The challenge

Homalco Tours offers world-class grizzly bear and whale-watching expeditions rooted in the traditional territory and culture of the Homalco First Nation. In 2018, however, their digital reach was stalled: search visibility sat at just 5%, and online conversion was idling at 1.3%. When international borders closed in 2020, their primary customer base vanished overnight, and new go-to-market plans needed to be built and managed carefully. Because Homlcoo tours revenue directly funds community language revitalization and local employment, building a self-sustaining booking engine was an economic necessity.

The approach

• Rebuilt the Booking Engine: Re-architected their Rezgo integration with WordPress from scratch, setting up automated abandoned-cart recovery, friction-free checkout flows, and post-booking email sequences.

• Opened International Markets: Conducted competitive research via European VPNs to uncover untapped demand across English-speaking European travellers. Built a multilingual landing page and GTM strategy that guided guests smoothly from their first search to checkout in their native language.

• Redesigned Website Strategy & User Flows: Overhauled the website navigation and homepage architecture to fix fundamental conversion bottlenecks. Built animal-specific educational landing pages (grizzlies, whales, marine life) targeting high-intent conversational searches. These pages established thought leadership and guided visitors naturally from early discovery to confirmed reservations using contextual calls to action.

• Behavioural Analytics & Experience Optimization: Used Crazy Egg and Microsoft Clarity for click mapping, scroll depth, heat mapping, and conversion overlays. Identified user hesitation and drop-off zones on core tour pages, continuously refining the layout and booking pathways.

• Eliminated Search Friction: Re-engineered on-page technical SEO to prevent keyword cannibalization across their expanding tour roster. Managed targeted Google Ads across Canada, the US, and Europe, continually cutting negative search waste.

• Built for Independence: Documented every process as standard operating procedures (SOPs) and trained the in-house team, resulting in a smooth handoff with zero drop in performance.

The Impact

• 48x ROAS on Google Ads: Generated over $1.15M in attributed revenue on $24K in ad spend.

• Cut international cost per conversion by 85.8% and Canadian cost per conversion by 82.2% over 5 years.

• Search visibility climbed from 5% to 67%, with conversion rates hitting 6.45% (more than double the industry average).

• Online bookings surged 173.8%, with digital self-serve sales accounting for 67.2% of total business revenue.