Gazzella Tours cut itinerary build time from days to hours while raising proposal quality for $10,500 bookings

Overview and background

Petra Mösslacher spent years searching for software that could match the way Gazzella Tours actually works. Every itinerary is compiled according to guest wishes, covering guided 4x4 off-road adventures, self-drive tours, fly-in safaris, and luxury fly-in safaris across Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. No two trips are the same. The company also runs the BMW Germany multiday 4x4 tours in Namibia, adding structured group departures to an already varied operation. That range made off-the-shelf tools useless and spreadsheets dangerous for a safari tour operator building every trip from scratch.

Before Tourwriter, Petra calculated costs in Excel alongside each itinerary she built in Word. For a single guided group tour, the pricing process alone took three to four days of double and triple checking. Group tours layer multiple accommodations, activities, park fees, vehicle hire, and transfers across changing seasonal rates, where one missed line can throw the entire margin. The fear of a calculation error was constant. Petra kept a physical file beside her computer and entered each line item manually, then rechecked every figure before she felt confident enough to send the proposal. That cycle consumed the majority of her working week, leaving little time to respond to new enquiries or improve the guest experience.

“It took me to compile one tour with the panic that it’s constantly wrong. I didn’t send it out for three to four days and constantly checked it if I calculated it right. Especially with the groups, there are so many things you need to consider and you so easily forget. That was actually quite a nightmare.”
Petra Mösslacher, Owner and Managing Director, Gazzella Tours

Petra is the owner, managing director, and sole itinerary builder at Gazzella Tours, a family business she runs with her husband Tim Flachberger, who leads the guided 4x4 tours, and Maria, a part-time tourism student. She founded the company in 2008 after moving from Austria to Namibia, where she first worked as a tour guide for six years before starting her own operation. Based in Windhoek, the company serves guests from Europe, North America, and beyond, with every aspect of trip planning, pricing, and client communication running through Petra.

At a company this size, the director, sales lead, and trip builder are all the same person. Petra handles supplier relationships, writes every description, calculates every cost, and sends every proposal. When the BMW Germany 4x4 partnership brought structured group departures alongside her bespoke self-drive and fly-in work, the volume of pricing calculations grew, but the tools did not.

She tried Tourplan but found it difficult to use, with PDF output that did not meet her presentation standards. Other systems she evaluated also fell short. So she continued with Excel, knowing it was inadequate but unable to find anything better. For an operator selling bucket-list safaris at $10,500 per confirmed booking, the gap between the quality of the experience and the quality of the proposal was a real business risk.

“I tried Tourplan. It was very difficult to navigate. And the thing is, when you wanted to print the itineraries, it didn’t look nice.”
Petra Mösslacher, Owner and Managing Director, Gazzella Tours

From Excel to polished proposals in hours

When Petra discovered Minim, the predecessor to Tourwriter, she recognised the concept immediately. The platform combined itinerary building with integrated costing in a single workspace, removing the need for parallel Excel calculations. She adopted Tourwriter in October 2020, when COVID halted inbound tourism to Namibia and gave her the dedicated time to populate the system properly. She entered all her supplier descriptions, accommodation text, and imagery, building the foundation for a true tailor-made tour operation. That initial investment meant every product she loaded, from lodge descriptions to activity details, became a reusable building block for future itineraries. Without the pause that COVID forced, she may not have had the uninterrupted weeks needed to enter the volume of content that now powers her workflow.

“I always wanted to have a program like this, but I never had the time to feed the program. During COVID, I was actually only busy with entering all the texts.”
Petra Mösslacher, Owner and Managing Director, Gazzella Tours

The investment paid off. Tourwriter’s itinerary builder lets Petra create day-by-day itineraries with costs calculated alongside each booking line. When she builds an itinerary now, the pricing builds with it. She controls it once during entry and once before sending, instead of spending days rechecking Excel formulas.

“The cool thing is that you can implement the costs as well. While you are compiling the itinerary, you also compile the costs. Before, you had to calculate the costs in Excel. You were always working with files, and you were always afraid something is wrong.”
Petra Mösslacher, Owner and Managing Director, Gazzella Tours

Gazzella Tours now reuses previous itineraries as starting points, amending them to match each new guest’s preferences. For the BMW group tours, Petra built templates she can duplicate and adjust for each departure rather than rebuilding from scratch. Any new content she writes gets stored in Tourwriter’s content library for future use, so the system accumulates knowledge over time. Platform data shows she creates a new product in an average of 5.13 minutes.

“We can use old itineraries and amend it according to the guests’ wishes. If there is text that needs to be added, we add new text. And the new text, even if we had to do it new, it is in our storage room. You actually accumulate a lot of text, which is very helpful.”
Petra Mösslacher, Owner and Managing Director, Gazzella Tours

The dashboard and navigation were decisive factors. Petra describes the platform as immediately intuitive, with the ability to move between itinerary content, costs, and task lists without confusion. She did not need formal training to begin building itineraries. For a sole operator who cannot afford to lose weeks learning a new system, that mattered. Tourwriter also generates polished proposals directly from the itinerary data using customisable branded templates, producing PDFs or live web links without requiring separate design work.

“It’s very easy to handle. You don’t even need any person explaining to you because you get into it very quick. You can easily navigate. You immediately understand how an itinerary works.”
Petra Mösslacher, Owner and Managing Director, Gazzella Tours

The results

The shift from Excel-based pricing to integrated costing collapsed Petra’s itinerary build time from three to four days per trip down to a few hours — a reduction of more than 85% in pricing time per trip. Across a full season of group departures, the time recovered is the equivalent of approximately seven working weeks previously absorbed by pricing and verification alone. For a business where the owner builds every itinerary personally, that time recovery is the difference between responding to one enquiry per week and handling several. The hours she reclaimed now go into strengthening the guest experience and managing supplier relationships, rather than rechecking spreadsheet formulas. For a sole operator, that reallocation of time is not a convenience. It is the basis for growth.

The confidence shift matters as much as the speed. Before, Petra lived with the constant worry that a pricing error would slip through and cost the business money or credibility. Now, with costs calculated alongside each itinerary line, she checks the figures once during entry and once before sending. The panic that defined her old process has been replaced by a system she trusts.

Proposal quality became a conversion tool in its own right. Gazzella Tours averages $10,500 per confirmed booking, selling bucket-list safaris to guests who expect premium presentation. Petra fills each proposal with photography and day-by-day detail so vivid she says it makes her “want to go on tour with the guests.” The visual quality of the output matters because these are high-value, once-in-a-lifetime trips. A polished proposal with embedded images, detailed daily descriptions, and clear pricing builds the confidence guests need to commit to a booking at that price point.

The mobile-friendly public link itineraries have also changed how guests interact with their trip information. Petra sends each guest a shareable link via email and WhatsApp. Guests tap an accommodation name to pull up exact directions and a map view, or download offline maps directly from WhatsApp for use in areas without mobile signal. For a company committed to the Better Travel Pledge, replacing 30-page printed roadbooks with a mobile link aligns operations with their sustainability values.

“Most of the people, they print out the itinerary we give to them, but it’s actually not even necessary because if you have the link on WhatsApp, you just go on your WhatsApp, download the offline map, and then you just press the accommodation and you have the maps, the exact directions.”
Petra Mösslacher, Owner and Managing Director, Gazzella Tours

Guests return regularly for the 4x4 experience, and Petra credits the combination of trip quality and clear communication for that loyalty. When a returning guest books again, Petra pulls up their previous itinerary in Tourwriter and adjusts it for the new trip, carrying over preferences and supplier notes without starting from scratch. Third-party reviews confirm the quality of Gazzella Tours’ output. The company holds a 5.0 out of 5 rating on SafariBookings from 24 reviews and won the TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice Award 2025. Reviewers consistently praise the organisation and personalisation of their trips, with one guest specifically mentioning receiving “an online travel plan via the tourwriter app” that helped with daily planning.