BORD Travel Aggregator

The initial task in creating the project was as follows: in Georgia, there are numerous companies and private entrepreneurs offering tourism-related or similar services. In most cases, such companies lack the infrastructure to effectively attract clients: no online booking systems, payment options, organized advertising campaigns, and many don't even have their own website.

BORD was intended to provide all this infrastructure, ensure quality service representation, client consultation with service providers, booking, payment, and transfer of all tourism company information.

In addition, BORD was to become an attractive platform for tourists and the population in Georgia due to its wide range of offerings and the principle of "everything in one place."

Also considered was the possibility of exporting this product beyond Georgia as a national tourism aggregator in contrast to global tourism aggregators.

Project organization:

The database of geographical objects includes cities, towns, bodies of water, mountains, landmarks, and museums. Each geographical object has a description, gallery, and serves as a point for linking a tourist route or activity.

The tour builder allows creating a tourist route by linking objects in a sequence. We incorporated a variation functionality – ability to choose one of several tour components offered. For example, at the same location, there could be boat rides, kayaking, and jet skiing. Depending on settings, clients can choose one or more of the offered services. Moreover, in group tours, some participants can choose one service while others choose another. Another example is the ability to exclude a tour component: a tour includes wine tasting, but some group members are not interested in this component while still interested in the overall tour. For this part of the group, wine tasting can be excluded, and accordingly, they don't pay for it.

Another crucial point is transfer services. Most tourism companies are located outside major cities and lack the capability to organize transfers, except perhaps by offering to call a taxi. To address this issue, we utilized another project of ours, Forter, which includes a large database of drivers with their own vehicles, and integrated it with BORD. Now clients can choose transfer as an additional option. Distance calculation and, accordingly, the cost of transfer are automatically calculated taking into account vehicle capacity, type of vehicle, and the rate set by the vehicle owner.

The tour builder also allows specifying different prices and conditions for different age groups, up to prohibiting certain age groups from participating. Age groups can be set individually for each tour.

The pricing component of the tour or activity is organized flexibly in the tour builder. You can specify the cost per person, per group, or define a gradation of costs based on the number of participants, using either formulas or specific figures.

The booking system allows specifying the number of participants by age groups, selecting various tour components, choosing optional transfer, and making payments.

As part of the task, an interactive tool was developed for adding and managing tourist attractions on Google Maps.

We also developed a category system, seasonal tour division, and search system. Clients can leave feedback on the tour or activity after its completion.

Currently, the project is on hold due to very low tourist activity. The client intends to resume work as activity increases, and we have further plans for project development.

• Adding an automated partner system for entities capable of attracting tourists
• Restaurant booking
• Tag system
• Intelligent selection of so-called similar products (tours, activities) based on user site navigation results
• Interface for tourism companies to create/add tours and activities (this is one of the main points that should ensure maximum project autonomy), as well as enabling direct client communication with tour/activity organizers
• We are considering how to organize automated addition of geographical objects; we want each object to be individually represented with a unique description and gallery. There are ideas and possible solutions – awaiting further development
• There are many other interesting ideas, all of which are not new and are presented in one form or another on similar resources. For ourselves, we set the goal of making everything as convenient, understandable, intuitive, and flexible as possible – solving the problems that are clearly present in large numbers among tourism aggregators, including major ones.