A merchant network is not a technology problem. Building the platform is the entry ticket. The difficult part is two-sided acquisition: recruiting businesses and reaching travellers, in different languages, in different markets, at the moment each side is actually receptive.
IoTourist (iotourist.com) is an independent tourism and merchant platform — a separate company, with its own product and its own commercial roadmap. Ratin Teknoloji Group acted as an external advisor on two fronts: commercial development in Türkiye and Iraq, and advertising strategy for the merchant and traveller sides of the network.
What the platform has to solve
A tourism merchant platform connects three things that normally sit apart: businesses that want visitor traffic, visitors who need to find them, and offers that make the connection worth acting on. Each of those has its own failure mode.
Businesses in tourist districts advertise into a fog. They cannot tell which nationality drives which basket size, which channel brought a customer through the door, or whether a discount moved revenue or simply discounted revenue they would have earned anyway.
Visitors, meanwhile, plan in one country and spend in another. The discovery moment happens weeks before arrival, in their own language, on their own platforms — and almost none of that intent reaches the local business that eventually serves them.
Offer management is where the two meet, and it is the part most platforms under-build. An offer that cannot be turned on for one city, one week, and one visitor segment is a brochure, not a demand channel.
Our advisory scope
Business development. Which merchant categories to prioritise, how to sequence city coverage, and what a participating business needs to see before it signs. Coverage density in a district matters more than raw merchant count — twenty businesses along one visitor route outperform two hundred scattered across a city.
Merchant acquisition planning. Field-team arguments, proof assets, onboarding friction, and the economics that make participation defensible for a hotel or a clinic rather than merely attractive on a slide.
Advertising strategy. Campaign structure, market-native creative, and measurement design across Türkiye and Iraq — with the merchant funnel and the traveller funnel treated as separate programmes with separate economics.
Four things that decided the outcome
Traveller intent is a timing problem. The window that matters opens roughly two to four weeks before departure and closes on arrival. Targeting destination interest without a timing layer spends most of the budget on people who are not going anywhere.
Language is not a translation task. A campaign written in English and translated into Turkish and Arabic underperforms one written natively in each. Search behaviour differs by market, and the highest-volume Arabic term for a tourism service in Istanbul is rarely the literal translation of the English one.
Merchant acquisition converts on proof. Businesses join a network when they can see what it delivered for comparable businesses in comparable districts. Documented results are the primary sales asset; creative is secondary.
Attribution has to be built before the spend, not after it. For a two-sided network this means instrumenting merchant onboarding and traveller activation as separate conversion paths. Collapsing them into a single funnel produces numbers that look fine and mean nothing.
Why Türkiye and Iraq
Türkiye offers the density: high inbound volume, a mature merchant base, and concentrated visitor corridors where coverage compounds quickly. Iraq offers the unmet need: heavy two-way movement with Türkiye — commercial, medical, educational, and leisure — and a merchant landscape that is ready for a demand channel but not for a complex integration project.
Running acquisition in both markets simultaneously is what makes native-language execution non-negotiable rather than a refinement.
Where our own experience applied
Our team manages advertising accounts in-house for large enterprises across tourism, financial services, insurance, real-estate investment advisory, fintech applications, ride-hailing, large-format retail, media and broadcast, and beauty and cosmetics — several of which map directly onto the merchant categories a tourism platform needs. That portfolio is described in more detail in our publications.
Advertising in regulated and semi-regulated categories also carries platform-level review risk. Claims that outrun what a service can deliver do not merely invite regulatory attention; they invite account-level enforcement that removes the channel entirely. Our approach to compliance applies to campaigns as much as to the underlying service.
IoTourist and ezee cash are separate companies. Our parallel advisory mandate on the payment side is covered in Advising ezee cash on expansion across Türkiye and Iraq.
For platforms planning two-sided growth in the region, our business units cover commercial development and acquisition as a single engagement. Start a conversation with the team in Istanbul.
