Case study
Julio's Happy Tour
Twenty years of reputation that only existed inside TripAdvisor, finally with an address of its own.
- Year
- 2026
- Sector
- Inbound tourism
- Location
- El Jobo, La Cruz · Guanacaste, Costa Rica
- My role
- Art direction · Design · Development
- Custom design
- Bilingual ES/EN
- Plan builder
01The problem
A family business in Guanacaste with over twenty years of guiding and 191 verified TripAdvisor reviews, and no site of its own. All that accumulated trust lived inside a platform that decides what gets seen, in what order and next to which competitor. Outside it, a traveller who heard about Julio had nowhere to check.
02The strategy
The asset was never the tour catalogue: it was Julio. The site is ordered so the person arrives before the product — the family, the area, the twenty years — and so every tour ends in the same place: a WhatsApp conversation with him, not with a call centre.
03Art direction
Real photography of the place, full-screen, and a palette taken from the coast at sunset: amber over deep blue. No stock imagery, no generic agency iconography. The four sections are numbered like chapters in a travel notebook, and the home page greets you according to the time of day in Guanacaste.
04Design
The eight tours are not a list: they are eight vertical photographic panels that open as you move across them, so all eight fit on one screen without scrolling. Each carries its duration, who it is for and what is included before anyone has to ask. Above them, a comparison table for people who would rather decide with the figures in front of them.
05Development
Hand-written code, no builder. The piece doing the work is the plan builder: tours are added from their own cards and the final form turns them into a single pre-written WhatsApp message, with the tour, the dates and the name already in it. The traveller doesn't start from a blank message and Julio doesn't have to ask three times.
06The result
An address of their own, in Spanish and English, that answers on its own what a traveller needs to know before writing: who will guide them, what there is to do, where it leaves from and how long it takes. The TripAdvisor reviews are still there, but now quoted inside the business's own house rather than being the whole house.
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