Two production trails. Real hikers. Real numbers.

The trail

The Lycian Way (Likya Yolu) was created in 1999 by Kate Clow, who marked the first 500 km using waypaint and a guidebook. Today it stretches across the southern Turkish coast — through ancient ruins at Patara and Olympos, over the saddle of Mount Tahtalı, past beaches with no road access, and into pine forests where the trail signs are sometimes the only sign of human presence. Tourism authorities count between 30,000 and 50,000 hikers walking sections of the trail each year, making it Turkey's most-walked long-distance route.

The problem

For two decades, the trail's primary digital presence was a guidebook, scattered blog posts, and PDF maps. Hikers were getting lost, accommodation discovery was word-of-mouth, and the trail's organization had no way to communicate trail closures, weather warnings, or safety incidents to the people actually walking it. International hikers in particular — German, French, Italian, increasingly Eastern European — needed multilingual content the existing infrastructure couldn't provide.

We were brought in to build the digital layer the trail had been missing.

What we built

The Lycian Way platform is the most feature-complete deployment of the codebase. It runs on the same architecture that Trailivo customers buy today:

Underneath: a Django backend with 14 application domains, ~65,000 lines of code, full test coverage including multi-trail isolation tests, deployed on a managed VM with Stripe, Resend, Mapbox, OpenWeather, and Sentry integrations wired in. The same backend that you'd run on your trail.

Timeline

The first version of the platform shipped in [VERIFY: launch month/year], built in roughly [VERIFY: weeks] from kickoff to App Store approval. Subsequent releases — currently at v1.1.0 — added the AI planner, the community/buddy system, the tour-operator marketplace, and three additional languages including Ukrainian for the post-2022 surge in Ukrainian hikers in Turkey.

What ships today is the 92-screen mobile application, two language-specific websites, an admin platform that the trail's team uses to push notifications and update content, and a Stripe-integrated booking flow. All of it deployed on a single droplet for under $50/month in infrastructure.

Results

• Eight active language locales — the trail organization can serve a German hiker in German, a Russian hiker in Russian, without operating eight separate websites.
• Offline navigation — hikers can download an entire stage's tiles, audio, and metadata before leaving WiFi. The Lycian Way runs through long stretches without cell coverage; this isn't optional.
• The org's team handles content directly — no engineer required to update accommodation, push a trail closure, or add a new translation.
• The trail has a brand for the first time — searches for "Lycian Way app" return the official product, not 14 third-party guides.

[VERIFY before publishing: total downloads, monthly active users, average session length, % of hikers using offline mode, real customer testimonial from the trail's lead.]

The trail

The Via Francigena was first documented by Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 990 CE — a 79-stage itinerary returning from Rome. The route became one of the three great pilgrimages of medieval Europe, alongside Santiago and Jerusalem. Today the trail crosses four countries: from the chalk cliffs of Dover, through Picardy and Champagne, over the Great St Bernard Pass into the Aosta Valley, down through Tuscany's strada bianca and the Val d'Orcia, and into Rome by the Via Cassia. Pilgrim numbers have been rising steadily since the European Council named it a Cultural Route in 1994; on the Italian sections especially, it's emerged as a quieter, more culturally rich alternative to the Camino de Santiago.

The problem

For a route that crosses four jurisdictions and several language barriers, practical planning information was fragmented. Stage descriptions lived on national associations' sites; accommodation came from word-of-mouth and a handful of tour operators; pilgrims often arrived at the start with paper printouts from three different organizations. International pilgrims in particular — and the Via Francigena draws them from across Europe and beyond — needed a single, multilingual planning resource that didn't exist.

What we built

WalkToRome.com is the trail's modern planning platform: a multilingual web product covering all 84 stages, with itinerary suggestions, accommodation discovery, a packing planner, route-sharing, and the same marketplace and community features that ship in the platform's mobile-app trails.

WalkToRome runs on the same backend codebase as the Lycian Way — same Trail tenant pattern, same content models, same booking flow. The difference is configuration, not code. That's the whole proposition: when your trail comes onto the platform, it inherits everything we've built on these two and everything the platform learns next.

Why this trail launched as web-first

Not every trail launches with a mobile app on day one. The Via Francigena has unique characteristics — it's longer than most pilgrims walk in one trip, it's frequently walked in segments across years, and a large share of planning happens months before the walk itself. The web platform addresses that planning window, where pilgrims compare segments, book accommodation, and design itineraries with their fitness and time budget.

A mobile app for the actual walking days remains on the roadmap; the platform supports it natively, and the same Flutter codebase that powers the Lycian Way app can be configured for the Via Francigena when the trail's stewards decide to ship it.

Timeline & status

The site went live in [VERIFY: launch month/year]. It currently serves [VERIFY: monthly visitors] pilgrims and prospective pilgrims monthly, with content in English and Italian, and active marketplace participation from tour operators across the Italian sections.

[VERIFY before publishing: monthly visitors, top traffic sources, conversion rate to provider inquiries, real testimonial from one of the tour operators on the platform.]

What this proves

• The same codebase runs different products. Lycian Way is mobile-first with audio guides; Via Francigena is web-first with planning emphasis. Neither was a fork — both are the same platform configured differently.
• Multi-country, multi-language is real. The Via Francigena spans four countries. The data model, routing, and content management handle it.
• Marketplace functionality isn't theoretical. Real tour operators and guesthouses run their businesses through the platform's provider tools.
• The platform earns its second deployment. Building once and configuring twice is the entire proposition — Via Francigena is the proof.