Escorpion Travels: giving a Bolivian ecotourism agency the digital tools of an international player
Rurrenabaque, Bolivia — a family business, an international ambition
When a local ecotourism agency wants to sell its jungle and Pampas excursions to an international audience, a simple showcase website is no longer enough. It needs a multilingual site, a reliable booking system, and a payment solution that actually works from Bolivia. That was the challenge we took on with Escorpion Travels, an agency based in Rurrenabaque, gateway to the Bolivian Amazon.
The context: a family business rooted in the Amazon, an international ambition
Escorpion Travels is first and foremost a family business, run by locals from Rurrenabaque who know the Bolivian Amazon from the inside — the river, the jungle, the Pampas, the wildlife — far better than any outside intermediary could. That authenticity is exactly what makes their offering strong: these aren’t guides reciting a script, they’re local people who actually live there.
But that strength on the ground had a flip side: like many local family-run businesses in Bolivia, the team was excellent at hospitality and excursions, without necessarily having the tools or digital expertise to position themselves for an international market. Their online presence relied on limited tools, poorly suited to a traveler arriving from Europe, North America, or elsewhere in Latin America — someone who wants to compare options, feel reassured, and book before ever setting foot in Bolivia.
The challenge, then, wasn’t just cosmetic: it was about giving a family team, expert on the ground but not in digital, real help to scale internationally. Turning a visitor into a confirmed booking meant solving three concrete problems:
- Speaking the client’s language, in every sense of the word
- Letting them book easily, across a wide range of tours, without dozens of back-and-forth emails
- Letting them pay, which is far from trivial for a business registered in Bolivia
The technical and business challenges
1. A site built for three audiences at once
Tourists booking a Bolivian Amazon excursion don’t all speak the same language. The site needed to be natively multilingual — Spanish, English, and French — not a machine translation slapped onto a generic theme. Every page had to keep a consistent tone and travel-appropriate vocabulary across all three languages.
2. A booking system that didn’t exist yet, for over twenty tours
Escorpion Travels doesn’t offer just one or two generic excursions: their catalog includes more than twenty different tours, each with its own packages, durations, and specifics (jungle, Pampas, combined trips, custom itineraries). It was precisely this volume that made off-the-shelf WordPress booking plugins unworkable — market tools are either too generic (built for a hotel room or a single time slot, not twenty tours with different logic) or too rigid to handle that diversity without becoming unreadable for both the client and the team.
Given this scale, a custom plugin wasn’t a luxury but a necessity: the site needed a structure capable of clearly presenting twenty-plus offerings without overwhelming the visitor, while staying simple enough for a family team to update without needing to become WordPress experts. That’s what shaped the development of the escorpion-reservar plugin, built from the ground up for this catalog size rather than retrofitted later.
3. The online payment puzzle from Bolivia
This is where the real bottleneck was. Stripe and PayPal, the “default” solutions for any Western agency, simply aren’t available to businesses registered in Bolivia. Without a working online payment solution, the entire booking chain stalls at “we’ll get back to you on WhatsApp” — a direct drag on conversion and on an international traveler’s confidence.
The solutions we implemented
A custom-built multilingual WordPress site
We built the site with a full multilingual architecture (Spanish, English, French), translating and adapting every page — not just the text, but the entire user experience — so a French visitor feels just as welcomed as an English or Spanish speaker.
Two WordPress plugins built specifically for Escorpion Travels
escorpion-reservar: a booking plugin designed to handle a catalog of twenty-plus tours without losing the visitor or complicating things for the team — availability and package management built for the way the agency actually works, designed to be run day-to-day by a family that already has plenty to manage on the ground.escorpion-contacto: a dedicated contact plugin to capture and qualify incoming inquiries without relying on a generic form.
This choice to build custom, rather than stacking third-party plugins, wasn’t just a technical preference: with a generic marketplace plugin, clearly presenting twenty-plus different tours quickly turns into a mess for both the visitor and the family managing the site. Building these tools specifically for Escorpion Travels gave them a coherent, lighter system, genuinely suited to the volume and diversity of their offering — with no unnecessary recurring license costs for a family-run business.
A payment strategy adapted to Bolivia’s reality
Facing the Stripe/PayPal dead end, we carried out real commercial and technical research, including direct conversations with players like Red Enlace and WeTravel, to find a solution that actually works. The approach we landed on combines WeTravel (a payment platform built specifically for travel agencies) with Airtm (to work around local banking restrictions) — a setup very few agencies in the region have put in place, giving Escorpion Travels a real edge over local competitors.
Complementary marketing support
Alongside the website, we designed a trifold flyer for their physical presence — useful for local points of sale, partner hotels, and tourism fairs, where digital alone still isn’t enough to capture part of the customer base.
What this brought to Escorpion Travels
Beyond the website itself, this project gave Escorpion Travels a digital infrastructure that very few local ecotourism agencies in Bolivia have:
- Real accessibility to an international audience, thanks to a site natively built for three languages rather than hastily translated.
- A genuine bridge between local expertise and the international market: the family stays focused on what they do best — hospitality, excursions, knowledge of the terrain — while the site presents twenty-plus tours clearly and professionally to a traveler thousands of miles away.
- Operational autonomy, with booking and contact tools built around how they actually work, with no dependency on an outside agency for every change.
- A real ability to accept online payments, where most local agencies remain limited to cash or manual bank transfers — a genuine competitive edge for reassuring a traveler booking remotely, months in advance.
- Consistent marketing support, bridging digital presence and physical presence on the ground in Rurrenabaque.
Why this case sums up how we work at Lostova
This project captures how we work at Lostova pretty well: we don’t stop at delivering a showcase website. We go looking for the real business bottlenecks — here, a payment problem that’s almost structural for any Bolivian agency — and we build custom solutions, even if that means developing our own tools when the market doesn’t offer anything suited to the job.
Running a tourism project in South America and facing the same challenges — multilingual, booking, international payments? Let’s talk about your project.
Running a tourism project with the same challenges?
Multilingual, online booking, international payments — we know these problems well, and we know how to solve them for South American travel agencies.
Let’s talk about your project