How to Sell Tours, Activities and Attraction Tickets Online
Sell activities online from your own travel website: 2,500+ activities, search by destination, ticket types by age, vouchers by email and your markup.
By the OTA Builder team. Updated September 15, 2026. 11 minute read.
To sell activities online you need three things: a website where people can search them, a price you control, and a way to deliver the ticket after payment. OTA Builder gives you all three, because every site it builds comes with 2,500+ activities in its supply, search by destination, ticket types by age, and a voucher sent to the customer by email.
Settle one point before you go further. OTA Builder sells activities from its own supply. It does not host or sell the tours you run yourself, so if you guide a walking tour on Saturdays, this is not the place to list it and take bookings for those departures. What you can do is sell the flights, hotels and activities that surround your trips, under your own brand.
This guide covers why activities are the easiest thing to add to a trip someone has already planned, how age based tickets change what a family pays, how to pick the destinations worth featuring, how to write about an activity so a stranger books it, and what happens on the morning of the tour.
Why are activities the easiest add-on to a trip?
Activities are the easiest add-on because the hard decision has already been made. By the time someone is looking at a sunset cruise or a museum entry, they have chosen the city, the dates and the people they are traveling with. You are not selling a trip. You are selling an afternoon inside a trip that exists.
That changes the size of the ask. A flight is a large payment with rules attached, and buyers slow down, compare and come back tomorrow. An attraction ticket is small, the rules are short, and the answer is usually yes or no in the same sitting. Many buyers who hesitate over a fare will add two tickets without thinking about it.
It also changes the timing. Flights and hotels are bought early. Activities are often bought in the last week before travel, and sometimes from a hotel room the night before. That gives you a second and a third reason to contact the same customer after the big booking is done, which is the part most new sellers miss.
The math is friendly too. Your markup on one activity is small next to a markup on a long haul fare, but activities repeat. A family of four buys three activities in one destination and you have priced twelve tickets. If you want the full picture of where the money sits across flights, hotels and activities, read how travel agencies make money on markup.
There is one more reason, and it is about trust. A customer who books a $60 ticket from you and receives a working voucher has tested you cheaply. The next time they need a $900 fare, you are no longer a stranger with a website.
How do age based ticket types work for families?
An activity ticket type is the version of a ticket sold to one kind of visitor: an adult, a child, sometimes a senior or a student. OTA Builder shows ticket types by age in activity search on your website, and the customer picks the ones that match their group before they pay.
This matters more than it sounds. Families are the biggest activity buyers you will serve, and a family of five is rarely five adult tickets. Get the ticket types right and a boat trip that looked expensive becomes affordable. Get them wrong and the family either overpays or turns up with tickets that do not match the people standing at the gate.
The age bands belong to the activity, not to you and not to your website. One aquarium may treat a twelve year old as a child and the next one may not, and infant rules differ again, so the number that matters is always the one on the activity you are selling. Your job in your own writing is to tell people to check it rather than to guess it.
| Ticket type | Who it usually covers | What to tell the customer |
|---|---|---|
| Adult | Full price visitors above the activity's child age | Check the age where adult pricing starts, since it varies by activity |
| Child | Younger visitors, often at a reduced price | The band differs by activity, so read it before choosing quantity |
| Infant | The youngest travelers, sometimes free | Free does not always mean no ticket, so include them if asked |
| Senior | Older visitors where the activity offers it | Proof of age may be requested at the entrance |
| Student | Students where the activity offers it | A student card is often needed on the day |
Price is not the only reason to get this right. An activity that checks tickets at the door will send a group back to the counter if the tickets do not match the people, and the person they will message about it is you, not the activity. A minute spent on ages when the booking is made saves an hour on the day.
Two habits keep this clean. First, ask for ages, not for the number of people, any time you quote a group by message. Second, count the group out loud in your reply: two adults, one child, one infant. It takes a sentence and it prevents the refund conversation later.
Which destinations should you feature when you sell activities online?
Feature the destinations your audience already travels to, not the ones with the most activities available. A tours and activities booking website that tries to cover the world converts worse than one that covers four cities properly, because your writing, your photos and your follow up all get thinner as the list grows.
Start from where your existing demand points. If your messages and your bookings cluster around three or four cities, those are your cities. If you are starting from nothing, borrow the demand from the flights and hotels you already sell, since the destination someone books a room in is the destination they will buy tickets in.
Then run each candidate through a short checklist before you commit to writing about it.
| Question | Why it matters | A good sign |
|---|---|---|
| Do your people already go there? | Demand you already have is cheaper than demand you must create | You get repeat questions about the city |
| Is there depth in the supply? | One activity in a city cannot carry a page | Search by destination returns a real choice |
| Does it suit families? | Age based tickets are where activities earn most | Museums, boats, parks, zoos |
| Can you describe it firsthand? | Specific writing outsells generic writing | You have been, or you sell there constantly |
| Does it pair with a hotel you sell? | Activities ride along with a room booking | You already book hotels in that city |
| Is it sold year round? | A three month season limits what you can build | Indoor or all weather options exist |
Four to six destinations is a healthy starting list for one person. Write about those until the questions arrive on their own, then add the next one. You can search the full supply from day one, so a customer asking about a city you have not written about yet is still served. The list is about where you spend your attention, not about what your website can sell.
How do you write activity pages that sell?
Write about the activity the way you would answer a friend who asked whether it is worth it. The pages and posts that sell attraction tickets on a website answer four questions in the first five lines: what is it, who is it good for, how long does it take, and what does it cost for the group in front of you.
Lead with the specific detail, not the adjective. "A ninety minute boat that leaves from the old harbor and gets back before dinner" tells a parent more than "an unforgettable cruise". Anyone can write the adjective. Only someone who knows the city can write the ninety minutes and the old harbor.
Then handle the family question openly. Say which ticket types the activity uses, say that age bands are set by the activity, and tell readers to check the band before they choose quantities. Doing this in your own words costs you three sentences and removes the most common reason an activity booking goes wrong.
Give people the practical facts they will ask you anyway: how to get there, what to bring, how early to arrive, what happens in the rain. You will not have every answer for every activity, and when you do not, say so and point the reader at the activity's own conditions rather than inventing a policy.
Close each piece with one link into search on your own website, aimed at the destination, not at a general home page. The point of the writing is to move someone from reading to searching without a detour. If your readers live on social platforms, the same text works as a caption with the link in your profile, which is the pattern described in selling travel on Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp.
How do you bundle activities with flights and hotels in your content?
You bundle with words and links, not with software. Your website sells flights, hotels and activities as three searches under one brand, and the bundle happens in what you write around them: a post that plans four days in a city, an email after a hotel booking, a reply that adds two tickets to a trip someone already paid for.
The simplest version is the follow up. Someone books a hotel through you for four nights. Two days later you send a short message with three things to do in that city and a link to activity search for the destination. Nothing about that is automated, and nothing about it needs to be. It is the same work a good agent has always done, with a checkout at the end of it.
The second version is the itinerary post. Write the four days, name the activities in order, and link the flight search, the hotel search and the activity search in the places where a reader would naturally act. A reader who books all three has bought a package from you, even though your site never sold one. For the hotel half of that pattern, see how to add hotel booking to your website.
An illustrative group of two adults and one child books through your site.
| What they book | Base price | Your markup | They pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flights for three | $900 | $60 | $960 |
| Hotel, 4 nights | $520 | $40 | $560 |
| Activities for three | $300 | $30 | $330 |
| Total | $1,720 | $130 | $1,850 |
Round numbers chosen for the example. You set each markup yourself in your account, and your markup is yours to keep.
Illustration only, not a typical result.
If you organize group trips yourself, this is where your website earns its place. You cannot sell your own departures through it, but you can sell every flight seat, every room and every attraction ticket that your group needs around your trip, all under your own brand. The page for tour organizers explains that split in more detail, and the features page lists what each of the three searches does.
How do vouchers work on the day?
The customer books and pays on your website, and the voucher arrives by email. That is the whole delivery step for an activity: no courier, no pickup desk, no separate account for the customer to create. A voucher is the proof of purchase the customer shows at the activity.
Tell people what to expect, because the email is the product until they arrive. Ask them to save it to their phone, to check the name on it matches the traveler, and to open it once before the day rather than in a queue with one bar of signal. Screenshots survive bad reception better than mailboxes do.
Set expectations about the name on the booking too. The person who pays is not always the person who goes, and an activity that checks names wants the traveler's name on the voucher. Ask who is attending before you take the payment, the same way you ask for ages, and the day of the activity stays boring.
Plan for the email that never lands. Send your own short confirmation message after the booking so the customer has a second thread with you, and check your account for the booking before you answer a worried question. Your bookings and your markup settings are both in your account, so you can answer from a record instead of from memory.
The morning of the activity is also your best moment to sell again. A message that says have a good time and adds one line about what else is worth doing tomorrow reaches someone who is standing in the destination with time on their hands, which is a better moment than any email you could send in January. That is how one activity becomes three, and how an experiences booking platform under your own name starts producing repeat customers instead of single transactions.
If you have not built the site yet, the order is simple: create it, set your markup on flights, hotels and activities, then write about the four destinations you know best. Starting the site itself is covered step by step in how to start an online travel agency for free, and the flight side is covered in how to create a flight booking website.