Confidential · Working Document
2 June 2026
A Midas × Asia Street Eats build proposal

Own your availability,
own your margin.

Two ways forward — a quick workaround, or the platform you own.

From Midas Analytics
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Curated food-tour OTA · Japan & SE Asia
01 Where we are right now

A curated food-tour OTA, in the making.

This is where you are right now — and you've made a deliberate choice: fewer, higher-quality vendors over an endless marketplace. Curation is the product.

Today, sales come through Simone's tourism channel; social media launches June 2026. Your supplier base — mostly Japanese — is stable and trusted, which is exactly what makes a deeper integration worth building.

Eight tours are live, heading to ten–twelve, with new markets already in conversation. This is the starting line — not the finish.

4 Japan 1 Thailand 1 Malaysia Korea · in talks China · in talks
Tours live
8 → 10–12
Group size
2–6 pax
Japan tour
~$150 /pax
Social launch
Jun 2026
My understanding — correct me where I'm wrong

The engagement objective: own your availability, own your margin.

02 The standard to match

byfood.com — content-led, clean, owns its rails.

The reference Simone likes. Worth being precise about why it works — it's the bar for your own platform.

byfood.com / food-tours
Food tours · Tokyo

Eat your way through the city.

Content-led blogSEO that pulls travellers in before they ever search a tour.
Clean booking UXFrom browse to confirmed in a few taps — no friction.
Curated, not infiniteA chosen set of experiences — the same instinct as yours.
Owns its railsIts own site, its own checkout — not renting margin to a marketplace.
03 Two frictions

Two things quietly tax the business every day.

One costs you time. The other costs you margin. Both compound as volume grows.

The manual scramble

Every supplier keeps availability in their own place — websites, calendars, a few on Bokun, many not. Today you check each one by hand and book manually.

Every bookingtouched by hand — across heterogeneous supplier calendars

The margin leak

Bokun takes 1.5–2.3%, Stripe 2–2.3% — a blended ~7–8% before bank fees. On a 20% gross margin, that's a meaningful slice gone to rails you don't own.

~7–8% + feesblended platform + payment take, plus HKD 18–25 per supplier transfer
04 Run the math

What you keep, per traveller.

One Japan seat at ~$150, a 50% gross margin. Watch what the rails take from it — and what cutting Bokun gives back.

Per traveller · one Japan seat 50% gross margin
Sell price
$150
Supplier cost
−$75
Gross margin
$75
Of that $75, the rails take $15.75 — 21% — before you keep a cent.
$6.75
$6
$3
$59
bókun Booking fee + currency exchange 2.5% + 2% FX · 4.5% −$6.75
stripe Processing + currency exchange 2% + 2% FX · 4.0% −$6
HSBC Bank transfer $3 flat / transaction −$3
You keep39.5% of sale$59.25
Cut Bokun — that $6.75 a seat comes straight back: ≈ $4,050 a year at today's volume. Your own checkout removes the booking fee and its FX margin entirely. ↳ the opportunity
0%of your gross margin, eaten by fees today.
At ~50 travellers a month × ~$150, that leak is about $790 a month — ~$9,450 a year, before you grow. Bokun is the biggest single slice — and the one your own checkout removes.
Illustrative — pending your real volumes & fee breakdown
05 Two ways forward

Two roads, one destination.

Same goal — your travellers booking, your suppliers flowing straight in. One route works around Bokun; the other replaces it. We'll lay out both — the call is yours.

WHERE WE ARE NOW Still paying Bókun on every seat THE DESTINATION Your travellers, booked CHEAP & FAST THE HIGHWAY YOU OWN
Press → for the second road
Option 1 · Workaround

Sync the calendars through Bokun

An agent reads each supplier's site for availability and pushes it into Bokun — you keep working exactly as you do today.

Fast & cheap Still pays Bokun Built site-by-site
Option 2 · Platform

Build the highway you own

Your own database, site and checkout — infrastructure that lasts. Built once, it carries every seat. After that, the only question left is what to sell, and how.

Built once, owns the rails Recovers the margin Then: just sell
06 The data flow

Two ways to wire it — only one makes you the marketplace.

Start with the workaround on the left. Press next — or the toggle — to flip to the platform and watch where the bookings flow.

TRAVELLERS YOUR SUPPLIERS THE MARKETPLACE Tokyo Osaka Kyoto Bangkok Kuala L. MULTIPLE PER CITY · EVERY PLATFORM bókun rezdy 31 + more ASIA STREET EATS bókun CHANNEL MANAGER −4.5% fee Read blog Book Get email Cancel HUMAN-WRITTEN slow · costly AI-WRITTEN fresh daily
Every supplier flows straight into Asia Street Eats — you own the database, the checkout and the margin.
Suppliers reach you only through Bokun — which charges a fee on every booking and owns the rails you depend on.
Blog written by handSlowA person writes each post — a few a month at best, and the back catalogue never compounds.
Agent reads each supplier siteFastWon't scaleReading a site is quick — but every new supplier you plug in needs its own integration built with the agents. It doesn't scale.
Suppliers sync through integrationsFastOften several suppliers per city, each on a different platform. Availability flows in automatically from whatever they already use — we integrate with all of them, effortlessly. Syncs from bókun rezdy 31Calendar
Blog written by an AI agentFastFresh posts and images every day — compounding indexed pages that grow your search traffic over time.
Option 1 · The Workaround Fast relief — dead end
07

Sync the calendars — but still through Bokun.

An agent reads every supplier's site for availability and pushes it into Bokun. The scramble eases in weeks — but you end up more tied to Bokun, not less.

An agent does the reading

It scrapes each supplier's site and writes availability into Bokun — no new tools for your team.

Live in weeks, not months

The smallest possible build. You keep working exactly the way you do today.

You still pay Bokun

Every booking runs on Bokun's rails — and Bokun's fees. The margin leak stays wide open.

It can't grow on its own

Every new supplier site means hand-building new agent logic to read it. No website, no checkout, no blog — and it never compounds.

The catch

It eases the pain — then locks you deeper into Bokun and gets torn out later.

Option 2 · The Platform Recommended — built in four phases
08

Your own OTA, built in four phases.

A byfood-class platform you own end-to-end — and the right foundation to build everything else on. Each phase stands on the one before, and every layer scales as you add suppliers, markets and tours.

1
Foundation

Database + website

Your own data model and a clean, content-led site — the byfood standard, on rails you own.

2
Reach

SEO blog automation

The content engine that pulls travellers in before they ever search for a tour.

3
Supply

Availability, ingested

Pull live availability from a provider that isn't Bokun, populate the database, and test the whole backend.

4
Revenue

Checkout + booking flow

Stripe payments, food-tour booking, confirmation emails and 48-hour cancellations — the step that recovers the margin.

Build it once, build it right — this is the platform everything else scales on top of, and you own every layer the moment it lands.
09 The plan

Two timelines — a 4-week patch, or the 7-week platform.

Option 1 buys ~4 weeks of relief on Bokun's rails. Option 2 builds the platform you own, phase by phase. Sequence is illustrative; firm dates are set at kickoff. Hover any bar for detail.

Phase Wk 0Wk 1Wk 2Wk 3Wk 4Wk 5Wk 6Wk 7
Option 1 · Workaround USD 12,000 · ~4 weeks, then torn out
0Kickoff & access
Kickoff
·Agent reads supplier sites
Read each site
·Sync into Bokun + test
Sync + test
Option 2 · Platform USD 28,000 · ~7 weeks, yours to keep
0Kickoff & data access
Kickoff
1Database + website
Database + site
2SEO blog automation
SEO engine
3Availability + backend test
Availability + test
4Stripe checkout + booking flow
Checkout + flow
10 Investment

Two options, costed.

What each road costs — built once, then run each month.

Option 1 · Workaround
Build · one-timeUSD 12,000
Run · the agentsUSD 200/mo
A calendar sync through Bokun — you keep working exactly as you do today.
Option 2 · Platform
Build · one-timeUSD 28,000
Run · the agents, the database & the platformUSD 380/mo
Database, website, SEO blog & your own Stripe checkout — built & fully yours to scale.
Run cost
The monthly fee runs the AI agents — availability sync, SEO blog, ingestion. Assumes up to 10 supplier integrations, in both options.
Billing
Build is phased — tied to the four delivery phases. Run is billed monthly.
Fees illustrative — confirmed at kickoff
11 The business case

The platform pays for itself.

Three reasons it compounds — and the math that shows recovered Bokun fees cover the build, often inside the first year.

It scales

Add suppliers, tours and markets without re-paying a platform tax on every booking.

SEO compounds

AI-written pages index daily and rank — fresh traffic you never pay per click for, month on month.

Bokun, gone

Every booking on your own rails keeps the ~$6.75 booking fee that used to flow to Bokun.

Bokun fees recovered — cumulative ~50% MoM · 50 → ~4,325 seats/mo
Month-on-month seat growth
Build cost · $28,000
M1M2M3M4M5M6M7M8M9M10M11M12
Paying back In profit Build cost Hover a bar for seats & recovered fees

Pays for itself

Build costUSD 28,000
≈ month 10
Recovered Bokun fees clear the $28,000 build by month 10. Everything after is upside — and it keeps compounding.
Illustrative — pending your real volumes & fee breakdown
12 Why Midas

AI, data & platform — in your corner.

Three senior people, no juniors. The exact build team this needs: agents that read messy supplier data, the layer that holds it, and the platform travellers actually book through.

AI Lead · Michele De Filippo, PhD

Agents & orchestration

The agents that read heterogeneous supplier calendars and normalise them into one availability layer — the hard, messy part.

Data Engineer · Anirudh Agarwal

The data layer

The database, the connectors and availability ingestion — the engineering that turns scattered supplier calendars into one source of truth.

Full-stack Engineer · Zakeen Ahmed

The platform

The website, the Stripe checkout and the booking flow — the product your travellers actually touch, built and owned end-to-end.

How we work

We build it with you — the knowledge and the code stay inside Asia Street Eats.

13 From here to kickoff

Three steps to start.

A simple path from your thumbs-up to Week 0.

Step 01

Your green light.

A short "let's do this" confirms the engagement and the scope of the build.

Step 02

NDA & SA.

Midas drafts and circulates the NDA and the service agreement. You sign.

Step 03

Kickoff & Week 0.

We agree the supplier map and read-access; data access requested; Week 1 starts building.

Michele De Filippo
Michele De Filippo, PhD
CEO · Midas Analytics
michele@midasanalytics.ai midasanalytics.ai LinkedIn

Thank you.

Looking forward to building the layer that lets Asia Street Eats own its availability — and its margin.

midasanalytics.ai
A Appendix · Financial incentive

Engaging Midas cuts cost in half.

The platform build qualifies for the HKSAR Inland Revenue Department's enhanced R&D tax deduction. Midas Analytics is a certified DLRI — No. D041.

0% tax deduction on qualifying R&D expenditure under Cap. 112.
✓ Req 01

DLRI-certified payee.

Midas Analytics — D041, valid through Jul 2026.

✓ Req 02

R&D in HK, new tech.

An AI-driven booking platform, built out of HK.

Option 2 feeUSD 28,000
300% deductionUSD 84,000
Savings @ 16.5%− USD 13,860
Effective costUSD 14,140
−50% Effective discount
DLRI Instrument of Designation — Midas Analytics Limited, No. D041 Click to enlarge
ITC · DLRI Cap. 112 DIPN 55
01/19
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