What is the OCTO standard used for in the tourism industry?
OCTO is a standard established by the world's leading companies in tourism and travel. Its goal is to standardise communication flows between tour operators when booking activities — whether that means entrance tickets for museums, tourist passes, or guided tours. OCTO stands for "Open Connectivity for attractions, TOurs and activities".Before the OCTO standard, every tourism company selling tickets for activities and tours online offered its own API (Application Programming Interface). An API is a software system that enables tickets to be sold anywhere in the world, provided that resellers' websites are able to connect to the supplier's API. And that is where things started to get complicated! As online sales of activities and tours grew, each supplier developed its own API independently, each in its own way. To draw an analogy with languages, everyone was effectively speaking their own tongue.
The OCTO standard came along to normalise all of this by establishing shared communication standards for all APIs. Today, a museum, an attraction, or any supplier wishing to sell tickets online can build or adapt their API to comply with OCTO — for example, in the way pricing, participants, and customer information are handled. The OCTO standard clearly defines, for instance, how communication flows exchange the items included in a rate.
The OCTO standard therefore offers a huge time saving for both suppliers and resellers. A supplier that complies with OCTO can immediately be distributed through a reseller's website, without months of bespoke software development. It also means significant savings in development costs on both sides.
Who can use the OCTO standard to resell their activities and tours?
As its name suggests, the OCTO standard is "open" and free to use. If you are an activity supplier or a reseller, you are free to build your API based on the OCTO standard's specifications. All specifications are openly available, so you can construct your API by following each of its elements.As a result, the tourism industry is adopting it wholesale. The OCTO standard has, for example, been adopted by the well-known GDS Amadeus, the online agency Tiqets, and several major activity providers such as City Sightseeing and the SUMMIT observatory in New York. OCTO represents a remarkable revolution for the travel industry.
Our platform Explorates also complies with the OCTO standard, and you will find our parent company CNEWYORK among the members of the OCTO consortium. By using Explorates to resell your tickets or tours through online travel agencies, you can be confident that you are following the OCTO standard — a guarantee of stability and long-term reliability!
One final important point: as explained above, the OCTO standard is a communication specification for APIs. However, as a tour guide or museum, you have absolutely no need to learn the OCTO language yourself. Like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Explorates will have your booking system speaking OCTO without you even realising it!
