Gondola was founded 2021 by Vitaliy Levit a travel industry expert and marketing executive and Nathan Robinson, a career product manager and serial entrepreneur. Our purpose is to empower tour and activity owners to grow their online direct bookings through their most important digital asset, their website.

Our story started when Vitaliy decided to graciously help a Spanish-struggling tourist (Nathan) communicate with a local in Mexico. From there, a friendship was formed. This grew into sharing our dreams, aspirations, and goals. After becoming further acquainted, we began to realize that there wasn't just an overlap in aspirations and a shared value for travel and supporting the individual, but that there was an alignment of skills and experiences to move towards those aspirations.

That was the beginning of Gondola, before it even was named Gondola. From there, we dug deeply into the needs of tour operators, building relationships with many of them along the way. Knowing some of their greatest challenges, it was easy to ideate a world where tour operators had all of the tools and help they needed, to make their businesses as successful as possible. However, Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will the Gondola platform. So we set out to discover how we could solve some of these problems in a small way, to validate both the necessity of these problems being solved, as well as validate the business model itself.

We started with just one customer, a tour operator in Key West, Florida. After some discovery meetings to understand his business and his needs, we set out to make him a world class website. We wanted to both use this as an opportunity to learn some of the common needs and requirements that tour operators have, as well as test what we thought we know about what composes a highly performing website. Before long, we launched his new website, and much to both of our excitement, it was a massive success! The business has seen 3X revenue growth, and our attention to detail and hypothesis for how to make a highly performing tour operator website was validated in the traffic received as well as the SEO rankings. The first milestone for Gondola was achieved. With a validated hypothesis, and community members lined up for their websites to be created or redone, we were off to the races.

This is but the beginning of the Gondola journey, with much more to learn as we continue to scale to more partners, solve more of their problems, and ultimately grow their businesses. Whether you're a tour operator, another partner in the travel space, a talented individual considering joining our team, we hope you'll join and partner with us on this amazing journey.