsight, even if it didn’t feel that way during it. He sequenced the work so that the domain change came first. Live business kept running on Front, on the old domain, with no disruption to customers. The new agisbt.com domain went into Missive as a sandbox: real but quiet, since customers weren’t yet using it for communication. That gave Ugo a real environment to test in without the risk of dropped customer emails.

Once the domain migration was complete, AGIS Business Travel activated auto-forwarding from old to new and signed with Missive in early January 2026.

It wasn’t perfectly smooth. Some auto-forwards from the old domain mysteriously refused to work, an issue on the Microsoft side that even AGIS Business Travel’s internal tech and external IT couldn’t fully resolve. So they delayed for a month or two, then went ahead anyway. The natural flow took over: as customers replied to forwarded emails, their address books updated, and traffic gradually migrated to the new domain on its own.

The only Missive-specific IT touch needed was a one-time Microsoft permissions adjustment so Missive could properly connect to the shared inboxes. Ugo handled the rest of the setup himself.

The rollout: a soft invite, not a forced switch

Ugo had a clear philosophy for bringing the team across.

“I like people to be part of the change. I want them to like what we’re going to offer them, not feel like it’s a forced choice.”

The rollout went in stages. Ugo gave a presentation explaining what Missive was, where things lived, and what to expect. The team had questions immediately. Ugo answered the ones he could and noted the ones he couldn’t. He brought those back to Missive’s team for a follow-up Q&A session with everyone.

During the transition itself, Front and Missive ran in parallel. The team got a soft invite to Missive but kept receiving emails on Front too, with the understanding that at some point Front would be cut off. AGIS Business Travel also did a historical migration so two years of email history from the old domain stayed searchable in Missive.

After the Q&A, Ugo did one more thing that’s underrated in change-management terms: he pointed the team directly at Missive’s documentation and support channels. Internal champions who become the only escalation path tend to burn out. Cutting that dependency early kept Ugo from becoming a permanent middle layer between his team and Missive’s support.

“At one point I just wanted to detach myself,” Ugo says. “It was really time consuming for me. So after the Q&A, I told them: you can still ask me, but it would be preferable to check the documentation or write to support directly.”

The result: same satisfaction, about 40% less spend

By the time the dust settled, AGIS Business Travel was fully on Missive, and Ugo’s verdict was simple.

“People are very happy. It saves them time. They were really satisfied on Front, and now they’re really satisfied on Missive. That was my goal.”

On the cost side: AGIS Business Travel now pays about 40% less than they were paying on Front. A few things they’d assumed they would give up turned out to be handled at least as well in Missive, sometimes better.

Ugo even told their former US parent company about it.

“We told the US company about you. These guys do the same thing for cheaper.”

The small things: logos, emoji, and a bit of joy

Mid-call, Ugo shared his screen to point at something that wouldn’t survive a feature comparison spreadsheet but that he notices every day: the small company logos that appear next to incoming senders.

“You instantly see who is writing in. Client logos, our back office. It gives a bit of joy in the app. Some color.”

Same with emoji support throughout the interface. None of this would survive a buying-committee checklist. All of it adds up across eight hours a day in your inbox.