DGtalguide is a quick and easy way to create comprehensive tours, including route maps, content, detailed schedules, and automatic booking of additional services such as restaurant reservations, lodging, museum tickets or car rentals.
Tour operators — package your experience and knowledge of the local area and your business partners’ services into a convenient digital product for the new generation of travelers.
+ 336 others joined this month
👋 Did you find value in this article?
A genuine comment can brighten someone's day and makes a big difference in our online community.
Travel Massive is about sharing knowledge and new ideas. Contribute your feedback or appreciation in the comments below.
If you like this content, then give this post an upvote.
A genuine comment can brighten someone's day and makes a difference. If you like this content, then contribute your feedback or upvote this post.
Comments
Hi, I’m Andrey, founder of DGtalguide — we automate tour operations end-to-end for modern travel companies and modern travelers.
Before launching DGtalguide, I founded Motoragazzi — one of Italy’s largest scooter rental and guided tour companies. That’s where I first faced the challenge: on any given day, clients wanted to take different tours, but we had only two guides — including me. To manage demand, we created fixed tour calendars, but that reduced flexibility and profit. Hiring more guides increased costs and lowered service quality.
That’s when the idea struck me: what if we replaced the guide with digital platform and mobile app? One that:
• sells tours online through the website and mobile app
• books partner services (rentals, wineries, restaurants, museums, hotels),
• navigates the client along the route and manages tour timing,
• delivers storytelling in any format (text, audio, photo, video, PDF),
• confirms service usage with partners and tracks transactions,
...so that the sale, organization, and guiding of the tour are fully automated.
In 2019, we launched the first version of the platform and app — and it worked. Costs dropped, sales rose, and we attracted younger travelers who value flexibility, affordability, digital tools, and independent experiences.
In 2022, with the arrival of my co-founder and CTO Alexei Stoliartchouk, we entered a new stage. We invested about $350,000 of personal funds, registered the company in the U.S., and rebuilt the entire platform from scratch. In 2023, first external tour operators joined. In 2024, we started scaling across the travel industry.
Today, DGtalguide is a powerful B2B2C platform used by local tour operators to sell and conduct thousands of tours.
It supports scooter, bike, walking, car tours and more — and offers white-label solutions.
What makes DGtalguide unique?
• Full automation of tour logistics, bookings, and storytelling.
• Instant online sales without human involvement.
• Real-time tour tracking and accountability across all parties.
• Scalable and customizable for any type of tour.
If this sparked any questions or ideas — I’d love to hear them. Let’s talk and see if DGtalguide can bring value to your work.
Explore a demo tour in 5 languages:
dgtalguide.com/tours/following-the-azure-river-bike-tour-start-at-peschiera-del-garda-276
Hi Andrey, thanks for sharing DGtalguide with the Travel Massive community.
The explainer video is really helpful — I like how the app keeps you on schedule!
What was the biggest challenge in building your platform and getting early adoption? And what are some new features that you're planning to implement this year?
Hi Ian,
Thanks for your interest and your questions.
We didn’t face any major challenges building the platform, since I’ve spent many years working in the event and tourism industry. We have an incredibly efficient team of engineers and designers, so everything I’d been carrying in my head for years quickly turned into algorithms, interfaces, and code.
However, getting early adopters on board was a real challenge...
Our platform doesn’t just automate certain processes within a tour operator’s business—it changes the business model itself. The travel industry is quite conservative, especially when it comes to radically new ways of doing things. Explaining what DGtalguide is feels like trying to sell microwaves in the late 1950s—people just can’t grasp the idea of heat without fire... :)
My job involves talking to tour operators every day and answering the same questions over and over again:
– What do you mean there’s no need for tour guides anymore?
– That’s right, you don’t need them. A mobile app can fully replace the guide.
– But who’s going to call and email the partners to book hotels, restaurant tables, or wine tastings?
– No one will call. The platform handles it all automatically.
– But we’ve always sold package tours…
– You don’t need packages anymore. Your client can build their own tour from the parts they want and pay for it online, instantly.
And so on...
Our experience with Motoragazzi—a tour operator in Italy that I founded—has been a huge help in dealing with new clients. Since 2019 (when the first version of DGtalguide was launched), Motoragazzi has been offering all its tours exclusively in an app-guided format and sells thousands of them every year. I just tell clients: “If this works for my business, it’ll work for yours too!”
Since 2024, other tour operators have started using DGtalguide and are now acting as our ambassadors. For example, Itinera Bike in Verona, BikeAndGo on the Venetian coast, and others. They help promote the very idea of app-guided tours by proving that it works and supports business growth.
I won’t sugarcoat it—marketing the product is a tough and expensive job. That’s why we’re actively looking for investors right now.
Our roadmap for new platform features is planned out for the next couple of years. We release new app versions at least once a month.
Currently, we’re working on integrating AI into the tour content creation process. The first feature, which will be launched very soon, is automatic translation of tour content into different languages. This way, a tour operator who creates a tour in English, for example, will be able to sell it to tourists from any country with language versions generated instantly.
One more very important thing…
Before creating DGtalguide, I spent months searching for a platform that could meet my needs. But I couldn’t find anything truly suitable for a tour operator. There are probably hundreds of platforms out there that present themselves as “self-guided tour platforms.” But in reality, almost all of them do the same thing — they offer travelers a route and some content.
A professional tour operator simply can’t use these platforms for their business, because the route and content are just a small part of what makes up a “tour.”
Over time, I realized what the real issue was. Most of these platforms were created by people with strong experience as travelers — but likely with no background as tour operators. They had no clear idea of what features a company needs when it actually organizes and sells tours.
Let me give you an example. Here’s a simple question I’d like to ask the members of Travel Massive:
What EXACTLY does a tour operator sell?
What is their CORE product or service? What are clients really paying for?
How would you describe it in a single word?
I’d be genuinely curious to hear your thoughts, colleagues.
This app is quite mind-blowing -- I'm sure it's a big part of the future of tourism. Plus, Andrey is a really bright mind who knows what he is doing. Good luck!
This is interesting. I am founder of TUBUDD - an app to book a local guide, buddy, interpreter, translators in many different languages. I am totally for the life of traveling with the locals as it is more interesting to get to know someone new and get shown the hidden places only locals know or just simply having a local friend and I believe in human touch, rather than self guided. However, this can also help my local buddy to show the travelers the route or directions and them going together. So it is quite interesting. Will try to use it and let you know. Keep going, Andrey! Love the insight!