Why I built TripWorks (and what we’re building toward)

A guest books a time slot. They show up. They have an incredible experience.

That’s the picture-perfect postcard version of the business-the clean, curated path every operator wants to deliver. But behind that experience is a constant coordination of moving parts: inventory, staff, timing, distribution, payments, and the unexpected variables that show up every single day.

That gap between what the guest sees and what it actually takes to make it happen is where I learned the hard lessons that shaped TripWorks.  

The entrepreneur behind the software

Earlier in my career, I ran SPEEDVEGAS, one of the largest tourist attractions in Las Vegas, Nevada. That’s where TripWorks was conceived, born, and tested.

I’ve worked in businesses where software doesn’t just support the experience, but is its backbone. Where a single system failure could halt operations and stop revenue in its tracks.

That perspective changes how you think about technology. You stop viewing software as a set of features, and start seeing it as infrastructure that supports your business. And it has to hold up under real-world conditions. Peak demand. Last-minute changes. Constant operational pressure. And once you see it that way, it becomes hard to ignore how fragmented the tooling in this industry has been.

During my time at SPEEDVEGAS, I kept running into a familiar pattern.

Operators were trying to stitch together a daisy-chain of solutions to fully support the day-to-day realities of running their business. Solutions to manage waivers, communications, abandoned carts, payment, reporting tools, channel managers, CRM systems. Each solved a piece of the puzzle, but none was designed to work seamlessly together.

At first, that patchwork seems manageable. But as the business grows, the cracks start to appear - and widen.

Manual work increases. Data becomes more intricate. Teams spend more time reconciling systems than serving guests. And instead of scaling cleanly, the operation becomes harder to manage every time a new layer is introduced. This business is complex, with many moving parts that have to work in sync. When they don’t, operations can grind to a halt, and revenue takes a hit. 

That understanding is what led to TripWorks.

What TripWorks actually is

TripWorks was built by operators, for operators. And that’s just one thing that makes it different. 

We’re a business intelligence-powered booking platform for experience businesses - one that unifies bookings, operations, and performance into a single, cohesive platform. The goal goes beyond reservations. It’s to give you a system that reflects and fits how your business actually runs.

That means your inventory, your checkout, your distribution channels, and your reporting aren’t separate layers you have to reconcile - they’re part of the same system, working in sync.

Because in reality, those things are never independent. A change in availability affects what you can sell. What you sell affects where you distribute. Where you distribute affects how demand shows up. And all of it feeds back into how you plan and operate the business.

Built by operators, for operators

At a high level, booking software can look straightforward. Search, select, check out, confirm. A clean flow, easy to follow. But that flow is only the surface layer.

The real complexity shows up over time, as the system encounters real-world scenarios: shared inventory across experiences, shifting staff schedules, multichannel distribution, edge cases that don’t appear until thousands (or millions) of bookings have passed through the system.

TripWorks wasn’t built in isolation from those conditions. It was forged in the field, developed by and alongside real operations, where those edge cases are daily realities. That’s a very different starting point than trying to engineer something from a blank slate.

What we’re building toward

At TripWorks, we think about this as a long-term build. Not just adding features, but continuously refining the underlying systems that make everything else possible: how inventory is managed, how systems stay in sync, how operators make decisions based on real data instead of guesswork.

Behind everything is constant coordination: routes, resources, timing, contingencies. You’re always adjusting, always recalculating, always making sure everything stays aligned as conditions change. So we’re investing heavily in AI and business intelligence as core capabilities embedded into the platform itself. The goal is to reduce manual work, surface better insights, and give operators more control over how their business runs.

Because ultimately, the best systems are the ones you don’t have to think about. They just work. Reliably, consistently, and at scale.

‍