Booking Drops Hotel Requirement to Book Tours and Activities


Skift Take

Booking.com's hotel focus has given way to a strategy to serve travelers at every portion of the trip. TripAdvisor already does it, Expedia too. Airbnb is on that full-service road. So Booking.com will have plenty of company.
After acquiring tours and activities software provider FareHarbor last year and launching options to book activities in 150 cities, Booking.com has taken the next step in pushing its tour offerings mainstream. Booking.com is expected to announce Wednesday at a conference in Europe that it is debuting an offering in 10 European and Middle Eastern cities that enables customers to book tours and attractions on a standalone basis without having first to book a hotel room. The pilot program, available in Amsterdam, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Barcelona, Vienna, Prague, Edinburgh, and Dubai, is available on city pages on the site, and offers everything from a skip-the-line ticket to Madame Tussauds Amsterdam to museum tours, and hop-on-hop-off bus and boat tours. The listings are available in 43 languages. All of t