Sweet Georgia
Building a tourism business and digital travel platform for Georgia
Co-founded Sweet Georgia, a tourism business and digital platform that grew out of an information portal about Georgia. The idea followed my own trip: tourist information was fragmented and often inaccurate. We brought together information about the country, routes and services, then began arranging and booking trips. I was responsible for business development, the partner network, the platform concept, analysis and organising development. With a small team, I automated tour preparation, pricing, bookings and coordination with service providers. When the team shrank, I maintained the servers and application code myself. Active operations are currently suspended during legal and organisational restructuring. The database and partner relationships have been retained. Social pages and channels remain in place; incoming travel enquiries are referred to partners in Georgia. The website needs modernisation following domain name changes.
- Participation started
- 2014
- Company
- Sweet Georgia LLC
- Positions in the project
- Co-founder · Director
Roles and achievements
| Responsibilities | My contribution | Results and metrics |
|---|---|---|
Business Development Director
|
Launched the business with a co-founder and built relationships with hotels, guides, drivers, restaurants and other providers. Handled negotiations, contracts and partner training. Organised an international network of travel agencies, representatives and volunteers who advised travellers and helped develop our information resources. Worked with partners to establish requirements for safety, insurance, cleanliness and service quality. The co-founder and a staff member organised trips on the ground; our company was accountable to travellers for the quality of the entire tour. |
During active operations, we worked with 750 hotels, more than 132 guides, approximately 75 drivers, 200 restaurants and 60 activity providers. Representatives and partner travel agencies operated in nine countries. Local representatives in Georgia's tourist areas assisted travellers and checked partner service quality. |
Product Owner
|
Defined a single point of entry for travellers. Started with an information portal in Russian, English and Georgian, then developed services based on incoming enquiries and practical experience of organising trips. Defined the capabilities of the tour builder, catalogues, booking services and partner accounts. Developed themed sections and subdomains, regional and attraction information, and accommodation, excursion and transport offerings. |
The portal became a platform for planning and organising trips. Organisers assembled tours from a shared database of routes, hotels, restaurants and transport. Travellers received detailed daily itineraries, photographs, service options and prices for different group sizes. The guide services later gave rise to a separate project, GuideInfo, at the request of the Association of Guides of Georgia. |
Business Analyst
|
Broke trip organisation down into individual operations and identified which to automate. Developed requirements for calculating tour costs, including accommodation, transport, fuel, meals and admission tickets. Provided for five service categories, pricing by group size, a target profit margin and manual adjustment of the final price. Validated algorithms against real examples: manual calculations were compared with the system's detailed breakdown by day and expense item. Accountants, partners and volunteers took part in the checks. |
Accounting staff and management gained a tool for analysing trip finances. Detailed cost breakdowns helped identify savings, including combining an accompanying tour organiser with local guides for individual stages of the itinerary. |
Project Manager
|
Coordinated a small team of two programmers and a designer. Combined task definition, modelling and implementation checks with business development. Organised the gradual automation of processes originally performed manually. |
The platform progressively gained a tour builder and calculator, accommodation, tour and excursion bookings, partner accounts, voucher and insurance processing, and payment options. Features were checked against practical scenarios before launch. |
Systems Analyst
|
Prepared implementation documentation myself: scenarios, use cases, actors, class models, entities, attributes and relationships. Worked out the data structure and created UML models in Rational Rose, supported by diagrams, tables and examples from real trips. Specified the use of partner data: exchange rates from the central bank of Georgia and TBC Bank, information from Aviasales and Booking.com, and fuel prices from a partner filling station network. |
Developers received detailed functional specifications and data models for implementation. The system used updated service prices and exchange rates to calculate trip costs. |
Full-Cycle Software Engineer + AI
|
Contributed code and maintained the platform. During the pandemic and subsequent instability, when the team was largely absent, I handled technical work myself, from server administration to software changes. |
Maintained the system with limited resources. The platform evolved from PHP and MySQL to separate backend and frontend layers using JavaScript, Framework7, Cordova and Vite. A later stage began migrating the backend to Python and FastAPI. |
Competencies and skills
Tools and technologies
Project testimonials
Yury is the foundation of our entire project. His vision, his ability to gather various methods, secure funding, and bring people together made it possible to build a major project—starting from virtually nothing, just a conversation. It has grown into something far more than a website; it now encompasses the country’s tourism industry, international partners, volunteers from various nations, and government agencies.
It has been truly amazing!