Strawberry Tours
Tour booking platform
7Fridays built the tour booking website and booking platform behind Strawberry Tours: 1,095 free walking tours in 583 cities, run by 589 tour vendors, from single guides to tour agencies, with more than 160,000 bookings since the new system went live in spring 2023.
Before, Strawberry Tours ran on an Elementor website. We started in 2022 from designs by the client’s team and built two websites on one platform: Strawberry Tours, where travellers book free walking tours, and a portal where guides create schedules, adjust their own tours, talk to travellers and pay for the platform’s services. From the start, one WordPress installation served both domains. The owner sees every booking and payment in one admin.
Next to the free tours, the site sells paid tours from Civitatis, and it is connected to Bókun, the booking system many tour operators run on. Both are connected by API, the same way we connected 9 rental companies for a car rental marketplace in Madeira. Travellers can also take flexible, self-guided tours: they book, then get a guide to the city’s best landmarks with map links and paid activities nearby, each a tracked partner link that earns the platform a commission. The whole site runs in 7 languages.
In 2024 we rebuilt the front end as headless WordPress with Next.js: over 5,000 pages moved with every address kept, and the site has passed Core Web Vitals ever since. Today the platform runs on Next.js for the front end, NestJS for the business logic, and WordPress for the marketing and content team.
Website: strawberrytours.com
- Client
- Strawberry Tours
- Industry
- Travel and free walking tours
- Year
- 2022 to 2024
- What we did
- Booking platform, guide portal, headless migration
Guide portal and owner admin
Where guides and the owner run the business
Free tours only work when the people who run them manage their own schedules. Guides and tour agencies manage everything in their own portal, on its own domain; the owner sees every booking and payment in one admin.
Schedules and tours
Guides and tour agencies create departures, adjust their own tours and talk to travellers from one portal.
Why it matters
589 tour vendors keep 1,095 tours current, without the owner editing them.
Bidding for the top spots
Tour vendors bid to show their departures first on a city page.
Why it matters
A second income stream for the platform, with vendors deciding what top placement is worth to them.
Owner admin
Every booking, payments from tour vendors and tour creation in one admin, with filters by dates, city, tour, language and status, and a CSV export. Vendors pay for the platform’s services inside their portal.
Why it matters
The owner runs a marketplace of tour vendors from one place, not from spreadsheets and email.
Results since launch
Live since spring 2023
- 160,000+
- bookings of own tours
- 583
- cities
- 1,095
- own tours
- 589
- tour vendors
- 27,389
- messages between users on the platform
Free walking tours
1,095tours in 583 cities
Travellers pick a city, a date and a tour, and book a free spot. Each tour shows its languages, duration, next departure and real reviews.
Free walking tour booking
What travellers book on the site
Flexible, self-guided tours
No fixed time and no group. Travellers book and get a guide to the city’s best landmarks, each with a map link, its story and a paid activity nearby. Every activity is a partner link that earns the platform a commission.
Paid tours from Civitatis
APIconnection to Civitatis
Next to the free tours, travellers see paid tours from Civitatis, pulled in by API, so a city page offers more than one kind of trip.
Very reliable and successful work, would absolutely recommend for anyone looking for [website] development.
From Elementor to headless WordPress
Speed and migration
-
2022: the platform
From an Elementor website to a custom platform on WordPress, built from the client’s designs. One installation served both domains from the start.
-
Spring 2023: live
Travellers book free spots; guides run their tours and pay for services in their own portal.
-
2024: headless
Front end rebuilt in Next.js, WordPress kept for content. Over 5,000 pages moved with every address kept, so no rankings were lost.
-
Since then: fast
Every page has passed Core Web Vitals for over 18 months.
Building a tour booking website
Questions, answered from this project
How long does it take to build a tour booking website?
We started Strawberry Tours in 2022, and the platform went live in spring 2023. AI models have improved a lot since then, and with them in our workflow we would build the same project today in roughly half the time.
How many bookings can a platform like this handle?
Strawberry Tours has taken more than 160,000 bookings of its own tours on the new system since spring 2023, not counting Civitatis: 1,095 tours in 583 cities run by 589 tour vendors, from single guides to tour agencies.
Can guides manage their own tours and schedules?
Yes. Guides and tour agencies have their own portal, on its own domain, where they create departures, adjust their tours, talk to travellers and pay for the platform's services.
Can a tour booking website show tours from Civitatis?
Yes. Strawberry Tours shows its own free tours next to paid tours from Civitatis, connected by API.
Can a tour booking website connect to Bókun?
Yes. Strawberry Tours is connected to Bókun, the booking system many tour operators run on, by API.
What is a flexible, self-guided tour?
A tour with no guide and no fixed time. The traveller books it and gets a guide to the city's best landmarks, with a map link and the story for each stop, plus paid activities nearby. Each activity is a tracked partner link, so the platform earns a commission when a traveller books one.
Why move from Elementor to a custom platform?
Strawberry Tours needed a solution that could scale and still load fast: hundreds of cities, hundreds of tour vendors with their own portal, and thousands of pages that stay quick as the site grows. We built it as a custom WordPress platform, then moved the front end to Next.js. Every page has passed Core Web Vitals for over 18 months.
Can a large WordPress site move to Next.js without losing rankings?
Yes. In 2024 we moved Strawberry Tours, over 5,000 pages, to headless WordPress with Next.js and kept every address. Every page has passed Core Web Vitals for over 18 months since.
How does a free walking tour platform earn money?
In three ways on Strawberry Tours: tour vendors pay for the platform's services in their portal, they bid to show their departures first on a city page, and self-guided tours earn a commission on the paid activities travellers book through partner links.
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