DaCapo Travel

Since 1988, DaCapo Travel has been bringing international tour groups to the Eastern Alps. Moving Primates has elevated the Tyrolean inbound specialist to a modern headless platform — with its own travel data structure, a B2B inquiry process, and a partner model for hotels.

Trips aren’t products. So we didn’t build any.

Shopify thinks in terms of products, variants, and inventory. A Tyrolean group trip thinks in terms of itineraries, daily stages, deposits, minimum participant numbers, activities, and organizers.

Instead of forcing trips into Shopify’s rigid product framework, we used Sanity to develop custom content types for Travels and Accommodations. Each content type is split into two layers: the Core layer for language-independent master data such as booking number, tour operator, and starting price, and a localized layer for title, subtitle, itinerary, and SEO. This way, a trip can be presented in five languages without having to maintain the same booking five times.

Shopify keeps the job that Shopify is good at: checkout, payment, orders. Sanity takes over everything that’s content.

Day by day, hour by hour

The centerpiece of every trip is the itinerary. One entry per day with date and title, followed by a timetable of activities with time, icon, headline, description, and media gallery. Everything can be edited in a CMS, without anyone touching the code.

This is complemented by Travel Highlights. These are small info blocks with an icon, background color, and short text that appear as a slider in the frontend. Highlights are managed centrally, but can be individually overridden for each trip — the template itself remains unchanged.

B2B inquiry meets Shopify checkout. No app needed.

Travel agencies and companies book differently. They make inquiries, clarify terms, negotiate deposits, add special requests. The classic Shopify logic doesn’t fit that – and third‑party apps solve the problem with compromises nobody wants.

We built the workflow directly in Shopify. A request via the Purchase Modal on the travel page creates a Draft Order with all inputs as line items. Custom items, discounts, net amounts, notes – everything can be edited before the payment request is sent out. One click on Send Invoice and the travel agency customer lands in the Shopify checkout, pays the deposit there, and the draft becomes a regular order.

No Plus-only feature. No extra app. No workaround.

A search that understands travel agencies

Travel agency staff search differently than end customers. They know booking numbers by heart, make typos, or search for topics like “culture” or “golf.” The standard search doesn’t reflect that.

We have set up a weighted search: booking number outranks title, title outranks subtitle, subtitle outranks content. Typos from five letters onwards are tolerated. If someone searches for “Kultur”, all trips from the “Kulturreisen” collection will appear – even if the word does not occur in the trip title. Incomplete products are automatically excluded.

Programs & Destinations: two worlds, one system

DaCapo tells travel stories along two axes — geographically by region, and in terms of content by theme. Both require their own overview pages, and both should be curated editorially in different ways.

Instead of building two systems, Collection is implemented as a generic concept: it can be filled manually or automatically, depending on the use case. Want the campaign landing page to stay predictable? Manual. Topic page that grows with every new trip? Automatic, with rules from Sanity.

In the frontend, a filter modal opens for trips with date, number of guests, and activities. For accommodations, clicking on stars and categories filters the list immediately. Two interaction patterns, one data model.

Hotels become partners. By subscription.

DaCapo works with dozens of hotels in the region. To enable them to actively present themselves on the platform, a partner subscription model is integrated in Shopify. Three tiers, billed monthly. Self-service is handled in the customer account.

Hotels apply, send information and image material, and are activated by taking out a subscription. The hotels appear with their own profile – address, amenities, media gallery. Everything comes from Sanity, everything is multilingual.

Five languages from a PDF — via an AI pipeline

Incorporating a new trip rarely starts as a neatly structured data set. It starts as a PDF from the program catalog. For example, in French. With fares, marketing text, and its own narrative style.

So that the content team doesn’t have to start from scratch every time, a AI-powered content pipeline runs in the background. A master prompt extracts the travel content from the PDF, generates subtitles and SEO texts, creates the URL slugs, and transfers everything into the Da Capo travel structure. DeepL Pro is directly integrated into Sanity. This way, a travel page can be translated into another language with a single click.

Hours of manual preparation become a single process. The content team reviews and refines instead of typing.

Dedicated URLs for each market

DaCapo sells to travel agencies in North America, to tour operators in Italy, and to group travel providers from France. Each market has its own search habits, its own keywords, its own expectations for slug structure.

That’s why the URL is independent for each language: /en/travels/tyrol-and-salzburg-2026 is not the same address as /de/reisen/tirol-und-salzburg-2026. Parent Documents and Folders allow nested structures without having to create separate pages for them. Redirects run automatically as soon as a slug is renamed. The sitemap and robots.txt regenerate every 24 hours.

The team maintains the meta title and meta description centrally in the travel document for each language — not scattered across the platform.