How ToursByLocals connects guides and travellers across 180+ countries, lifting bookings by 15%

Use case: Chat messaging
Industry: Travel technology
Country: Canada, operating globally
Size: Enterprise

ToursByLocals is a private tour marketplace that connects travellers with vetted, independent local guides for private, customizable tours and cruise-ship shore excursions in more than 180 countries. As a peer-to-peer platform, messaging is the key element that allows guides, travellers, and travel agents to connect and, from there, to confirm bookings. After 17 years of running messaging on a self-built system, ToursByLocals moved its messaging to TalkJS, migrating its full history with zero downtime and zero data loss. Since the December 2025 launch, enquiry-to-booking conversion (the rate of traveller enquiries that turns into a booking) has risen roughly 15% and guide net promoter score (NPS, likelihood that a guide would recommend the service to others) has climbed about 43% year-over-year.

We spoke with Sebastian Leder, Senior Product Manager at ToursByLocals, to learn how the team did it.

Problem: An in-house system reaches its limits

For over a decade, ToursByLocals ran its messaging between travellers and guides on a platform it built and maintained itself, in-house. This worked well, until consistent growth began to expose the system’s limits.

For one thing, while great messaging is central to the experience of both the travellers and guides, the messaging quality of the in-house version still fell short of what the team wanted it to be. For example, travellers couldn’t easily share tickets and documents, and the guide-traveller chat lived separately from bookings, resulting in a disunified booking experience. 

As traffic increased, the platform’s messaging system also started to run into scalability issues. 

"We were, in effect, learning as we deployed. Assumptions and implementations that worked perfectly well at lower usage would show their limits as messaging traffic grew."
— Sebastian Leder, Senior Product Manager, ToursByLocals

On top of that, ToursByLocals ran into a problem many fast-growing marketplaces face when messaging was never meant to be a standalone engineering project: the legacy system was built on a different technology stack than the rest of its platform. That mismatch added friction every time the team had to work on messaging, slowing development and driving up maintenance costs.

Closing the gap between what the team wanted to offer guides and travellers and what the in-house system in fact delivered would have meant a large, ongoing investment of engineering time focused on just the messaging. Time which the team wouldn’t be able to spend on its core marketplace. 

All this pushed the team to rethink its approach. Things had to change. 

Key challenges:

• Scalability limits: Assumptions behind the in-house messaging system broke down as traffic grew.
• Tech stack mismatch: The messaging system was built on different infrastructure than the core platform, slowing development.
• Rising maintenance cost: Improving the experience in-house would require large, sustained investment.

Solution: A purpose-built real-time messaging platform, migrated with zero downtime

Rather than maintain an in-house system built for an earlier stage of the business, ToursByLocals decided it was the right moment to replace this with a dedicated messaging platform.

The decision of what to select came down to five main requirements: 

• Scalable: The messaging platform had to be flexible, so that the infrastructure could scale with ToursByLocals’ consistent marketplace growth. 
• Native feel: Guides and travellers would need a fast, reliable path from conversation to booking, with the relevant booking details visible directly in the chat itself, so that the conversation and booking flow would feel native to the rest of the ToursByLocals platform, rather than bolted on.
• Browser and platform support: Messaging had to work everywhere and on all devices, so cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility was a must.
• Preserve message history: Stable conversations are central to sustaining trust between guides and travellers, hence any migration would have to preserve ToursByLocals’ 17 years of messaging history without data loss.
• Cost-effective migration: The move had to make financial sense. Moving off self-maintained infrastructure would have to free engineers to focus on the core marketplace rather than on messaging upkeep, without increasing net cost. 

TalkJS fit the requirements on all counts.

"We wanted messaging to feel native to ToursByLocals: blending in and fitting seamlessly with the rest of our site."
— Sebastian Leder, Senior Product Manager, ToursByLocals

The ToursByLocals team set out to migrate its conversation infrastructure, as well as its complete messaging history, to the new platform with TalkJS as its messaging backbone. 

Importing its full messaging history was straightforward enough to do. Plus, TalkJS’ focus on cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility meant that the team could just build once and deliver a consistent messaging experience across all browsers and platforms.

To ensure all would run smoothly, the ToursByLocals team used a feature-flag rollout with dual-system operation, running the old and new systems in parallel during migration. That approach let ToursByLocals migrate more than a decade of message history with zero downtime and zero data loss.

From kickoff to full production launch, the entire move took just around two months.

Key features implemented:

• Real-time chat with booking context: Conversation and booking details live side-by-side, shortening the path from a traveller’s enquiry to a confirmed booking.
• Email fallback with reply-by-email: Travellers and guides can reply by email to any message, and the team can turn this feature on or off on a per-user basis. 
• File attachments (PDFs, images): Travellers can reliably share tickets and documents, which the old system's sanitizer used to block.
• Custom actions: Guides can perform custom operations directly from the chat.
• Admin oversight and moderation: The support team has admin oversight and moderation capacity across all conversations, allowing ToursByLocals to maintain trust and safety for its users.
• AI and sentiment monitoring: Automated monitoring that leverages AI and sentiment analysis replaces a manual keyword-review process, so quality control and anti-poaching steps can run at scale without human bottlenecks.

Results: Higher conversion, stronger guide satisfaction, lower cost

ToursByLocals went live with TalkJS as its messaging foundation in December 2025, connecting its guides, travellers, and travel agents. 

Adoption was strong from the outset. When the team gave a group of guides early access ahead of the full rollout, the feedback was resoundingly positive. Messaging is now the most widely used tool that ToursByLocals recently shipped.

The numbers from the months since launch back up the early positive signal from guides. Enquiry-to-booking conversion increased by roughly 15% in the first full period after going live which is a significant upward shift considering that the baseline had been flat. 

Not only that, but guide satisfaction as measured by net promoter score (NPS), rose approximately 43% year-over-year, and guides who've adopted ToursByLocals' newer tools show NPS roughly 70% higher than those who haven't. Around two-thirds of guides who rated the new messaging experience called it better than what was used before.

Reliability improved too: consistently high uptime, combined with cross-browser, cross-platform compatibility, even resolved a large majority of ToursByLocals' long-standing messaging issues. 

Finally, once infrastructure and developer time are factored in, running messaging on TalkJS costs less, net, than maintaining the previous in-house system.

“Integrating TalkJS has given us a stable, monitored, and scalable messaging surface we can keep building on.”
— Sebastian Leder, Senior Product Manager, ToursByLocals

Going forward, ToursByLocals has active projects on its roadmap to refine the messaging experience based on feedback from guides and travellers. “We're continuing to deepen how messaging connects to the rest of the booking journey, building on the foundation TalkJS gives us,” Sebastian said. “We share feature requests with the TalkJS team as they come up, and they've been receptive to taking them on. Beyond the product, we've gained a trusted partner we can count on.” 

By replacing 17 years of in-house infrastructure with TalkJS, ToursByLocals now offers fast, reliable messaging for guides, travellers, and travel agents across 180+ countries, without losing a single message in the migration process. With a 15% lift in enquiry-to-booking conversion, a 43% year-over-year rise in guide NPS, and a lower net operating cost, TalkJS continues to power the conversations that turn ToursByLocals' potential customers into confirmed guests.

“TalkJS let us move off a long-serving in-house system onto a scalable, purpose-built platform, migrate all of our history with zero data loss and zero downtime, and go live in about two months. At a lower net cost than maintaining our own.”
— Sebastian Leder, Senior Product Manager, ToursByLocals

Key outcomes: 

• Conversion: Enquiry-to-booking conversion improved by roughly 15% in the first full period after launch.
• Guide satisfaction: Guide NPS rose about 43% year-over-year, and guides who've adopted the newer messaging system show an NPS of 70% higher than non-adopters.
• Reception: Around two-thirds of guides who rated the new messaging experience said it was better than the old system, with messaging becoming the most widely adopted tool among ToursByLocals’ recent launches.
• Reliability: TalkJS ensures consistently high uptime and availability. The move even resolved most of ToursByLocals' long-standing messaging issues.
• Lower cost: Running messaging on TalkJS reduces net cost compared to the previous in-house implementation.