# Websites and platforms for tourism and experiences

> Marketplaces, booking and brand identity for tour and experience operators in Sardinia, without handing the guest to a portal. studio jem projects.

Page: https://www.studiojem.it/en/sectors/tourism-experiences/

A season that fits into four months, and the portal that sells it keeps both a slice of every booking and the guest's email — so next June you start again from nobody.

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](/en/work/avoy-it/) 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](/en/work/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](/en/services/app-development/) that take the middleman out
of the guest relationship, and [brands](/en/services/branding-logo/)
that say which Sardinia someone is buying. Between them,
[websites](/en/services/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](/en/quote/): three minutes today, so you do not lose a
season.

## FAQ

### How do we sell experiences without going through a portal?

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.

### Can a small operator compete with the big marketplaces?

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.

### How many languages should a Sardinian tourism site speak?

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.

### Does an experience operator need a brand?

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.

### When should we rebuild the site if the season is short?

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.