An ultra-modern approach to building a travel business. A company with the potential to reach a billion — made for people, running without people.
Tour Leader Club — guided diving journeys worldwide, from Antarctica to Socotra. Over seven months the company gained a catalogue that fills itself, a journal that publishes itself, advertising measured by funnel steps, payment on the site, a buyer profile, trips run by checkpoints, its first AI executor handling correspondence with partners, and full double-entry accounting of its own. One circuit: from an ad impression to a completed journey.
Figures as of 1 October 2026
The company does not sell a handful of destinations, it sells an assembled picture of world diving. Somebody who arrives looking for Egypt also sees the Galápagos, Socotra and Cocos — and that is the catalogue's work, not a manager's.
guided programmes with schedules, a day-by-day itinerary, a route map, accommodation, flights and a price breakdown. Among the new ones — Japan and Indonesia in 2027
cabins, equipment, departure schedules, prices, photographs
from the Maldives and Mexico to Papua and Belize. Resorts under $100 a night were taken out of the catalogue: the storefront keeps to the level of its buyer
the actual dive itineraries inside each destination
countries and regions with pages of their own
the company's own Helium Dive line
trip reports, articles, stories, participant reviews
the reference the destination pages are built from
descriptions of individual dive points
All of it renders as 1,646 pages in two languages — 831 Russian and 815 English. The English side is not a stub: the boat catalogue and the journal are translated in full, and the company does not sell to Russia alone. 28 journeys have a route map of their own — the buyer sees the trip before reading the programme.
The company started with a storefront on a page builder and bookkeeping that lived outside the system. It is now one circuit where every step a buyer takes and every rouble leaves a record.
The storefront moved onto our own footing and the catalogues were filled: boats, resorts, routes, destinations. Page structure laid out, search engines given everything they need — titles, descriptions, structured data, an automatic sitemap.
Campaigns in Yandex Direct, the keyword core, journal articles written against queries of known frequency, automatic publishing to Telegram and Dzen.
Enquiries in the database, participants, the offer, payment on the site, the manager panel, the task flow, double-entry accounting, obligations and management reports.
The buyer profile, correspondence in one window, trips run by checkpoints, trip costing, work with partners and the first AI executor handling correspondence with them.
Three jobs that in a company this size usually occupy a person of their own happen here without one.
All 129 boat cards and all 81 resort cards — specifications, cabins, equipment, departure schedules, prices, photographs — were gathered automatically from the owners' and the resorts' own sites. A separate page shows the state of the queue: what is filled, what is still waiting. A catalogue this size cannot be typed by hand: it would go stale before it was finished.
The client sends whatever they have: text in no particular order, photographs in a folder, prices in an email. The system brings it to one shape — day-by-day itinerary, accommodation, flights, price breakdown, equipment, regional information. The photographs arrange themselves into spreads. A new journey goes on sale in hours rather than after a week of emails with a designer.
A post is taken from the queue and published to the Telegram channel on its own — an album with a caption in a single message, inside a daytime window. The same material goes to Dzen in full. The queue is scheduled ahead: the channel stays alive even when everyone is busy.
The storefront is built so that a buyer enjoys being on it and never thinks to go looking for somewhere more solid. The look resembles no other site in the niche — it is remembered from the first touch.
The storefront is recognised at a glance. Somebody who saw the advertising once comes back on their own the second time: the company pays for the first touch and gets every one after it.
The page arrives before the buyer has time to doubt. Waiting is the first thing that breeds mistrust of an unfamiliar company; here the conversation starts with the journey rather than with patience.
A person hands €2,000 and upwards to people they have never met, and decides with their eyes before their reason. A storefront at this level leaves them not the slightest doubt about who they are paying.
Pictures in trip reports fall into spreads. The buyer leafs through somebody else's journey and tries it on — the wish to go arrives before the price does.
People live in their phones, and that is where the decision to buy is made. How good the storefront looks on a small screen is the sale itself: the calendar, the day-by-day itinerary and the galleries sit under a thumb, and between «I want this» and a submitted enquiry there is not one awkward step.
The buyer reads in their own language and sees the price in their own currency without leaving the page. An unfamiliar currency is a ready-made excuse to postpone the decision; here there is no such excuse.
The thirteen sections of a journey page are identical across all forty-eight. A buyer who has looked at two reads the third already familiar with it — and reaches a decision faster.
Growity is an advertising management system that follows an ad click through to an event on the site and allocates budget by what actually reached an enquiry. Connected and running.
The bottom of the funnel is a completed journey, not a submitted enquiry. A refund is subtracted from the stage where the purchase was made.
The funnel is counted inside Russia too, where foreign trackers usually go silent — and counted without holding the page up. Most sites have either a hole in their statistics at this point or seconds lost to loading.
The money stages come from the accounting system rather than from the browser: the funnel totals reconcile with the account turnovers to the cent. The advertising visit is carried through to the booking, and revenue is tied back to that same click. Advertising knows not only the cost of an enquiry but the cost of a buyer for every campaign — and it is the buyer who pays the company, not the enquiry.
1 March — 30 September 2026, Tour Leader Club campaigns, figures from the ad account. Six months ago the budget was spent indiscriminately — the platform decided for itself who to show the ads to. Now we control the spend, and every step a visitor takes after the click is counted. The funnel reaches the money: advertising reports revenue, not only enquiries.
Topics were chosen from Search Console data and Wordstat frequency, not by taste. Each article closes a specific cluster of queries and leads into the catalogue — traffic that does not have to be paid for every month.
Not one general picture per article: the stonefish, the fire coral, the cone snail each get their own frame. Plus a cover.
Wherever the buyer sends a link — to a friend, a family chat, a social feed — it unfolds handsomely: photograph, name and price. Everyone who shares brings the next person in for free.
Yandex and Google show the journeys richly — with a price and a photograph rather than a line of text. On one screen of results the company takes more space and reads as more solid than whoever is next to it.
Site → Telegram as a teaser with a link → Dzen in full. The last two happen with nobody involved.
A second wave of topics is ready: the blue whale, the immortal jellyfish, octopus intelligence, PADI Open Water.
There is no phone number, no email, no messenger and no manager card anywhere on the site. This is a decision, not an oversight: contact made around the form is an enquiry nobody counted and nobody followed up.
Every enquiry lands in the register and in the funnel. It is visible which page and which ad the person came from.
One required field — how to reach you — plus consent to data processing. Name, dates, city and party size are optional.
A way to make contact around the form cannot appear on the site by accident. Everything the advertising was paid for reaches the funnel intact: there are no lost enquiries nobody ever heard about.
A gentle staircase of commitments: nobody jumps from «interesting» to wiring three hundred thousand roubles. The first payment is 4,900 ₽ for a personal itinerary plan.
A form on the journey page or the general one. Lands in the register.
Surname and given name in Latin, date of birth, sex, citizenship — what a ticket and a hotel actually need.
Legal terms and consent to personal data processing.
Card payment on the site. Then the instalment schedule.
Not «name and phone» but the exact set an airline and a hotel will accept a booking on. A list that could not later be turned into a booking does not get through to payment — nothing has to be redone behind the buyer.
Somebody was interrupted mid-booking — they come back and find everything they had entered. No started booking falls apart because the phone rang at the wrong moment.
One set for the trip, one for the booking, one for an individual participant. A discount for one person does not break the schedule for everyone else.
Payments used to be collected by hand. Now every traveller has a detailed payment plan for each trip in their profile: a clear instalment schedule, the discount if there is one, and every change to the schedule. The question «how much and when» never reaches a manager.
Card payments on the site, a receipt under 54-FZ, FFD 1.2, the simplified «income minus expenses» regime, the order number on the receipt. The payment was verified end to end — from the button through to the accounting entry.
If the card fails, an invoice is issued rather than a refusal shown. The buyer is not lost to a technical error.
A booking cannot be confirmed until the price, the departure date, the email and who is selling the trip are filled in. The «Booking confirmed» letter goes out with the exact amount and an instalment schedule in even rouble sums.
A foreign-currency instalment is invoiced in roubles at the site rate. If the rate rises by more than 1%, a new invoice goes out on its own; if it falls, the buyer pays at the rate of the day the invoice was issued. The company does not lose on the rate, and the buyer does not have to chase it.
A cancelled booking receives one letter with a smaller first instalment for 24 hours. Paying by the link returns the booking to work on its own. Someone who left an enquiry and never reached payment receives one letter with a «Continue» button.
The buyer sends a passport scan and sees it treated the way a bank would treat it: access closed, every look at the file accounted for, the data deleted after the trip. This is the step where deals most often fall apart.
The subscription form is protected against bots: Latin characters only in the address, honeypot fields, disposable domains filtered out, a per-IP limit and email confirmation.
A person handing over €2,000 and upwards for a journey expects to be treated the way a private bank treats them: no passwords, no repeated questions, in the messenger they already use. All correspondence sits in one window for the manager, and not a single message is lost.
Sign-in by a code sent to email or with a button in Telegram. The profile holds the trips, the payment plan with payment, the programme, flights and participants. The buyer chooses where to be written to and connects Telegram with one button.
A manager's reply, a payment letter and a sign-in code go where the person replies from. The conversation does not hop from email to messenger and back — the buyer never has to look for where they were written to.
Under every message — when it went out, when it was opened and when the link was followed. The manager does not guess whether the invoice arrived: they can see the buyer opened it at 21:40.
If the mail server refuses or the address has a typo, the manager immediately gets a task on that booking and the work chat gets a message. The buyer is not left without an invoice because a letter quietly went missing.
Every letter about a trip carries the journey card — photo, dates, price. A manager's personal reply looks like a letter from a person, not a mailing. Letters are in the buyer's language: an English-speaking buyer gets English.
A review is left by someone who can be answered, and the moderator answers them both publicly and personally. Questions and answers on the pages come only from real buyers, with a name and a date.
One person — one card: a shared email or phone merges cards on its own. The whole history — enquiries, bookings, letters, calls — opens on one page, and a new manager picks up the conversation mid-sentence.
Tasks are not entered by anyone — they appear on their own out of what is happening to bookings and to money, and they disappear on their own once done. Forgetting is impossible in principle: a task leaves the queue only together with the reason it arose.
Comes out of the booking's payment schedule — separately for each participant and each instalment.
Out of an obligation to a boat owner or a resort: to whom, how much, by what date.
Stands until a participant's passport has been verified, and clears itself once it has.
A booking draft with no movement raises itself rather than sinking down the list.
Tasks are tied to the departure date and appear in advance, not once it is too late.
One queue for the whole firm: enquiries, bookings, trips, partners, money. The manager holds nothing in their head or in a chat thread. Letters go out to buyers and partners and are written into the booking thread, and replies arrive in the same place — the history of a relationship is not scattered across personal mailboxes.
The booking director's logic has been moved into the system: group and individual trips, deadlines, visas, flights, accommodation. A mistake in the boat list costs a cabin, a forgotten visa costs the trip; here such things are not kept in anyone's head.
Three months, one month and two weeks before departure — each trip has its own set of tasks: tickets, lists for the supplier, documents for travellers. Deadlines are set on the trip, not on every task.
The Rooming List for the hotel and the boat and the Flight Info for the transfer are built from participant data: room or cabin, passport, arrival and departure flights. An entered flight is a bought ticket.
The «Visa» task appears only for those who need one by citizenship, with a hint in the traveller's profile. Everyone else is left alone.
Fourteen days before departure the traveller receives the programme of their own trip as a file: days with photos, meeting and transfer, their booking price line by line, paid and outstanding. No meeting entered — a task for the manager, not an empty letter.
Single room, extra nights, a private transfer, a safari: price → traveller's consent → booking with the supplier → confirmation. Consent changes the booking price at once, and a confirmed extra goes into the programme.
The price of a place is calculated from costs: the boat, accommodation, acquiring, tax, a currency buffer, commission, discounts for part of the group. A table by group size shows where the trip moves into profit. The price is put on the site with one button.
A group trip does not breed extra tasks: there is one booking with the supplier for the whole group, and a traveller's payment does not disturb the supplier. An individual trip is set up in the panel without a page on the site and gets the same circuit — programme, lists, checkpoints.
Boat owners and resorts reply in English, over weeks and to different mailboxes. Now all of that correspondence sits in one database, and requests for places and prices are run by an agent — a colleague who never forgets who it has written to and which hold expires tomorrow.
Requests places and prices, turns partners' replies into offers with a price, a hold and a deadline, drafts letters that negotiate. Every letter from the agent is approved by a manager; the manager's remarks become rules, and the next letter already follows them.
The shared mailbox and the managers' mailboxes are gathered into an archive of correspondence going back years. For each partner — the whole history, the people, who answers fastest, what terms they gave in past seasons. A departing employee does not take the partner relationships with them.
Partners' mailings to agents — last minute, «30% off», freed-up cabins — have been collected from the archive: 1,161 mailings from 40 partners. The agent extracts the discounts and matches them against our trips — a fresh discount reaches the buyer, and negotiation rests on who conceded what, when and by how much.
Boat, accommodation, transfers, flights, excursions — a request with quotes and holds. Its tasks stand in the same queue as work with buyers.
A badge is ready for boat owners and resorts, linking to their page with us, with partnership levels. Every such link from an operator's site lifts us in search, and the system itself tracks where the badge is placed and whether the links are alive.
Company money is seen only by those who should see it: a sales manager does not see purchase prices or profit, a booking manager sees the profit of their trips, reports and the cash box are for the accountant and the owner alone. The check is on the server, not a hidden button.
Money is posted against a chart of accounts by double entry. Companies this size usually keep their books in spreadsheets and learn the truth once a quarter from an accountant — here the entry is created at the moment of payment.
Every payment creates an entry; manual entries and reversals are available in the panel. Nothing is posted twice and nothing goes missing.
The simplified «income minus expenses» regime with deferred accrual — the tax is visible in advance, not in April.
Accrual and payment are posted, not worked out separately on paper.
Upcoming payments and debts: to whom, how much, by what date. Partner payments are accepted in instalments and «paid» is worked out on its own.
Currency purchases are posted separately and the deal rate is recorded on the payment — profit is not eaten by a difference nobody noticed.
Issued to the tour leader, spent, returned. Cash on a trip stops being a black hole. An expense can be recorded with a photo of the receipt in the work channel.
Each trip records whether the company sells it itself or as a tour operator's agent. The receipt and any refund follow that scheme — the tax office sees exactly what happened.
The dashboard shows the nearest obligations and dated events, one currency at a time.
A line of receipts and payments in both directions from today — a cash gap is visible before it happens.
What each line of business brings in, rather than one common pot.
What came in from buyers for that operator's trips, cash included, and what was sent through them — a summary with the discrepancy for each trip.
With a chartered boat it is visible from which traveller onward the trip moves into profit. «Discount or no discount» stops being an argument.
Storefront prices are converted at the central bank rate every night, with our own margin on the rouble and on the cross rate. The company does not lose on a rate swing and does not scare the buyer with a price taken from thin air.
No page builder on a subscription, no off-the-shelf system charging per seat. The storefront, the funnel, the panel and the accounting are the company's own, and they grow with the business instead of running into somebody else's price tier.
The catalogue, enquiries, bookings, documents and books live in our own database. Changing contractor or platform does not begin with «and how do we get the data out».
The tooling behind the storefront and the advertising is tied to nothing about this business. A second project in the same niche starts from something already built.
The partner-side agent is already at work. The next one will take correspondence with buyers — replies to enquiries, reminders, choosing a journey — on the same pattern: a draft, the manager's approval, remarks as rules. Letters that have gone out a hundred times in a row without edits move to automatic.
The bank statement is pulled in on its own and reconciled with the books; the free balance that will not be needed before the next partner payments goes on an overnight deposit and returns by morning.
Choosing a journey by parameters; the routes section returns.
A notification about the next payment — the reason the instalment schedule was built.
The company is not looking to be rescued: the system is built, it sells, and it counts its own money. But a growing business is always open to intelligent capital, for the plain reason that it grows faster and harder with it. Money goes where money already is, and at this stage everything put in works on a machine that already runs rather than on a promise to build one.
Commercial interest is a given on both sides. But the strongest results come from someone who matches the subject: who understands diving, travel, and the people who buy them.
Somebody inside the subject brings connections, a name and an instinct for destinations along with the money. That accelerates growth more than the sum itself does.
The company offers a finished circuit: the storefront, the task flow, the books, and advertising that measures itself in money. Nothing has to be taken on trust — it is all visible in figures from the first day.
Terms are discussed on the substance — from the tasks of growth, not from need.
Put «Investment» in the subject line and the letter reaches the owner directly rather than the general enquiry queue. Say what volumes interest you and on what terms you would consider placing them. What follows is a conversation: we look at whether the tasks, the timing and the subject line up. Where they do, the company puts together a proposal. Where they do not, that is a normal outcome too, and we say so at once.