4 de May de 2025 System integration

From E-mails to Full Control: How We Automated Civitatis and Guruwalk Bookings Without an API

The Daily Pain of Modern Tour Operators

If you manage tourism activities, you know what it’s like to sell on Civitatis, Guruwalk, or any other marketplace that doesn’t offer an API:

Dozens of daily emails with bookings and cancellations.
Capacities that change by the minute, leading to overbooking or empty seats.
Spreadsheets to reconcile commissions, guide and reseller payments.
Repetitive tasks, risk of error, and time wasted that you could invest in scaling your business.

This article explains how we solved that problem for an agency operating in 14 cities by building a custom platform that not only centralizes their operations but turns emails into automated actions. If you’re a product manager, operations director, or founder of a tourism company, this is for you.

The Challenge We Accepted

Our client needed a solution that:

Centralized inventory, bookings, payments, commissions, reviews, and affiliate systems.
Served multiple subsidiaries under different brands (a multitenant model with skins).
Eliminated the manual burden of integrating bookings that arrive by email from external agents.

The Platform: A 360° View

Here are some of the implemented modules:

Multitenant with customized skins: one codebase, multiple brands, colors, and business rules.
Catalog and availability: dynamic pricing, quotas, language/hour-based variations.
Booking engine: omnichannel B2B and B2C flow, secure payments, automatic vouchers.
Planning: guide assignment and customer distribution across tours.
Commissions and settlements: real-time calculations for affiliates, guides, and resellers.
Self-invoicing: automated billing system with automatic payments and collections for guides, providers, etc.
Reviews and reputation: verified review system connected to CRM.

Each company, provider, affiliate, and guide logs in with their own role; the tenant layer applies the corporate branding, adjusting colors, logos, domains, and business rules without duplicating code.

Our Secret Weapon: Reading Emails Like APIs

1. The Problem

Marketplaces like Civitatis or Guruwalk don’t offer technical integration. They only send emails like this:

“Booking confirmed: Free Tour Madrid – May 3, 10:00 AM, 4 people, Spanish.”

No webhooks, no endpoints. The result: desynchronized inventory, last-minute guide assignments, miscalculated commissions, and lack of traceability.

2. Our End-to-End Solution

Secure email connector

OAuth/IMAP; no plain credential storage.
Sender and subject filters with < 30s latency.

Lightweight AI engine

Multilingual transformers trained on 5,000+ email templates.
Extracts: date, time, number of people, language, city.
Cancellation detection through semantic classification.

Smart tour matching

Similarity algorithm between subject and internal catalog (fuzzy + hidden IDs).
Tolerant of different commercial names: “Free Tour Centro” ↔ “Walking Tour Old Town.”

Event orchestration

Inserts the booking, updates capacity, recalculates commissions, and notifies the guide — all within seconds.
If a cancellation is detected, it reverses the assignment, adjusts the payout, and frees up the spot.

3. Real Impact

Manual back-office tasks went from 8 h/week to 1.5 h/week.
Overbooking dropped from 3% to 0.2% of bookings.
New tour time-to-market reduced from 5 days to 1 day.
Project ROI achieved in under 6 months.

Lessons Learned and Next Steps

Email remains the universal API. With well-tuned AI and rules, any channel can be automated.

Same principles, different verticals. We’re already piloting this logic for attractions, transfers, and rentals.

Roadmap 2025:

Automatic post-tour review capture.
Demand prediction for dynamic pricing.
Generative AI to suggest upselling to guides and resellers.

Does This Problem Sound Familiar?

If you’re a director of operations, product manager, or founder using sales channels that “just” send emails, we can help you turn them into a fully synchronized, error-free flow.

Ready to go from copy-paste to scalable growth? Contact us and turn your inbox into an opportunity engine.