Trip.com Group is one of the world’s largest travel companies (and one of Bókun’s OTA partners). Its Attractions & Tours business alone covers over 210k travel products across 140+ countries and 2k+ destinations —with 6.7 million travellers booking tours every year. And it owns not just Trip.com, but also Ctrip, Qunar, and Skyscanner.

Once you’re listed as a Trip.com supplier, you get access to one of the widest distribution networks in the industry, reaching travellers from every part of the world. Your products are promoted on the Trip.com and Ctrip apps and distributed across 2k+ B2B partner channels, including other OTAs, tour operators, and travel companies.

For operators looking to grow beyond their existing channels and reach international travellers, this opportunity is hard to beat.

This guide covers everything you need to start selling on Trip.com, including:

How to apply as a Trip.com supplier

The first step here is to make sure you’re applying to the right Trip.com programme: vBooking. This is the vendor platform for tour operators, attractions, ticket providers, and transfer companies.

(Trip.com also offers eBooking for hotels and accommodation providers, and an Affiliate Programme for content creators and bloggers. Those aren’t your fit.)

Next, read through Trip.com’s supplier requirements to check that you qualify.

  • You must be a registered business and be able to provide your business licence, any relevant activity or transport licences, insurance documents (required for car rentals), and company and banking details. Individual operators aren’t accepted.
  • You must have been operating for at least 180 days before applying.
  • You can only have one account per entity. Trip.com prohibits duplicate registration, including affiliated entities with the same management, shareholders, family connections, or operational team. They use technical detection to enforce this.

Two additional things to note:

  • If you offer group tours, a guide must accompany the group for the full duration (airport transfers on the first or last day are exempt; guides aren’t required on flights or trains between cities).
  • If you offer custom trips, you cannot sell them as standardised, always-on listings. Instead, Trip.com’s Trip Planner tool takes the booking and builds a plan around the traveller’s brief.

Then, if you meet all these requirements, you can apply.

  • Start at trip.com/m/vbooking/home
  • Select your business line — Attractions & Tours, Group or Private Tours, Custom Trips, Private Car Tour, Cruises, Car Rentals, Visas, or Ridehailing
  • Submit your company details and documents

After you submit, Trip.com typically takes 2 to 3 business days to review your application. Once approved, contract signing takes another day or so before your VBooking account goes live. A Trip.com rep will reach out after submission to negotiate commission rates and walk you through onboarding.

After you’re approved as a Trip.com supplier, you can simplify set-up and improve booking management by connecting Bókun. Here’s how that works.

  1. Push your products over automatically. Instead of rebuilding your listings from scratch in the vBooking account, you can push Bókun product listings directly to Trip.com. Your product data — titles, descriptions, itineraries, pricing, availability — transfers automatically.

    One thing to keep in mind once you’re mapped: avoid changing your ticket types, departure options, availability settings, or booking conditions without flagging it to Trip.com first. Restructuring products after they’ve been pushed breaks the connection and causes booking failures.

  2. Set your rates in Bókun. Instead of setting a retail price and having Trip.com deduct its commission after the fact, you load the amount you want to receive per booking, and Trip.com builds its price on top of that. You can set and manage that directly in Bókun, alongside your rates for every other channel, instead of doing it separately in vBooking.
  3. Trip.com bookings land in your Bókun calendar. Every reservation that comes through Trip.com shows up automatically in your Bókun central calendar, with all your other bookings — from your website, other OTAs, and any other channels you’re selling through. Availability updates in real time across all of them, so you never have to worry about double bookings.

What tours & activities can you sell on Trip.com?

Trip.com’s vBooking platform has ten standard supplier categories: Attractions & Tours, Group Tours, Local Guides, Themed Tours, Study Tours, Custom Trips, Cruises, Cars, Car Rentals, and Visa Services.

Between them, they cover a wide range of experience types, including:

  • Attractions & tickets — museum passes, theme parks, observation decks, performances, exhibitions, and skip-the-line entry
  • Day tours & activities — sightseeing, walking, bike, and cultural tours
  • Guided group tours — from day trips to multi-day itineraries
  • Local guide services — personalised itineraries, chartered experiences, and special-access routes
  • Dining experiences — food tours, wine tastings, brewery tours, and other culinary experiences
  • Themed tours — experiences built around a specific theme, like outdoor adventures (hiking, skiing, off-roading), nature, culture, festivals, education, or photography (note: itineraries must be at least 2 days, and themed activities must make up at least 50% of the trip)
  • Learning experiences — workshops, classes, and hands-on activities
  • Study tours — summer camps, winter camps, and parent & child study tours for children ages 4 to 18
  • Custom trips — built around the traveller’s brief through the Trip Planner flow
  • Cruises — ocean and river voyages, cruise/flight packages, and other tours or packages that include cruise tickets
  • Car rentals
  • Private car tours & transfers — airport and station transfers, car and driver services, and taxis
  • Visa services — tourist, business, family, study tour, and transit visas

Trip.com supplier fees, commissions & payouts

There are no enrolment, listing, or subscription fees to become a Trip.com supplier. Like most OTAs, Trip.com runs a commission-only model.

Commission rates are negotiated directly with your Trip.com contact and vary by product type, destination, and volume — operators generally report landing somewhere between 15% and 25%. As mentioned above, Trip.com adds its commission to the rate you set to calculate the price travellers see.

On payouts: Trip.com collects payment directly from the traveller and pays you out every month.

Best practices for creating Trip.com listings & winning bookings

  • Write titles that actually say something. «Skip-the-Line Colosseum Tour with Underground Access» earns clicks. «Rome Tour» doesn’t. Lead with what makes your product different.
  • Use real photos from real tours. They give travellers a sneak peek at what to expect and do most of the selling.
  • Be specific in your listings. Clear itineraries, inclusions, exclusions, meeting point, what to wear — cover it all.
  • Highlight what makes your experience unique. Do your guides have decades of local knowledge? Skip-the-line entry? Exclusive access? Whatever sets your experience apart from the ten other listings on the same page — say it, front and centre.
  • Flag language options explicitly. If your guides speak Spanish, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, or any other languages — or you offer audio or printed narration — put it in the listing. For travellers who want to experience your tour in their own language, it’s often the deciding factor between booking with you or moving on to someone else.
  • Give people options. Multiple ticket types and departure times mean fewer bookings lost to a competitor whose schedule fits better that day.
  • Offer flexible cancellation where you can. International travellers planning trips far in advance are more likely to book when they have a way out if plans change.
  • Keep availability accurate. Outdated calendars and double bookings = lost bookings and cancellations that hurt your standing with Trip.com. (If you’re connected through Bókun, this takes care of itself.)
  • Respond quickly. Your responsiveness to Trip.com’s team and booking enquiries affects your placement on the platform. More active accounts get better visibility when travellers are searching for what you offer.
  • Ask for reviews consistently. Having good reviews, and a lot of them, helps you rank higher on Trip.com. They also carry a lot of weight with travellers comparing your experience to others.
  • Use Trip.com’s built-in marketing tools. Trip.com gives suppliers access to merchant training, data insights, and content support to help you optimise and grow. The most underused of these is Star Hub — a marketing channel inside the Trip.com app where you can promote your experiences and offers directly to users browsing the platform. Most suppliers don’t use these tools at all, or not as often as they should.

Benefits of becoming a Trip.com supplier

  • You’re joining one of the biggest distribution networks in travel. Trip.com Group’s ecosystem spans Trip.com, Ctrip, Qunar, and Skyscanner. As a vBooking supplier, your products move through all of it, plus 2k+ B2B partner channels distributing your inventory to even more corners of the market.
  • Trip.com helps you access markets that can be difficult to enter. Its presence in Chinese and other Asian outbound travel markets is among the strongest available through a single OTA connection.
  • You can win bookings from millions of travellers. 6.7 million travellers book tours through the platform every year. They report 90k+ annual participants in just the theme and study tours alone.
  • You can leverage Trip.com’s massive reach without investing in extra marketing. Trip.com promotes its inventory across the app, web, mini-programmes, and offline stores. Suppliers benefit from that reach without having to fund it.
  • Trip.com’s loyalty programme keeps travellers coming back. Customers earn Trip Coins on bookings, while tiered membership benefits give them more reasons to book through the platform again. For suppliers, that means access to an audience with an incentive to return.
  • Trip.com offers more marketing support than most operators realise. As covered above, that includes merchant training, data insights, content support, and Star Hub — tools that help you perform better on the platform over time, not just get listed.
  • Trip.com offers customers multilingual support. Trip.com’s customer service runs 24/7 across 19 languages; they can handle traveller enquiries and other common questions so those emails don’t fill up your inbox.
  • Trip.com offers API integrations for enterprise operators. If you have an existing tech stack you want to connect, Trip.com’s Open API Platform makes it straightforward, so you’re not hassling with complex integrations.
  • You aren’t locked into exclusivity requirements. Sell through Trip.com plus your own site, other OTAs, and partners at the same time.

Trip.com <> Bókun Connection

In 2023, Trip.com partnered with Bókun, choosing us as one of its trusted sources for global supply.

In the words of Chase Liu, Trip.com’s General Manager of Tours & Tickets:

«We see Bókun as a key contributor to our global supply acquisition strategy.»

What that means for you: Trip.com joined the Bókun Marketplace as a reseller, so they can find your products and send you a contract proposal — including commission terms and which products they want to resell. You review it, accept or reject it, and stay in control of what Trip.com sells on your behalf.

Connecting Bókun also makes day-to-day management of Trip.com much easier.

First, there’s the booking and availability management piece. Your Bókun calendar works in sync with your Trip.com calendar.

As we mentioned above, all your Trip.com bookings push over to the Bókun central calendar — with all your other bookings — so you can see everything in one view. This calendar also powers the real-time availability updates. All reserved slots are automatically blocked off in your Trip.com calendar so you don’t overbook yourself.

This saves you from having to update both calendars separately. No copying or pasting bookings or frantically updating availability with every new reservation that rolls in. And this is even more critical as you expand to other OTAs. The Bókun calendar syncs with every site to keep your availability current everywhere you sell.

Then there’s the product management side of things. Push Bókun products (with your desired rates) directly over to Trip.com, so your listings stay consistent, and you don’t have to rebuild anything. A huge time saver.

In addition to Trip.com, Bókun partners with other global OTAs: Viator, GetYourGuide, and Google Things to do. (One of the perks of being a Tripadvisor brand!)

  • Our Viator Preferred Partnership lets us offer 0% Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations and free yearly subscription checks — 12, 24, or 48, depending on your plan. This lets operators keep more of what they earn from Viator bookings.
  • The GetYourGuide Premium Partnership lets our users get their products visible on GYG quickly and easily. And it guarantees best-in-class API performance so bookings and availability sync reliably in real time.
  • The Google Things to do official connectivity partnership lets our users instantly join Google’s program — without having to submit the lengthy application and wait around for approval— and start selling across Google products. They can get their experiences listed at the top of search results, in Maps, and in Google’s other apps.

Our platform also connects with 70+ other OTAs and online marketplaces, so you can sell anywhere travellers are looking — Expedia, Airbnb Experiences, Klook, Civitatis, Tiqets, Musement, Headout, TourRadar, Hotelbed, and more.

You can browse all these connections in the Sales Tools tab and add as many sites as you wish; we never cap you here.

We also offer a few other powerful growth drivers to get your experiences in front of new audiences.

The Bókun Marketplace is our built-in partner network. And it’s one of the largest partner networks in the industry. It features thousands of travel industry professionals you can connect with — tour operators and activity providers, attractions, travel agents, DMCs, accommodation providers like hotels and resorts, transportation services, rental companies, and more. There are three main ways to use this network:

  1. Partner with resellers who can promote your experiences to their audiences and win bookings for you. You win new customers; they earn commissions with each booking they send your way.
  2. Work as a reseller and promote others’ services or travel experiences to earn commissions. This is a nice way to expand your offerings and supplement revenue without adding more tours to your schedule — ideal when you’re already running at full capacity and want to keep growing without stretching your operation thin.
  3. Create packages with partners. Another way to diversify your offerings. And it lets you provide more comprehensive travel packages that take the planning off travellers’ plates — combining accommodation, transport, activities, or whatever mix you want to offer.

And Referral Tracking lets you expand beyond Marketplace partners and build your own custom affiliate network. Bring in any partners you want — other businesses in your area, social media influencers, bloggers, local interest groups, or whoever regularly interacts with the audiences you want to reach. You set individual commission rates, provide each affiliate a trackable booking link, and see exactly who’s driving bookings your way.

We offer two solutions for tour operators to tap into all of this:

  • Our all-in-one tour operator software is a complete operating system for your business — booking management, channel management, resource management, website builder, CRM, automated communications, reporting, and more. Everything you need to run your day-to-day and sell everywhere online, in one place. (We offer a 14-day free trial for new operators to test this out. You can redeem yours here. No credit card required.)
  • The Channel Manager is for operators who already have a booking system and need an intermediary to connect with other online sales channels (like Trip.com). It integrates with your existing setup, pulls all your bookings into one central calendar, and pushes real-time availability back to every channel you’re connected to. (Our team can provide a demo of this to show you exactly how all systems connect and give you a custom quote. Request yours here.)

Both give you access to all the distribution tools and partnership perks we discussed above at some of the lowest rates in the industry: 1.5% on online bookings, 0% Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations, and free offline bookings (vs. competitors’ fees of 3% to 8%).

See how other operators are growing with Bókun in our case studies below:

Getting started

Trip.com is one of the most powerful distribution channels available to tour operators — over 400 million customers across 200+ countries, and a distribution network that goes far beyond what travellers see on the app. And getting listed is free. Head to Trip.com to start your application.

From there, Bókun helps you manage your Trip.com listings, bookings, and availability in one place. To connect with Trip.com and other sales channels, start a 14-day free trial of our tour operator software or request a free demo of our Channel Manager.

Learn more about how to sell across all the most popular OTAs and online marketplaces in our guides below: