Okawari Travels was an accomplished tour guide operation in Tokyo specializing in bar hopping tours in the Kichijoji area with one weakness they wanted to address; the majority of their revenue came from Airbnb tours with a smaller portion coming from other platforms they had no control over.
Sure enough, they were banned from Airbnb shortly after with no explanation as to what rules they broke and little recourse to fix their suspension. Luckily by that point, Okawaritravels.com had become a big enough part of their overall operations that they were no longer at Airbnb’s mercy.
What they needed
Okawari Travels required a robust website with a booking system in order to reach clients promoted through social media with plans to visit Japan. The major focus was to diversify their income away from the existing booking platforms as they didn’t want to be at an outsourced customer service department’s mercy should anything happen.
On top of that, anticipating a flood of tourists coming from Japan’s re-opening, they had plans to eventually take on more employees and open up different types of tours to better serve their future customers.
What we did
In order to fit Okawari Travel’s needs, we built an eye-catching website with the capacity to handle well over 25,000 visitors per second without stuttering and a global network of over 120 servers to reach customers quickly no matter where they are.
At the time, a simple booking system was set up which was able to handle multiple time zones complete with client email reminders so they don’t miss their tour date.
On the back-end, the website was set up with an easily customizable WYSIWYG editor with daily backups so anyone on Okawari’s team could make last-minute or emergency changes on their own without worry of breaking anything when trying to tinker.
Room to grow
As Okawari Travels wisely planned to expand their operations over time, we built the site with options to create content, sell guides, multi-employee management, and an in-house booking system with referral attribution so the company can partner with local travel brands, companies, and influencers on future projects.