A group travel organizer booking site for the trips you already run

The month before a departure without a group travel organizer booking site

A group organizer spends the month before a trip acting as an unpaid travel agent. The trip itself is full and planned. What is not planned is how 12 people get to the starting point, where they sleep the night before, and what the four of them who arrive early do with their spare afternoon.

So the questions come in one at a time. Which airport, which flight, is there a later one, can I change it, is the hotel near the meeting point, does it allow a late check in, what is there to do on Thursday. You answer each one by looking something up and retyping it into a message or a group chat.

Some of it goes wrong in predictable ways. One traveler books into the wrong airport. Another finds a fare that cannot be changed and then needs to change it. A third arrives a day early with no room and asks you to fix it at 9pm. None of that is the trip you sell, and all of it lands on you.

The awkward part is that these are real bookings with real value moving through your hands, and none of it is yours. You do the work of arranging flights and hotels for a dozen people, and every one of those bookings is made on someone else's site.

What this sells, and what it does not

Be clear on the boundary before anything else. OTA Builder does not host or sell your own tours, and there is no feature in it for putting your own departures on sale, taking deposits for them or managing places on them. It sells flights, hotels and activities from OTA Builder's own supply.

You keep selling your trips exactly as you do today, on the channels that already fill them. What your site adds is everything around the trip: the flights in and out, the hotel nights either side, and activities on the free days. OTA Builder creates that website under your own brand, name and domain, and building it, running it and selling on it are free.

How a booking site changes the run up to a departure

With your own site, the month before a departure has one link in it instead of fifty answers. You send your group the address of your own booking site and they search flights into the meeting city themselves, on one way, return or multi city searches, with filters for airline, stops and departure time on each leg.

They book the hotel for the night before after reading the check in window and the deposit policy on the page. They add the museum or the boat trip for their free afternoon. Each traveler gets their own e-ticket and their own vouchers by email, under your site's name, and the PNR sits in their own name so they can check it on the airline's own website. Once you sign up, your site is live within one working day.

Ana is a fictional group organizer invented for this page. She runs walking trips in the mountains, six departures a year, about 12 travelers each, and has always sent people off to arrange their own flights.

Round numbers, for illustration only:

• She sets a markup of $20 per passenger on flights, 5 percent on hotels and 10 percent on activities.
• A return fare found at $400 shows on her site at $420.
• One night at a hotel near the meeting point found at $100 shows at $105.
• A half day guided walk from the activities supply found at $50 shows at $55.
• A traveler books all three and pays $580 on Ana's site.

Her own walking trip is still sold the way it always was, away from the site. These numbers are illustrations, not a typical result.

Illustration only, not a typical result.

The three features that matter most to a group organizer

Three parts of the site do the work for someone who already runs trips: flights into the meeting point, hotels for the nights on either side, and activities for the free days.

Flights into the meeting point

Flight search covers one way, return and multi city, which matters when half your group is adding a city before or after. Results start arriving within seconds, duplicate offers are removed, and refund and change rules are shown where the source provides them, so the traveler who needs a changeable fare can see which one to pick. A price calendar shows the lowest fare found for each day, which helps a group that can shift a departure by a day. See multi city in the glossary.

Hotels for the nights around the trip

Hotel search covers a whole city or one property, with room size, bed types, photos and full policies: check in window, children, pets, meals and deposits. That is what settles the late arrival question before it reaches you. The hotel voucher arrives by email with your site's name on it. How to add hotel booking to your travel website goes into the detail.

Activities for the free days

Your site sells 2,500+ activities from OTA Builder's supply, searchable by destination, with ticket types by age and a voucher by email. These are not your tours and they are not sold as yours. They fill the afternoons your own program leaves open. How to sell tours, activities and attraction tickets online explains what that supply covers.

Around the trip, not instead of it

Nothing here replaces what you already do. The trips you design, price and lead stay yours and stay where they are sold now. The site takes the parts you were arranging for free and turns them into bookings with your own markup on them.

Features lists what is in the site, pricing covers the free plan and the $99 per year bundle, and how to start an online travel agency for free is a good next read if this is your first time selling travel outside your own departures. If you also advise individual clients between trips, the page for independent travel advisors covers that work.