Jacques Grandchamps and Valerie Sans are busy, international small business owners with the usual challenge of wearing many different hats.

French Escapade Tours offer cultural tours, painting tours and cooking tours throughout France, Spain, Belgium and Italy for most of the year; then a few months in San Francisco providing US tours to Europeans.

They are esteemed experts in the European culture and geography and provide breathtaking, personalized tours – which leaves little time to manage a website, much less manage the newest marketing trends for web conversions.

Their website was over ten years old, which not only showed in the design but also showed in the inefficient navigation function, creating friction for their visitors to quickly convert and reserve directly with their tour over a competitive marketplace of other tour operators and tour aggregators.

They have no shortage of photos from the many tours they have given over many years; however, their current website does not provide an easy way to integrate these images into the visitor experience. Instead, they are stacked into long scrolling, narrow pages, along tiny print.

Customers are also still beholden to snail mail for reservations and payments, making it all the more difficult to get their many website visitors from all over the world to buy.

And, full disclosure, I have taken French Escapade Tours and know, firsthand, the quality of this tour – which was not at all represented in the quality of the experience visiting and booking on their website.