Marjorie: Sri Lanka, differently
Thirteen years ago, Marjorie settled in Sri Lanka. With Chamika, she co-founded Atypique — an agency built on lived travel rather than passive tourism. She shares her view of her adopted country and her work as a DMC.
Thirteen years ago, Marjorie settled in Sri Lanka. With Chamika, an entrepreneur of Sri Lankan origin, she co-founded Atypique Lanka - since become Atypique Voyages, with local teams deployed across Asia (Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines). A name that suits her well: her own path is just as unconventional.
Driven by a shared conviction - that a memorable trip is born of lived experiences rather than passive tourism - Marjorie and Chamika built an agency committed to respecting people, their culture and their environment. This commitment continues in particular through the Atypique Foundation, launched in 2019: it channels the agency's presence on the ground into local development initiatives, especially in favour of the empowerment of Sri Lankan women, as well as the preservation of cultural and natural ecosystems. An approach recognised in 2026 by the Travelife certification, which acknowledges Atypique Lanka's commitments to responsible tourism. Initiatives we value greatly at TOOGO.
A TOOGO user, Marjorie shares with us her view of her adopted country and of her work as a DMC.
Sri Lanka & the DMC's craft
What are your secret gems in Sri Lanka, the ones you love to reveal to your travellers?
I love sharing Anuradhapura by bike, with a passionate guide who devised his own route along the back lanes. It lets you discover this high place of Sri Lankan Buddhism - which still draws thousands of pilgrims today - in a far more intimate way.
And then, sleeping up in the trees facing the paddy fields in the south of Sri Lanka: waking to birdsong or squirrels running across the roof, then watching the mist rise gently over the rice fields… It's a truly timeless moment.
After all these years, what still makes you love your work so much?
Sharing the country that has welcomed me for 13 years now. And above all its people. Sri Lankans have this quite incredible ability to keep smiling whatever the situation. It is, in fact, probably the feedback we hear most often from our travellers: “the kindness of the people”.
What is the most unexpected or amusing client request you've received?
Not really amusing, but certainly one of the most moving. A traveller who had been adopted and grew up in France once asked us to help her find her biological mother in Sri Lanka. She had discovered that she was probably part of the stolen-babies scandal of the 1990s. The process was extremely delicate: we had to help her in her search while respecting the life of this mother, who might never have spoken of this story to those close to her. In the end, they were able to meet. It was an extremely powerful moment.
TOOGO & her
TOOGO in three words would be…?
Efficiency, organisation… and sometimes a headache!
What first won you over about TOOGO?
The ability to bring almost all of our activity together in a single tool: creating and editing quotes, the programme library, logistics, sales tracking…
Before TOOGO / after TOOGO: what has changed the most in your day-to-day?
No more Excel spreadsheets all over the place, nor programmes in Word! It was only four years ago, and yet it feels like another life.
What is your favourite TOOGO feature, the one you would struggle to do without today?
As a manager, clearly the new Desk: having a synthetic view of sales, logistics and the sales funnel is extremely useful. And of course the new statistics, very much so!
Which task used to take far too much of your time before TOOGO?
Everything! More seriously, it was above all the sheer number of different files, spreadsheets and tools that made us lose an enormous amount of time.
How does TOOGO help you create a better travel experience for your clients?
TOOGO lets us control much better the quality of what is sent to the traveller right from the sales phase - that, in any case, is one of the points that mattered most to me! I can monitor the quotes and, thanks to a centralised library of content and visuals, we also guarantee greater consistency with our brand identity. My Travel Designers can no longer, for example, pick a random photo and drop it into a quote when it doesn't match our brand guidelines at all!
If you had to explain to another DMC why you use TOOGO, what would you say in one sentence?
TOOGO lets us steer a large part of our activity from a single environment: sales, production, logistics and statistics.
If there were one feature you'd dream of seeing appear in TOOGO tomorrow, what would it be?
A real CRM - but apparently it's on its way! Otherwise, probably going even further on the accounting and finance side, so as to minimise the need for a specialised external software, as is currently the case.
(Editor's note: by the time this article was published, TOOGO CRM 2 had been released!)
And since TOOGO saves you time: what do you like to do with the time you gain?
Work on my production! Looking for new experiences, improving our itineraries and imagining the next gems we'll share with our travellers.