Otherwise Solutions built Matei Travel end to end: the design and the website, a booking platform with online card payments, tickets with QR check-in, an internal partner and referral program with promo codes, and an SEO and AI-search content engine. Two months after the growth phase started, Google clicks were up 196% — and the website began bringing paid orders from organic search.
Who is Matei Travel
Matei Travel is a tour company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. It runs day tours across Utah — Antelope Island, the Bonneville Salt Flats, Salt Lake City walking tours — plus corporate retreats and gift cards. Tours depart on fixed dates in groups, so the schedule, the payment, and the ticket have to agree with each other at all times.
What we built, in four phases
The project ran in four phases, each adding a layer to the same system: website design, an online booking platform with card payments, an internal partner portal with automation, and an SEO and AI search content engine. The booking system feeds the partner program, and the content engine sells the tours the booking system delivers.
Phase 1: design and the website
We designed and built the website around how travelers actually choose a tour: destination pages with strong photography, clear tour cards, Tripadvisor proof, and an upcoming-trips calendar visible right from the hero — so a visitor can pick a date and book in a few clicks.
Phase 2: the booking platform
Live schedules and card checkout
The website shows real upcoming departures — date, time, tour — and the calendar is the single source of truth: what it shows is what can be booked. A traveler picks a departure and pays by card in the same flow, at any hour, in any time zone. No invoice emails, no "we will confirm later".
Tickets and check-in by phone
Every paid booking automatically creates a ticket with a unique QR code. On tour day the guide scans it from a phone — check-in in seconds, no printed lists, no doubt about who paid.
Phase 3: the partner and referral system
Matei Travel's best leads often come through other people's front desks — hotel concierges, hosts, local guides. We built an internal partner portal that turns those recommendations into a tracked sales channel:
- Partners register themselves and get a dashboard: guest registration, tour calendar, booking history, profile.
- Each promo code carries two numbers — the guest's discount and the partner's commission (say, 10% off and 20% to the partner), so stronger partners can get better terms without manual renegotiation.
- Earnings, successful bookings, and pending referrals update in real time — commissions are numbers a partner can check, not a trust exercise.
- The portal pulls tour schedules straight from the main website, so partners always sell departures that exist.
Phase 4: SEO and AI search — turning the site into a sales channel
A brand-new travel website in the English-speaking market starts with no search presence at all. We filled the site with commercial pages, optimized it for Google and for AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews), and connected an automatic blog powered by Blogent — our own product. Every article answers a real customer question, links to the matching tour, and carries a hidden promo code that nudges the reader from reading to booking.
The growth was not only quantitative: queries with impressions grew by 212%, and the number of queries in Google's top 3 grew by 300%. The site also started earning visits from AI search — analytics shows travelers arriving from ChatGPT and Gemini and landing directly on tour pages.
Marketing is wired into the content itself. Blog readers find a promo code inside the article — styled as a small discovery, not a banner — and that insertion generated the first paid order directly from a blog post.
"Given the competition in the English-speaking market, I never imagined the website could convert so well thanks to the blog. This tiny investment paid for itself with the very first order. We built the website to showcase our services — and it turned into a sales tool."
Matei Travel, on the growth phase
What the system does now
- Bookings are paid, ticketed, and confirmed around the clock without the team touching them.
- Check-in is a QR scan from the guide's phone instead of a passenger list.
- Hotels, hosts, and guides sell tours under their own promo codes and watch commissions in real time.
- The website ranks for the company's services in Google and gets cited by AI assistants — and organic search delivers paid orders every month.
