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How Hanaline Makes Local Culture Accessible With AI Multilingual Tours
After visiting Kyoto’s Kiyomizu-dera Temple five or six times and snapping countless photos, Lannie Kuo, COO of Hanaline, realized she still knew nothing about the history behind those iconic pillars. Once, after securing a rare tour spot at a Japanese sake brewery, she found herself unable to understand the Japanese-only presentation—smiling awkwardly for an hour before leaving with just a single beer.
These personal experiences highlight a key challenge of post-pandemic global tourism: travelers can arrive at a destination, but often remain disconnected from its stories and culture.
Turning a Pain Point into a Business Opportunity
That pain point became the inspiration for Hanaline, a Taiwanese startup that developed a software platform enabling local organizations to create multilingual digital tours—no coding required, and ready within half a day. Since launching in October 2025, Hanaline has landed contracts with partners in Italy, Kobe Electric Railway in Japan, and six other cities. Now, the team is planning a seed funding round to deepen its reach in Japan’s B2B market and bring this internationally-proven digital translation model back to Taiwan.
How did Hanaline transform local revitalization from a subsidy-driven endeavor into a self-sustaining business?
From Gamified Tours to AI-Powered Digital Interpreters
Unlike traditional guided tour apps that cost millions of NT dollars and take months to develop, Hanaline is designed for simplicity and flexibility. Users upload photos and descriptions, and the system leverages AI to instantly convert them into multiple languages, including Mandarin, English, and Japanese—with options to choose different voice tones and narration styles.
But Hanaline goes beyond static audio guides. CEO Rex Chen explains, “We want to simulate the sense of interaction you get with a real guide. After publishing the content, tourists can receive tasks while exploring, like checking in via GPS, finding a specific pillar or architectural detail, or answering cultural trivia. This shifts the experience from passive sightseeing to active exploration.”
Maintaining these tours is equally easy. “If a route changes due to construction or an exhibit moves, you no longer need to call a developer. You just update the route in the backend, and it’s instantly refreshed,” Kuo adds.
Proven Results in Europe and Japan
Hanaline’s flexibility was first proven in Europe. Early in development, the founders visited an Italian museum housing Roman artifacts. With only a director and one part-time assistant on staff, the museum would shut its doors at noon daily, even during peak tourist hours. This situation, driven by post-pandemic labor shortages and language barriers, is common in the global tourism industry, where rich content goes unshared and its value remains untapped.
Hanaline solved this with digital tours, enabling the museum to serve visitors in multiple languages—even with minimal staff—offering rich English and French content. The system not only increased what tourists were willing to pay, but also broadened the audience. This transformation won a digital innovation award from the Florence government and brought the team to the United Nations to share their experience in sustainable tourism.
With proven success and low development costs, Hanaline also broke into the Japanese market. Many second- and third-tier Japanese cities struggle with a cycle: too few tourists to support professional guides, and too few guides to attract high-value tourists. In fact, many such cities lack even QR codes, relying instead on paper brochures. Traditionally, developing a custom tour app in Japan costs 600,000 to 800,000 yen (about USD 4,000 to 5,300), with low user retention.
Hanaline’s lightweight solution now serves six partners in Japan, including a major collaboration with Kobe Electric Railway. Hanaline acts as a “digital translator,” creating content that directs visitors from stations to local businesses, leveraging deep historical material from places like Arima Onsen and the Ijinkan district.
Empowering Local Guides and the Creator Economy
Beyond official collaborations, Hanaline aims to empower individual tour guides. “A guide only has one body. Even during peak season, they can only lead one group per day and must turn down other jobs. In the off-season, they might have no income at all,” says Lannie Kuo.
To break this cycle, Hanaline introduced a creator economy business model. Guides can digitize and monetize their favorite routes, turning nine out of ten into affordable digital tours that generate passive income. When tourists are captivated by these digital experiences, guides can offer a high-value, in-person tour as their premium service. With Hanaline, guides can build their own brands and develop long-term business beyond traditional limitations.
For corporate clients, Hanaline adopts a SaaS subscription plus content-sharing model. Much like Canva, clients pay monthly fees based on the number of routes, AI features, and usage. Special cultural translation projects incur additional fees. For guides and creators, the platform enables revenue sharing, letting the company grow from a simple tool provider into a profitable ecosystem rich with content assets.
Hanaline’s name comes from the Taiwanese Hokkien phrase “Hāng-á-lāi,” meaning someone who knows all the local secrets. Although the team’s spirit is rooted in Taiwan, their business journey started far from home.
Founders Kuo and Chen were driven by a sense of cultural anxiety. “When foreign friends asked for travel recommendations in Taiwan, beyond Taipei 101 and soup dumplings, I struggled to share any deeper local stories,” Kuo admits. As avid travelers in Japan, they often marveled at beautiful sights but were left unable to understand the deeper history due to language barriers.
The team’s expertise in gamification, board games, and digital and live-action games became the foundation for Hanaline’s product. Their philosophy centers on making historical and cultural content accessible, accurate, and engaging for the public.
Bringing International Experience Back Home
Despite successes in Japan and Italy, the team has never forgotten its roots. The founders first expanded overseas to prove their business model, then returned to Taiwan to ignite local success with international experience.
In Taiwan, Hanaline adopted a B2B strategy tailored to local needs, focusing on being an ESG transformation partner for businesses and cultural institutions. They work with hotels and temples, transforming guided tours into value-added services for guests and tools for retail promotion.
Today, Hanaline serves around 10,000 users across Taiwan and Europe. At the Chihpen Royal Hotel in Taiwan and Museo di Pistoia in Italy, the introduction of digital tours extended average visitor stays by about 70 percent and improved tour satisfaction by 82 percent. In-store conversion rates for experiential products increased by 18 to 35 percent.
Looking ahead, the team plans to partner with businesses to turn one-off ESG sponsorships into ongoing social investments that help build digital tour systems for cultural institutions. “We want to help local cultural organizations create self-sustaining revenue models, so invested funds partially flow back and reduce reliance on government subsidies over time,” they say.
There are also plans for educational game design competitions to help the next generation rediscover Taiwanese culture from new perspectives.
Kuo concludes, “Whether in Italy, Japan, or Taiwan, if local memories are not digitally preserved and translated, once the buildings are gone and the elders pass away, those stories are lost forever. What we want to do is preserve the story behind every building and give it a viable business model for the future.”
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