From Hawaii Roots to Leading Vacation Rental Booking Engines

How it all started

Started in Hawaii. Built to help.

TechSpokes began in 2008 in Kalaheo, on Kaua‘i—the Guardian Island of Hawaii. That origin shaped our purpose. In Hawaiian culture, kōkua means help, but also protection. We carried that meaning into technology, acting as a shield between property managers and the complexity of modern technology.

We started as a marketing agency focused on travel, tourism, and vacation rentals. Our small team was already running a Hawaii-based travel blog to test ideas in traffic generation, SEO, and storytelling. Today Beat of Hawaii attracts over a million unique visitors each month, and continues to grow.

Living in a place powered by tourism, it was clear that vacation rentals needed the most help—and the tools to grow direct business simply didn’t exist.

Co-founders Jeff Tucker and Rob Kvidt began helping local managers to connect marketing with emerging web technology. Jeff’s technical consulting background allowed us to translate marketing needs into digital infrastructure. When Serge Liatko joined (later in 2008), we gained the engineering capability to build what we had been missing—a one-stop technology platform that supported the kind of marketing we believed in.

That is how TechSpokes took shape: born from Hawaii’s hospitality spirit, built by marketers and engineers who wanted technology to serve people, not the other way around.

The (r)evolution

From a single website to an engine.

Our first technology work centered on V12, the property-management system originally owned by HomeAway (now deprecated by new owners – Expedia). Many large vacation-rental operators at the time relied on it, but integration limits made growth difficult. We began by building websites and booking flows around V12, creating faster, cleaner, and more reliable user experiences for both guests and managers.

In 2009, while most of the industry was shifting toward mobile-first design, we took a different path—business-first. Instead of starting with screens, we started with goals: more bookings, smoother operations, stronger direct revenue. Every layout, workflow, and feature was built to serve that outcome. That mindset—technology shaped around business objectives, not trends—still defines how we design and build today.

As the industry evolved, we saw new systems appear, but few matched the flexibility and enterprise-grade capability our clients needed. When Track PMS emerged, it stood out as the most forward-looking platform—flexible, scalable, and engineered for professional operators.

Transitioning from V12 to Track was a turning point. We rebuilt our architecture entirely to align with Track’s APIs, preserving the depth of our booking and marketing experience while modernizing the core. The result became a Track-integrated direct booking engine that unites web, booking, and SEO performance in one system—built for scale, direct ownership, and measurable return.