How to Sell Tours and Tickets on Tiqets

Tiqets sells tickets to museums, monuments and attractions. Founded in Amsterdam in 2014, its catalogue is reported at more than two and a half thousand venues, and it is built around one idea: a single ticket, bought on a phone, usable immediately and frequently skipping the queue.

It is also, as of 2026, part of Expedia Group — and for a venue deciding whether to list, that is the most consequential fact on this page.

What it focuses on, and who fits

Tiqets is narrower than the big activity marketplaces, and that is the point. It is built for admission — a timed entry, a museum, a monument, a viewing platform — rather than for the full range from cooking classes to treks.

Good fit: attractions with timed entry, venues with a queue worth skipping, and tour products that work as a ticket rather than an experience requiring coordination. If your product can be reduced to this person, this slot, this door, it fits.

Poor fit: multi-stop guided itineraries, pickups, anything needing a meeting point conversation, and products where the guide rather than the access is what is being bought. Those belong on Viator or GetYourGuide, and a listing here would compete poorly against products the platform is actually designed around.

What Expedia ownership means

Expedia Group announced the acquisition in December 2025 and has since confirmed it closed. Tiqets continues under its own brand, with its curated attraction supply now inside Expedia's distribution.

The strategic consequence is the interesting bit, and it connects to something covered elsewhere on this blog: Expedia's own activities supplier programme is reported to be effectively closed to new direct suppliers, sourcing inventory through partners instead.

Two caveats worth holding. Expedia has said existing contracts and tools stay as they are for now, with changes communicated in advance — so do not plan around integration benefits that have not arrived. And post-acquisition integration is exactly when supplier terms get revisited, so read anything you sign rather than relying on a summary written today.

It also completes a pattern worth noticing: Booking Holdings owns FareHarbor, Tripadvisor owns Bokun, and Expedia now owns Tiqets. Three of the large travel groups each hold a piece of the activities stack, which is a live consideration when choosing booking software too.

What "Tiqets channel manager" means

A common search with a misleading name. Tiqets sells tickets; it does not build software for managing them. So nobody offers a product called a Tiqets channel manager, and searching for one leads nowhere useful.

The thing being looked for is booking software with Tiqets on its list of supported channels — something holding your slot inventory centrally, updating Tiqets when it changes, and depositing Tiqets bookings into the same queue as your walk-ups and website sales. How that mechanism works is explained separately, along with how to pick one.

Timed entry raises the stakes on getting this right. Where a tour with a stale seat count merely embarrasses you, an oversold 14:00 slot produces a visitor at a door being told no, in front of everyone else in the queue.

Onboarding and product setup

Apply, set up products, then arrange connectivity either directly or through your booking software. How smoothly it goes depends almost entirely on how precisely you can express your admission rules.

• Ticket types. Adult, child, concession, family, and whatever your local rules require. Get this exact — mismatches surface at the door as arguments.
• Timed slots or open entry. If you sell timed entry, your slot structure and capacity per slot has to be modelled accurately rather than approximated.
• What the ticket actually includes — which parts of the venue, whether temporary exhibitions count, whether an audio guide is bundled.
• Validity rules. Whether a ticket is valid only for its slot, for that day, or for any day within a window. This causes more support contacts than anything else.
• Access and facilities information, honestly stated. Attraction buyers check this more than tour buyers do.

Photograph the thing being visited, not the city around it, and answer what will I see and how long does it take before anything else.

Commission and payouts

The structure is straightforward: Tiqets sells at retail, keeps its share, and remits the balance to you — connectivity partners describe the arrangement as a shared margin. What is not available anywhere is a published rate card.

We are not going to quote a percentage, because none is public and any figure circulating online is somebody else's negotiated deal rather than yours. What is worth doing is the same as with any marketplace: establish your rate in writing, confirm which bookings it applies to, and price backwards from your highest-commission channel rather than forwards from what feels reasonable.

Establish the payout cycle too, and remember it will run after visits rather than after bookings — reconciling what arrives against what you expected is a monthly job worth setting up properly at the start.

Tickets, barcodes and the door

This is the operational heart of selling on Tiqets, and where a venue either works with the platform or fights it. The product is a mobile ticket, so your door has to accept one.

• Agree how validation works before going live — whether you scan a barcode, check a code against a list, or use a supplied app. Whichever it is, staff need to have done it before opening day.
• Plan for poor signal. Many venues have thick walls and bad reception. If validation needs a live connection and yours drops, you need a fallback that does not involve turning people away.
• Redemption has to be fast. A slow check creates a queue, which is precisely what the traveller bought a skip-the-line ticket to avoid, and it lands in your reviews.
• Mark tickets as used. Without proper redemption you cannot answer a later dispute about whether somebody attended.
• Brief every person on the door, including seasonal staff. The failure is almost never the technology; it is somebody on a Saturday who has not seen this kind of ticket before.

The same discipline that makes a tour check-in work applies here, with one addition: your busiest hour is when the process gets tested, so rehearse it before the season rather than during it.

Capacity across channels

Timed-entry inventory makes this sharper than it is for tours. A slot with twenty places sold across Tiqets, your own site and a walk-up desk has to reconcile in real time, because the consequence of getting it wrong happens in person, at a door, in front of other visitors.

• Pool your slot capacity rather than allocating fixed blocks per channel, so a quiet channel does not sit on places a busy one could sell — the allotment arithmetic is stark at slot level.
• Hold back walk-up capacity deliberately if you take visitors at the door, and treat that as a decision with a number rather than whatever is left.
• Sync in real time or not at all. Manual updating across timed slots is where overbookings become unavoidable rather than unlucky.

How Travelity fits

If you came here looking for a Tiqets channel manager, this is the category of thing you wanted: Tiqets sits on Travelity's list of OTA partners, with slot availability held once and pushed out to every channel selling it, your own site included, and all redemptions arriving in a single view. Check with us which specific connections are active on your account rather than assuming a marketplace is available. Twenty-one days to try it, no card.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Tiqets?

Expedia Group. The acquisition was announced in December 2025 and Expedia has since confirmed the deal closed. Tiqets was founded in Amsterdam in 2014 and continues to operate under its own brand, with its curated attraction supply now feeding Expedia Group distribution.

What is a Tiqets channel manager?

Tiqets is a marketplace rather than a channel manager, so the phrase means a channel manager that supports Tiqets as a connected channel. What you actually want is booking software that keeps your ticket availability synchronised with Tiqets and brings those bookings back alongside the rest.

What kind of businesses sell on Tiqets?

Museums, monuments and attractions above all, plus tour operators whose product works as a timed ticket. The platform is built around a single ticket bought online and shown on a phone, frequently skipping a queue, so venues with timed entry fit it far better than multi-stop guided itineraries.

How much commission does Tiqets charge?

No rate is published. Tiqets runs a commission model in which it collects the retail price from the traveller and pays the venue a net amount, with connectivity partners describing a shared-margin arrangement. Your rate is agreed with them, so treat any figure you find online as someone else deal rather than yours.

What are the ticket requirements for selling on Tiqets?

Your venue needs to accept a ticket presented on a phone screen and validate it quickly at the door. That means agreeing how the barcode or code is generated and checked, making sure staff can scan or verify without a data connection if signal is poor, and confirming that redemption is fast enough not to create a queue.

Bottom line

If your product is admission — a slot, a door, a queue worth skipping — Tiqets is built for exactly that, and its new position inside Expedia Group makes it a more interesting listing than its own traffic alone would justify.

Before going live, settle two operational things: how a phone ticket gets validated at your door when the signal is poor and the queue is long, and how slot capacity stays correct across every channel selling it. Both fail in person rather than on a screen, which is what makes them worth rehearsing.

Related guides

• Which OTAs should you list on? Choosing channels by tour type and region
• How to sell tours on Expedia: a supplier's guide
• How to sell tours on Headout: a supplier's guide
• Channel manager for tours: the complete guide
• Digital manifests and check-in for tours
• Booking cut-off times and allotments explained