Journey's Costa Rica — Digital Transformation of a Tour Operator & DMC

About the client

Journey's Costa Rica designs and operates trips in Costa Rica for international travel agencies and groups. It coordinates hotels, transport, guides and activities across many suppliers.

The challenge

• Multi-service quotes were built by hand, with seasonal rates and several tariff types per supplier.
• Converting a confirmed quote into a reservation, and then tracking payments, meant re-typing the same data in several places.
• Sales, operations and finance each worked from their own files, with no shared view of a trip's status.
• The website didn't reflect the company's range or rank well in English or Spanish.

Our solution

1. Discovery first: recorded discovery sessions turned into a written process map and a 13-week delivery plan using DBUGGER's ICM methodology.
2. TOMS — Tour Operations Management System: multi-service quotations with a status per service, one-click conversion to reservations, supplier and product catalogs, seasonal pricing by date range, and payment tracking. The UI is Spanish-first for the team.
3. Role-based access for sales, operations and finance, on a 14-table relational schema (Drizzle ORM on Supabase Postgres).
4. Drag-and-drop itinerary building (dnd-kit) and transactional email through Resend.
5. New bilingual website: an 84-URL EN/ES sitemap and a dedicated design system (Ocean, Emerald, Marigold).

Scope

• Discovery and process mapping
• TOMS MVP (quotes → reservations → payments)
• supplier and seasonal-rate management
• roles and permissions
• bilingual website and design system
• designed to handle 500+ products and 1,000+ reservations a month

Milestones

1. Discovery and schema
   Done
2. design system
   Done
3. TOMS core build
   Current
4. website build
   Upcoming
5. team training and go-live
   Upcoming

Takeaways

• Tourism runs on exceptions, so model seasons and tariffs first
• one record from quote to payment ends double entry
• Spanish-first UI speeds up adoption