An excursion marketplace: a new business

Tutu already had a large audience of travellers and decided to offer them excursions. It was a good opportunity for an extra sale: someone had bought a ticket to another city, but there was still room to add something to the trip. The reverse worked too. An interesting excursion could be the reason to travel at all, bringing new customers to the ticket business.

We built and launched a marketplace of carefully selected excursions and integrated it with Tutu’s ticket service.

A reason to book a ticket

A ticket service usually enters the picture after someone has decided where to go. An excursion catalogue can reach them earlier, while they are still looking for a reason to leave home. Tutu can help shape the trip itself, then help people get there.

We connected excursions to Tutu’s shared geographic database. When booking a ticket, travellers can see what to explore at their destination; from an excursion page, they can find tickets to get there. Cities and excursions have their own pages that search engines can index, allowing an interesting offer to bring in people who have never used Tutu before.

The new business has an audience for its first sales, and the existing business gains another way to attract customers.

People behind the catalogue

The service’s value depends on which organisers and excursions make it into the catalogue. Tutu took responsibility for selecting them, and we built that work into the platform: guides supply the content; editors decide what travellers see.

An independent guide or tour company registers, creates a profile, and adds a route description and photos through a personal account. Both profiles and excursions go through review, with a separate interface for Tutu’s staff to check and publish them. Organisers prepare their own materials and manage their listings, leaving editors free to work on the quality of the catalogue without copying other people’s text and photos by hand.

Approved listings form a shared catalogue with city search and filters. Travellers read about the route and guide, choose an excursion and send a booking request; the organiser receives it and gets in touch. We brought self-service for organisers, editorial selection and sales into one system.

Launch the business, hand over the product

We handled development and technical operations, so Tutu could focus on the new business: finding organisers, selecting experiences and working with travellers. The company could test the idea through real bookings while building its own engineering team.

We then handed over a working product with an established catalogue, organisers and bookings. Tutu continued developing the business and later relaunched it as “Tutu Adventures”, expanding into tours by independent organisers and unusual travel experiences. By the end of 2019, the catalogue listed around a thousand experiences in more than 70 countries.