You’ve seen the data, and you know the time has come to offer your guests experiences bookings online. Now the question becomes which technology should you use?
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The technology stack at most hotels is layered, complex and creates multiple hurdles to integrating anything new. And yet, the costs of doing nothing are increasing every year. That’s why we’ve put together this handy guide to help you through the process of choosing activities software, and implementing it in a way that’s right for your hotel.Ultimately there are three key performance indicators (KPIs) where you should see an impact from your activities software:

In order to determine the impact on these KPIs, you’ll want to asses activities software providers according to six key features:

Bespoke experiences refers to the ability to add in-house experiences, or experiences from your own trusted partners, in addition to the “out of the box” catalog.
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As you’d imagine, you won’t get anything other than Viator experiences from a Viator API. That means that integrating anything in addition is likely to require a custom build by your hotel, and even then it’s unlikely you’ll be able to present the experiences truly side by side with those from Viator given how their endpoints are set-up.
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The Turneo platform meanwhile sets itself apart from other providers through the ability to add any experience and have it be automatically integrated into both front-end and back-end use cases. It’s quick and requires no technical knowledge to add in-house experiences via their Experiences Hub, plus you can send invites to other trusted organizers you work with that may not be on major platforms such as Viator. This means that your scope to differentiate via activities and experiences - building your brand and boosting your direct bookings, is much higher with the Turneo platform.

The experiences catalog refers to the quantity and quality of experiences you can access “out of the box”, ready to start selling straightaway.
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Typically, APIs are provided by global experience platforms such as Viator, meaning you’ll get access to a vast catalog of experiences, often as seen on their own traveler-facing websites. You’ll struggle to find such immediate access to such an extensive list of tours and experiences anywhere else. However, be warned that whatever activities you can access, so too can every other hotel nearby - so the options to differentiate are limited.
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Turneo experiences platform, also comes with an “out of the box” experiences catalog that lets you start selling straightaway. However, the catalog is much more curated than that of global players such as Viator so the list is likely to not be quite as long. However, the lack of quantity is made up for in quality - with each experience vetted by the platform, and duplicates removed - so if you don’t want to create your own prioritization algorithm and deduplication mechanism, it can be a good option.

You will want to assess the ease of connecting any activities software to your hotel website, app or other guest-facing channels - and of course to back-end systems such as your Property Management System (PMS)
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The benefit of a full API integration is that you’ll have full flexibility to integrate into any channels of your choosing. However, it's worth noting that building and maintaining a bespoke API integration like this can become incredibly costly and time intensive. Depending on your set-up, the initial build is likely to take at least 6 months before you're able to start testing the product - or seeing any returns.

Whilst Turneo also offers a full API integration, the core proposition is slightly different. A new "Elements" feature lets you add select experiences to your website with just a few lines of copy and paste code. You create groups of experiences (e.g. "wellness" options, or "recommendations of the week") and set a series of custom branding and design factors (including inheriting aspects such as font directly from your website). You'll be able to roll out an initial solution in days or weeks depending on your tech set-up, letting you test, learn and grow before committing significant time and investment.

Turneo are also rolling out a growing number of PMS partnerships. This makes certain features - such as payment on-room, or activities-based guest itineraries available “out of the box”. Again, this comes in handy if you are wanting to avoid long lead times of development build and maintaining multiple costly bespoke integrations.

For many years, activities offers have been considered a wild west by hoteliers: finding it difficult to track what is being sold, to whom, and what impact it is having on that guest’s stay. However, the ability to see, track and measure over time the performance of your activities offer enables you to make actionable improvements and should be a staple of any activities software.
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A key differentiator of the Turneo platform is the expert insights and analytics available via their Experiences Hub. You’ll get real-time updates on live bookings, but also be able to delve into the details of which experiences are being browsed, which channels guests are using, and what reviews they ultimately end up giving. You’ll be able to create in-depth guest profiles for personalization and AI itinerary generation with their standard platform package.
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With the Viator API, you’ll need to pay extra for bookings data access, and you won’t have the option to see channels, impressions or reviews. Plus, any interface will have to be built yourself.

Whilst we have discussed many indirect benefits of offering activities at your hotel, it is also important to consider the direct economics of your earnings potential with any software provider. Fortunately, this is often fairly easy to calculate using a representative standard booking, and publicly accessible data on organizer earnings and platform commission.
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With API integrations such as Viator, hotels are typically offered a fixed affiliate fee of around 8%. This can limit your profit potential in the long-term, especially as global API providers can act as a monopoly over supply.
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With the Turneo experiences platform, commission is agreed directly between organizers and hotels. Because hotels are free to choose which organizers they feature, there is incentive to offer more generous commissions, and also the ability to honour any previously negotiated contracts. The result is that hotels typically earn between 15% and 25% of every booking value - over double the affiliate fee.

A global API provider such as Viator can be a tempting option given their extensive catalog and established brand. However, it is worth noting the amount of custom work you’ll have to do to ensure that their API integrates sufficiently with your hotel tech stack, including any additional experiences you may want to offer.
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In the long-run it is likely that the Turneo platform could prove more effective and profitable, especially if you are excited to grow your offer, establish your own experiences or provider relationships, and don’t want to sink investment into long upfront build and maintenance.