Vibe Adventures began as a small-group operator in Mexico. Eight years later, its shift into travel technology reflects a larger industry problem: multi-day trips are still far harder to assemble than flights or hotels.
By Alex Veka, Founder & CEO of Vibe Adventures
Travel planning can look simple from the customer side, but multi-day trips involve a chain of interconnected decisions. Photo: Rawpixel, CC0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The problem appeared before the product
I did not start Vibe Adventures because I wanted to build software. I started it because I wanted people to travel differently.
By the time we launched in Mexico in late 2018, I had studied tourism, traveled through more than 50 countries and spent years thinking about what made some trips memorable while others felt interchangeable. The original idea was deliberately small: small groups, local guides, less-traveled places, and experiences that gave visitors more contact with the communities they were visiting.
We had no outside investment when we started. We grew through operating tours, answering customer questions, solving logistics problems and learning what travelers actually worried about once a trip moved from an idea to a booking. Before the pandemic arrived in early 2020, we had served around 1,800 travelers.
That operating experience eventually became more important than the original business model.
A traveler sees an itinerary. An operator sees the vehicle that must arrive on time, the guide who needs the correct language, the attraction with a timed ticket, the hotel that may have changed a rooming list, the pickup address, the weather, the traffic, the supplier payment and the customer who may be landing from another country only a few hours before departure.
Those details are where travel products either work or fail.
Operations teach you where friction lives
Running local tours made one thing obvious very quickly: travel planning becomes difficult not because any one component is especially complicated, but because the components depend on one another.
A guided trip might start at 8 a.m., but that immediately creates another set of questions. Which flight gets the traveler there in time? Is arriving the night before necessary? Does the airport transfer still work if the flight changes? If one departure date is cheaper than another, is it still cheaper after airfare is added? If a traveler extends the trip by one night, does that create a better flight combination?
None of those questions are unusual. They are normal parts of buying a multi-day journey, yet historically the traveler has been expected to solve most of them across separate websites.
Vibe Adventures began by operating small-group experiences in Mexico, where execution depends on guides, transport, timing and local coordination. Visitors at Teotihuacan. Photo: Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The pandemic forced us to rethink what we were building
The pandemic stopped international travel almost overnight and forced Vibe Adventures, like thousands of tourism businesses, to adapt quickly. We shifted into virtual experiences, including tours distributed through platforms such as Amazon Explore, because it was one of the few ways to keep guides working and maintain some revenue while borders were closed.
When in-person travel returned, we did not simply rebuild the 2019 version of the company.
We expanded distribution, worked with more local operators and gradually moved from being only a tour operator toward being an online travel seller. By 2024, the business had grown to more than 300 tours across Mexico and Central America, combining experiences operated by our own team with products from selected local partners.
That transition exposed a second problem.
The more inventory we added, the more obvious it became that distribution itself was fragmented. Different operators used different systems. Prices and availability were stored in different places. Some products could be booked instantly; others still depended on email or manual confirmation. A traveler could find a tour online, but completing the rest of the journey often required starting over somewhere else.
The wider industry is dealing with the same issue. Arival’s 2026 research on multi-day tours found that third-party resellers account for 29% of bookings in the sector, compared with 20% through operators’ own websites and 19% through online travel agencies. The numbers show a category spread across multiple sales channels rather than concentrated in one dominant booking model.
That fragmentation is not necessarily bad. Multi-day travel is diverse by nature. But it makes connectivity increasingly important.
Why a multi-day trip is not just another product
Flights and hotels became highly standardized online because the essential data can be expressed relatively cleanly: origin, destination, dates, room type, fare class, availability and price.
Multi-day tours are different.
A single departure can include accommodation, ground transport, guides, activities, meals, park permits, meeting points and local suppliers. It may have a fixed start date but several possible room configurations. Some departures require travelers to arrive a day early. Others finish too late for a same-day international flight. A price that looks attractive at tour level may become less attractive once the flight needed to reach it is included.
That is why simply displaying airfare next to a tour is not the same as building a complete bookable journey.
The system has to understand whether the pieces actually fit.
Air schedules are one of the hardest pieces to connect with fixed multi-day tour departures because timing, arrival buffers and total trip cost all matter. Departures board at Bristol International Airport. Photo: Adrian Pingstone, public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Building around the whole journey
In 2025, we began building a platform around that problem rather than around the original tour marketplace.
The idea was not to create another place where a traveler could discover a tour and then leave to organize everything else independently. It was to connect organized multi-day inventory with the transport needed to reach it, so travelers could compare complete trip options rather than isolated prices.
That work became the current Vibe Adventures platform. Today, travelers can browse more than 6,000 guided adventures across 125+ countries and see compatible flight options alongside tour departures. Tour inventory is connected through TourRadar’s Distribution API, while flight connectivity is provided through Duffel.
The customer-facing experience is intentionally simpler than the infrastructure behind it: choose an origin, destination and travel window, then compare combinations that already account for the main pieces of the journey.
For us, the important change is not that the company now has more technology. It is that the technology is being designed around the operational problems we encountered before we were a technology company.
Operator experience still matters in software
Travel software can make a process faster without necessarily making it better.
If the system does not understand that a traveler should arrive before a tour starts, that a transfer needs a realistic buffer, or that a lower tour price can be offset by a much more expensive flight, automation simply moves the same problem onto a screen.
The operating years taught us to think about the booking as a sequence of dependencies rather than a collection of products.
They also taught us that quality matters differently in guided travel. A hotel room can often be compared by location, category and amenities. A guided experience depends on less standardized factors: the guide, pacing, group size, local knowledge, coordination and the ability to handle exceptions when the plan changes.
That human layer should not disappear as travel becomes more automated.
My view is that the best travel technology absorbs complexity without pretending the complexity does not exist.
As I said when we launched the platform, “The opportunity is to manage that complexity through technology so the traveler doesn’t have to.”
Recognition came after the operating years
In June 2026, Vibe Adventures was named the Emerging Markets Scaleup winner in the Global Startup Pitch produced by Phocuswright, Web in Travel and PhocusWire.
For a young technology company, an award can look like a beginning. In our case, it felt more like recognition of a much longer progression: operating local tours, surviving a shutdown of global travel, experimenting with virtual experiences, building a regional marketplace, learning distribution and finally turning those operating lessons into software.
The pitch itself was useful because the judges were not evaluating only a travel idea. They were looking at whether a real industry problem existed, whether the technology could scale and whether the business had learned enough from the market to have a credible approach.
That distinction matters to us.
We did not begin with a technical thesis and then search for a travel problem. We spent years inside the travel problem before deciding which parts should be solved with technology.
What this story says about travel tech
The shift happening at Vibe Adventures is part of a broader change in organized travel.
Multi-day tours have traditionally sat in an awkward middle ground. They are more complex than a hotel booking but more standardized than a fully bespoke travel-advisor itinerary. They combine the operational demands of local tourism with the distribution expectations of global e-commerce.
That middle ground is now attracting more investment, API connectivity and digital distribution.
The opportunity is not to remove guides, operators or travel advisors from the process. It is to give them better infrastructure and to remove repetitive planning work from the traveler.
For companies building in this category, the temptation is to start with the interface because that is what customers see. Our experience suggests the opposite approach can be more useful: start with the operational exceptions, dependencies and failures that happen behind the screen, then design the interface around solving them.
Vibe Adventures has changed considerably since the first tours we ran in Mexico in 2018. The original mission, however, has changed less than the business model.
We still want travelers to spend more of their trip experiencing a place and less time dealing with logistics.
The difference is that we are now trying to solve that problem at a much larger scale.