Tourism Promotion Platform — Asociația Pentru Toplița

The brief

Asociația Pentru Toplița is a Romanian non-profit association with a mandate to promote tourism in the Toplița area of Harghita County — a region of significant natural and cultural value in the northern part of the county. The project was developed as part of the “Promovarea zonei de nord a județului Harghita III” programme, funded by the Romanian Government’s General Secretariat through the Community Development Service.

The brief called for a comprehensive, content-rich tourism platform — not a brochure site, but a functional destination resource capable of listing local operators, showcasing activities, publishing editorial content and engaging visitors with interactive tools. Product ownership was part of the engagement: we were involved in defining the platform’s structure, membership packages and additional revenue streams for the association alongside the technical delivery.

Scale and content architecture

The platform delivers over 150 pages across three primary content areas:

• Activities — a structured catalogue of things to do in the Toplița region, each with full detail pages, imagery, categorisation and integrated reviews.
• Local operators — a directory of tourism businesses, accommodation providers and service operators in the area, each with their own profile page, contact information and review module.
• Blog — an editorial section for news, guides and destination content, supporting both SEO and ongoing visitor engagement.

The content architecture was designed for long-term maintainability — operators and activities are managed through a structured CMS layer, allowing the association’s team to add and update listings without developer involvement.

Proprietary RAG AI chatbot

The platform includes a custom-built AI chatbot powered by a proprietary RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) implementation — a separate, purpose-built module distinct from any third-party service. The chatbot is trained exclusively on the platform’s own content: activities, operators, local information and editorial material.

Visitors can ask questions about the region in natural language — what to do, where to stay, what to see in a particular season — and receive accurate, contextually relevant answers drawn from the platform’s knowledge base. The chatbot serves as a 24/7 concierge for the destination, reducing the friction between a visitor’s interest and their decision to travel.

Interactive map — Mapbox API

An interactive map built on the Mapbox API displays the geographic distribution of all listed operators and activities across the Toplița area. Visitors can explore the region spatially — clicking map markers to access operator and activity profiles directly — giving a clear sense of what is available and where.

Personalised itinerary request

A custom itinerary request form allows visitors to specify their interests, travel dates, group composition and preferences for their visit to the region. Completed forms are validated and delivered directly to a platform operator, who can follow up with a tailored itinerary suggestion. This module bridges the gap between passive browsing and active trip planning, and provides the association with qualified leads from genuinely interested visitors.

Custom review management

Each activity and operator listing on the platform includes a review module. Reviews submitted by visitors are held in a moderation queue and published only after manual approval by a platform operator — ensuring quality control and protecting listed businesses from unverified or inappropriate content.

Google for Nonprofits — $120,000/year Google Ads Grant

In January 2026 — within weeks of the platform going live — we secured a Google for Nonprofits grant for the association through a professionally prepared application and eligibility plan. The grant provides $10,000 USD per month in Google Ads credit, totalling $120,000 USD per year, available exclusively to approved non-profit organisations.

This is not a passive benefit. Managing a Google Ads Grant at this scale requires the same strategic rigour as a commercial paid search account: proper campaign architecture, keyword strategy aligned to the destination’s content, conversion tracking and continuous optimisation to meet Google’s performance thresholds — which, if not maintained, result in the grant being suspended.

We manage the full grant budget on behalf of the association, running campaigns that drive qualified traffic to the platform’s activities, operator listings and itinerary request module — turning the grant into a measurable, compounding source of visitor acquisition for the Toplița region.

For prospective clients evaluating our PPC and Google Ads capabilities: this engagement demonstrates our ability to secure and actively manage large-scale Google Ads budgets for non-profit organisations — from grant application through to ongoing campaign management and performance reporting.

Technical SEO and launch performance

The platform was built with technical SEO as a first-class concern from the outset — semantic HTML structure, optimised metadata, structured data markup, fast Core Web Vitals and a clean URL architecture designed for rapid indexation.

The results validated the approach: the platform was delivered in December 2025 and recorded approximately 1,500 organic search hits by the end of January 2026 — within its first full month of operation. For a brand-new domain in a regional tourism niche, that level of early traction reflects both the quality of the technical foundation and the relevance of the content to active search demand.

Membership and revenue architecture

As part of the product ownership scope, we worked with the association to define membership packages for local operators and identify additional revenue streams to support the platform’s long-term sustainability — ensuring the association has a viable commercial model alongside the grant funding that initiated the project.