PlacePass: A Tours and Activities Marketplace at Global Scale
A travel experiences marketplace spanning 300,000 activities in 800+ destinations, later acquired by Hopper.
- Experiences available across the marketplace
- 300,000
- Destinations covered
- 800+
- By Hopper in October 2021, forming its travel experiences division
- Acquired
About PlacePass
PlacePass was a digital marketplace helping travellers find, compare and book things to do in any destination. Founded in Boston in 2015, it aggregated roughly 300,000 experiences across more than 800 destinations and distributed them both directly and through travel brands — most notably powering Marriott International's Marriott Bonvoy Tours and Activities platform. CharPixel worked on the web application. In October 2021 PlacePass was acquired by Hopper, which folded the team and its B2B booking solution into a new travel experiences division.
- Approximately 300,000 bookable experiences across 800+ destinations.
- Powered Marriott International's Marriott Bonvoy Tours and Activities platform.
- Both a direct consumer marketplace and a B2B distribution product for travel brands.
- Founded in Boston in 2015; $14M raised across two rounds, with Marriott International among the investors.
- Acquired by Hopper in October 2021 to lead its travel experiences division.
- Client
- PlacePass
- Industry
- Travel & Experiences Marketplace
- Business type
- B2B and B2C marketplace for tours and activities
What the platform had to solve
Booking a flight and a hotel had long been solved; booking what to actually do on the trip had not. Tours and activities are a uniquely fragmented category — hundreds of thousands of products from thousands of small operators, each with its own availability model, pricing rules and cancellation terms. Aggregating that into something a traveller can search, compare and trust is a hard data problem, and presenting it as a browsing experience that works both on PlacePass's own site and inside a partner brand's platform is a hard front-end one.
What made it difficult
Inventory that is enormous and inconsistent
Three hundred thousand experiences from thousands of independent operators arrive with mismatched availability models, pricing structures and cancellation terms. Normalising that into something comparable is most of the work.
Search across an unstructured category
Travellers do not search for activities the way they search for flights. Intent ranges from a specific attraction to 'something to do on Tuesday', which makes discovery a genuinely harder interface problem than a date-and-destination form.
One product, two very different contexts
The same marketplace had to work as PlacePass's own consumer site and as an embedded experience inside a partner brand's platform, where it has to feel like that brand rather than a widget dropped into it.
Enterprise partners raise the bar
Powering a major hotel group's activities platform means the front end is judged against that brand's standards for performance, accessibility and consistency, not against startup norms.
How we approached it
- 01
Marketplace web application
The front end for searching, comparing and booking experiences across a very large and heterogeneous catalogue.
- 02
Discovery and comparison interfaces
Search, filtering and comparison surfaces built for a category where users often arrive without a specific product in mind.
- 03
Partner-facing distribution
Interfaces supporting the B2B side of the business, where the same inventory is surfaced inside travel brands' own platforms.
- 04
Booking flow
Checkout handling the variation that comes with third-party operator inventory — availability, participant details and cancellation terms differing per product.
What it was built with
The technologies named for this project.
Application
Web application
Front-end engineering
What the platform does
Experience search
Discovery across roughly 300,000 activities in more than 800 destinations.
Compare and book
Comparison of options within a destination before booking.
Destination browsing
Entry points by destination for travellers without a specific activity in mind.
Partner distribution
The same inventory surfaced inside travel brands' own booking platforms.
Operator inventory handling
Booking against third-party supply with per-product availability and terms.
Results
Figures published for the PlacePass platform.
Outstanding work from CharPixel FE team. CharPixel is an ideal partner: very professional, delivers quality work, is very communicative/responsive, and has great ideas for how to make our projects shine.
Emily BernardCo-Founder & Chief Brand Officer, PlacePassPlacePass in use
What this project involved
Web Application Development
Scalable web applications on modern frameworks, engineered for first-load performance and sustained load.
Product Design & Discovery
Discovery, UX and interface design that resolves the expensive questions before implementation starts.
Custom Software Development
Bespoke systems shaped around your operations, integrated with the tools and data you already run on.
PlacePass: common questions
Working on something similar?
Tell us what you're building and we'll say whether it's a fit.
Start a project01
What did CharPixel build for PlacePass?
The web application — the front end through which travellers searched, compared and booked experiences. As PlacePass's co-founder put it, the work came from our front-end team.
02
Why is placepass.com no longer live?
PlacePass was acquired by Hopper in October 2021. The team and its B2B tours and activities booking solution moved into a new travel experiences division at Hopper, and the standalone site was retired. Hopper also took over powering Marriott Bonvoy's Tours and Activities platform as part of the deal.
03
What made the inventory difficult?
Scale combined with inconsistency. Around 300,000 experiences from thousands of independent operators, each with its own availability model, pricing structure and cancellation terms — normalising that into a catalogue a traveller can meaningfully compare is the central problem in this category.
04
Was PlacePass a consumer or a B2B product?
Both. It ran as a direct consumer marketplace and as a B2B distribution product surfacing the same inventory inside travel brands' own platforms — most prominently Marriott International's Marriott Bonvoy Tours and Activities.
Related case studies
EdTech and Activity Management
ActivityHub
A SaaS platform connecting parents with children's activity providers across web, mobile and iPad.
- 94 min/week
- Time saved for activity providers managing activities
- 863K
- Messages sent between users
Food Delivery
TocoPick
A full food delivery platform — customer app, rider app and vendor dashboard — built in house.
HR Technology & Staffing
Crowdstaffing
A hiring platform managing the contingent-workforce pipeline for employers and staffing agencies alike.
Building something like PlacePass?
Tell us what you're working on and what it has to handle. We'll come back with an architecture opinion and a realistic first milestone.
- Reply within one business day
- NDA on request