A tour company that had to build its own software
Under2 Company Limited builds travel technology from Hanoi. It did not start that way. For the first years it sold tours, and the software exists because nothing we could buy survived contact with our own operation.
The short version
Under2 Company Limited was registered in Hanoi in December 2016 — business registration 0107665342, issued on 14/12/2016. It began life as a tour operator with an international tour operator licence. Today it builds booking platforms, websites, payment and channel integrations for other travel businesses.
The core team is about ten people, working with outside development partners on individual projects, and the booking platform izBooking currently runs more than a thousand merchant sites.
Under2 is a software company with an operator's memory. That is the whole difference, and it shows up in how the systems behave when something goes wrong rather than in a longer feature list.
December 2016, and what the company was then
The company was set up in Hanoi to sell inbound travel: itineraries in Vietnam and the wider Mekong region, sold to foreign visitors and to agents abroad. It held an international tour operator licence, number 01-0117/2017/SDL-GPLHQT, and it operated the way almost every operator of that size operated at the time — a shared spreadsheet for availability, an inbox for requests, a calendar on the wall, and one person who knew what all three really meant.
That period is on this page for one reason: it is where our understanding of the operational problem comes from. It is not what we sell now, and there is no tour on this website because we do not compete with the operators who run on our platform. The travel brands that grew out of those years still exist inside the group, and the work page states plainly that they are ours rather than third-party clients.
The awards belong to that period, and to the travel side
Between 2016 and 2019 the travel business collected the recognition an inbound operator collects. We list it because leaving it out would look like hiding something, and we date it because an award is a photograph of a year, not a description of a product.
- TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence, awarded continuously from 2016
- Best growth partner of Vinpearl, 2018
- Top 10 Famous Brands, awarded by the International Intellectual Property Institute together with the Vietnam Union of Science and Entrepreneurs
- International tour operator licence 01-0117/2017/SDL-GPLHQT, held by the travel arm
Every item above was earned by the tour operating business between 2016 and 2019. None of them says anything about the software we write today. No independent body has audited our engineering, our security practice or our uptime, and the security page says so in more detail rather than less.
Why an operator ends up writing software
The turning point was ordinary. Two people sold the same seat on the same boat for the same Saturday, because availability lived in a spreadsheet, the agent lists arrived by email, and the confirmation was written by hand. One person spent a morning apologising in two languages, and the fix everyone agreed on was to be more careful. That fix lasted about a month.
We bought tools. Each of them solved one part and assumed the rest of the world worked the way its designers imagined. A booking widget that did not know about agent rates. A channel manager that pushed a price we had already changed. A payment page that lost a third of the people who reached it because it asked for a local address from a customer in Sydney.
The first version of what became izBooking was written to stop our own staff apologising twice a week. It was not a product plan. It became one when other operators saw it running and asked whether they could use it. It now serves over a thousand merchant sites under other people's brands.
See what the platform became
izBooking is the direct descendant of that first internal system, rebuilt several times since.
What the operating years left behind
We know what a booking looks like when it goes wrong
A fifteen-minute hold that expires while an agent is on the phone. A cancellation that arrives after the supplier has been paid. A card authorisation that succeeds on the bank side and fails on ours. These are not hypothetical test cases to us, which is why they are handled rather than discovered by your staff in month two.
We know what an agent actually asks for
Net rates, a quote they can forward without editing, and an answer today. A consumer checkout is irrelevant to a B2B partner, and putting one in front of them is a common and expensive mistake.
We know which promises cost money
Free date changes, instant confirmation on a product that needs supplier clearance, a refund policy written by marketing. Software will implement any of these, and the operations team then pays for them every week.
We know what it costs to change systems mid-season
Hence our migration rule: a new platform passes an acceptance gate before a single live site moves onto it, and never runs in parallel with the old one on the same inventory.
How the company is put together today
About ten people form the core in Hanoi — analysis, development, integration, content and operations. Around that core we work with outside development partners, brought in per project rather than kept on a bench; the team page explains what that shape costs us.
The work splits in two: products that already exist and can be running next week, under products, and custom builds shaped around one operator's process, under services. Most companies need one, believe they need the other, and are best served by being told which.
What we are not good at
Saying this in public costs us a few enquiries and saves everyone the ones that were going to end badly.
- Brand and design-led work. We build sites that sell, not identity systems. If the brief is a rebrand with a website attached, a design studio should lead it and we should be the second call.
- Round-the-clock coverage. The team works from Hanoi in GMT+7. We answer outside those hours when something is broken, but we will not pretend to a follow-the-sun rota that does not exist.
- Large enterprise procurement. If your process requires a vendor with an ISO certificate and a numeric uptime guarantee on paper, we will fail that screening, and it is better to know it in week one.
- Being the fastest quote in the room. We ask questions before pricing, and a supplier who quotes from a two-line brief is always quicker and usually more expensive by the end.
- Rescuing a project where nobody internally owns the decision. We have tried. Software freezes an unresolved argument, it does not settle one.
What Under2 does not do
- We do not build outside travel.
- We do not take design-only projects with nothing operational behind the screen.
- We do not sell tours in competition with operators using our platform.
- We do not promise a live payment integration in under two weeks, because bank and gateway approval is not something a developer can accelerate.
There is no legal, accounting or marketing arm here either. Earlier versions of this company offered some of that; it is gone, and we refer that work out.
Tell us what is breaking
A short description of what you sell and what you run on today is enough for a written answer with an approach and a price range.
What travel operators ask us most
Is Under2 still a tour operator?
Not as a business we sell on this site. Travel brands founded in those years still operate inside the group, but Under2 the company sells software and build work to other travel businesses.
That separation is deliberate. An operator will not put its inventory on a platform run by a competitor, and we would not either.
How big is the team, really?
About ten people in the core team, plus outside development partners engaged per project. We publish that number rather than a vague one because the honest version tells you what kind of supplier we are.
It means a focused team on a defined scope, and it means we are the wrong supplier for a programme that needs thirty developers next quarter.
Why do you still mention awards from 2018?
Because they happened and because operators who knew the company then ask about them. They belong to the tour operating business between 2016 and 2019 and we say that every time they appear.
They are not evidence about our software. Evidence about our software is what it does when a channel manager pushes a stale price.
Who owns Under2?
Under2 Company Limited is a private Vietnamese company, registered in Hanoi under business registration 0107665342 issued on 14/12/2016. It is not part of a foreign group and has no outside platform investor directing product decisions.
The travel brands in the same ecosystem are related companies, which we state on the work and partners pages rather than presenting them as clients.
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