How Iceland Luxury Expeditions built the operation its ambition demanded

Overview and background

Reporting was the thing that broke first. Iceland Luxury Expeditions had a system that produced good-looking proposals and a conversion rate that was climbing. What it could not tell them was why, or which trips, or whether the pattern would hold.

“Before we moved to Tourwriter, Iceland Luxury Expeditions had no reporting. With TripCreator, it was like driving a car blindfolded.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

ILE is a B2B luxury destination management company and licensed tour operator based in Reykjavík, founded in late 2015 by Halldór Jón Jóhannesson. A dedicated team of six runs the entire operation, covering Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the Scandinavian North, selling almost entirely through travel advisors and agency partners. ILE holds Serandipians Grand DMC Champion status and is an XO Private Destination Master, and the team builds B2B demand through trade events including Ultra by Private Luxury in Dubai and Private Luxury Split. Their guides are Icelandic, born and raised, and drawn from unusual careers. One of them happens to be a former president of Iceland.

Gabriela Ciobotaru arrived four years ago for a narrow reason. ILE was adopting Nitro, a group-travel itinerary platform, and she had used it at a Copenhagen DMC. The team needed someone to train them on it. She stayed, took ownership of the entire platform stack, and became the person who decides how ILE’s operations work. She evaluates new systems, runs every migration, trains every colleague, and fields every question about why a number looks wrong or a workflow changed. At a six-person company, that makes her the operational architect.

ILE’s first two platforms each solved one problem and created another. Nitro had been built for groups, which made it awkward for the FIT and luxury work ILE actually sells, and the client-facing output was not presentable. TripCreator, an Icelandic itinerary platform with strong proposal design, fixed the presentation problem and created a measurement one: no reporting at all. Pricing added its own friction. Iceland applies VAT at three rates, and changing the rate on a service in TripCreator could erase the selling price.

Choosing a system with robust reporting

When it came time to evaluate a third platform, Gabriela ran the demos. She had already migrated ILE through two systems and knew exactly what the next one had to do. The proposal output had to hold up against what TripCreator had been producing. And the reporting layer had to answer the question that had been unanswerable for two systems running.

“Of all the systems I have worked with, Tourwriter is the most user-friendly. The presentation towards the client is straightforward. The pricing and the way the reports work are top-notch.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

Gabriela chose Tourwriter and set the go-live for August 2025. She would change that date if she could. August is mid-season in Iceland. Trips already in TripCreator had to be moved or finished there, so she was running two systems at once through the busiest months.

“If we had our time again, we would move earlier or wait until October. There were a lot of live trips to move, and we were running both systems in parallel through our busiest months.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

Onboarding was handled by Jess Gaspari with the Tourwriter loading team, Maria and Jenica, building out ILE’s supplier and product data. Three ILE staff use the platform daily, plus accounting. Gabriela trained them all, the same way she has trained every team member on every system before this one. Her colleague picked it up fast. Her boss asks more questions, because he is in the system less often, and Gabriela says the answers are easy to give now that the platform makes sense.

Four features carry most of ILE’s daily load. Contracted supplier rates also sit in the central supplier database and pull straight into quotes, removing a manual checking step, and digital itinerary links replaced static files so advisors and guests always see the current version. But four things changed how the team works.

Templates

ILE built reusable itinerary structures for Iceland’s most popular routes and now assembles a custom trip by dragging a template in and adjusting it.

“We built templates for Iceland’s most sought-after routes, but our version includes the places only we know. We drag a template in, customise it for that client, and the itinerary is ready in 10 minutes. When you have 10 requests in a day, that matters.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

Price history

Rates update, offers age, and a consultant needs to know what a room cost on the day the quote went out. TripCreator had no way to trace that back. Tourwriter logs every change.

“The system saves every price change as we go. When you need to check what a hotel room cost on the day you sent the offer compared to now, the full history is right there.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

Tasks

ILE holds summer hotel space to make an offer sellable, so every held booking gets a task with its cancellation date attached. Deposits are taken on confirmation and balances fall due 45 days out, and those sit as tasks too. The Zoho data shows 144 tasks completed in the last 12 months, against four in the first month on the platform.

“Every cancellation deadline, every payment date, it is all in one place. Nothing gets missed.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

Agency management

ILE sells through advisors, so every contact met at a trade show goes into the agency list with commission settings attached, ready for the first request. Tourwriter pulls that commission into the itinerary pricing table automatically. The agency list has grown from 16 records to 488 in 13 months.

“We set the commission once on the agency profile and it calculates automatically in every pricing table.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

The results

ILE averages six days from enquiry to confirmation, driven by rapid quoting and fast client responses. A consultant builds a full bespoke itinerary from template in about 10 minutes. Confirmed bookings average over $12,000 per itinerary, and three people plus accounting run the entire operation. Those numbers describe the same behaviour: a small team that has loaded its data properly, built its templates, and stopped re-doing work.

“Since we moved to Tourwriter, our confirmation rate has increased. I could not give you the exact percentage, but it is significantly higher than on Nitro or TripCreator. Clients respond faster because we can turn changes around quickly, and I think that speed is part of why more trips confirm.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

Gabriela built the templates, loaded the agencies, set the task conventions, and trained the team. She cannot put a percentage on the improvement, and says so plainly. The direction is not in doubt.

Speed of reply matters more in luxury inbound than volume does. ILE deliberately stays low-volume, works FIT and small high-end groups of around 16, avoids the sites everyone else runs to, and offsets its footprint through a reforestation programme that gives guests the coordinates of their own planting area. Quality over quantity is the stated position, and the operational consequence is that every enquiry has to be answered properly and fast.

The company is expanding its inbound offering into Scandinavia, adding suppliers and partners in Norway, Sweden and Finland, and building B2B demand through trade shows. T-Fest in Cancún is next, in late October. Every advisor met there will be loaded into the agency list before the follow-up starts. The same template and loaded-rate model that works for Iceland will extend to the new destinations as supplier contracts come in. A further hire is likely around April, once next summer’s shape is clear. ILE won Iceland’s Best Inbound Golf Tour Operator at the World Golf Awards in 2024.

Three migrations in, Gabriela has a view on what matters most in an itinerary platform. It is not the features. It is whether the system can tell you what is working.

“I cannot even describe Tourwriter’s reporting. The number of reports available, and the way you actually use them day to day, is amazing.”
Gabriela Ciobotaru, Director of Sales, Iceland Luxury Expeditions

Asked what she would tell another operator weighing up the same move, Gabriela does not hedge: “Do it.”

What travel advisors say about working with Iceland Luxury Expeditions:

“Of all the DMCs we work with across more than 30 countries, I consider Dori and Iceland Luxury Expeditions to be the only true partners who fully understand the meaning of luxury beyond simply charging more for the same product.”
Eitan Silberberg, Founder and President, Spiced Destinations

“ILE gave our guest something no other Iceland operator has ever come close to. They came back and immediately asked us to book next year. That has never happened before.”
Luxury travel advisor, London