Tourism & Experiences
Sector projects.
A tour operator in Sardinia sells a morning, not a week. Small ticket, short season, and most of those mornings are booked through someone who keeps a slice of the price and the guest's email address. We have worked both ends of that: a zero-commission marketplace where experiences sit beside stays, and the brand of an operator selling a way of seeing the island.
The problem in this sector
Portals are built for beds. An experience gets squeezed into the same card as a room — one photo, a price, a duration — and everything that made it worth doing falls out. Meanwhile the commission gets charged even on the guest who already chose you, and the address of the person who spent a brilliant day with you stays with the platform.
Then there is the geography. Someone landing here for the first time cannot tell Gallura from Sulcis, and no list of results teaches them — which is exactly what a local operator knows and a catalogue does not.
And a week gets assembled across three sites with three accounts: where to sleep, what to do, how to move in between. Seven browser tabs to plan five days.
What actually helps
Availability that is true today, and a booking that closes in three steps: longer than that and the portal wins on convenience alone. One search holding stays, things to do and ways to get around, so a trip is planned in one place. The island explained zone by zone, in the words of people who live there. Languages picked from where the bookings actually come from, not from a flag menu. And someone answering when guests write: at night, on Sundays, throughout August.
How we built it
AVOY is where we took it head-on: a Sardinian marketplace running three verticals — properties, experiences and activities — behind a single search, where the host keeps 100% of every booking and the guest talks to the owner directly. It carries over 2.5k mapped activities, 1024+ experiences and 51+ properties, hosts verified, and an interactive Mapbox map with clustering makes the island readable at a glance. Every zone gets its own story, the part the big portals have never had. Support runs through Sofia, an AI concierge on duty 24/7 in 12 languages, guests and hosts alike.
Sarda Trips works one floor up, on the brand. An experience operator sells a way of looking at Sardinia before it sells a tour, and the market is full of the same beach photographed by everybody. So we built a mark that holds up without the photograph: five pictograms drawn from real photographs of the island — nuraghe, sail, mountain, sea, place — an eight-colour system where each colour belongs to a pictogram, typography, pattern and applications reaching merchandise and social.
Two projects, two floors of one problem: platforms that take the middleman out of the guest relationship, and brands that say which Sardinia someone is buying. Between them, websites that turn a search into a booking.
If your year fits into four months and your guest list belongs to somebody else, the site gets rebuilt now, not in May. Tell us what you sell in the online quote: a few questions, a clear estimate, no commitment.
Frequently asked.
You need the two things the portal has and you don't: availability that is right today, and a booking that closes in a few taps. On AVOY, stays, experiences and activities sit in one search and the host keeps 100% — the guest's contact stays theirs.
Not on volume. On the territory, yes: an international portal lists, someone working on the island can explain. That is the gap between a page of results and a zone described by people who live in it — and it is what first-time visitors are actually reading.
The ones your bookings already arrive in — your own history says which. On AVOY the concierge, Sofia, handles guests and hosts round the clock in 12 languages.
If you sell a way of seeing the island rather than a ticket, yes. For Sarda Trips we drew five pictograms from real photographs of Sardinia and built an eight-colour system around them: the mark says which Sardinia before the catalogue gets a chance to.
In low season — the only stretch with room to do it properly. A site rebuilt in June pays for itself the year after; one rebuilt in November is ready when the searches start again, which is January.