Travel marketplaces
In-app chat for travel and tour booking marketplaces
TalkJS is a chat API and SDK with a ready-made chat UI for travel booking marketplaces. Travelers message guides, hosts and tour operators in your web or mobile app, before and after they book. Each conversation belongs to a booking, contact details can stay hidden until it’s confirmed, and we store and deliver every message.
Traveler and guide messaging for every booking
In a travel marketplace, the conversation is where a traveler decides to book. Give each inquiry or booking its own conversation, so the questions, the answers and the booking details stay together. GetYourGuide built its supplier inbox the same way: “Each message sits next to its booking”.
- A traveler sends an inquiry about a tour. Your server creates a conversation for it with one REST API call. The tour’s name and photo become the conversation’s subject and photo, and your booking ID goes in as custom data.
- The guide answers in that conversation. Your app posts updates such as “Booking confirmed” as system messages, which everyone in the conversation sees.
- When we email someone about a message they missed, the email can link to the booking page in your app.
- After the tour, set each participant’s access to read-only. They can still read the history, but nobody can post.
For a group tour, add every traveler to one group conversation: up to 100 participants on the Basic plan and 300 on Growth.
Mask contact details in marketplace chat until the booking is confirmed
Once a guide has a traveler’s phone number, the next trip can be booked without you. That’s why travel marketplaces keep the first conversations on their own platform, and put it in their terms. Travelers on ToursByLocals agree not to give guides “any personal contact details including full name, phone number, email, and/or social networks” before booking, and Vrbo’s offline booking policy bans hosts from sharing “contact details that are intended to redirect guests away from Vrbo”.
TalkJS can hide email addresses, phone numbers and links in messages from the roles you choose, such as travelers and guides. Each one is replaced with “(hidden information)”, the rest of the message is delivered, and the details stay hidden in notifications too. Once the booking is confirmed, you make one REST API call per participant. Then that traveler and that guide see each other’s details, in their conversation only. Masking is included on every plan.
Case study: ToursByLocals
Inquiry-to-booking conversion at ToursByLocals rose roughly 15% after the move to TalkJS
ToursByLocals is a private tour marketplace that connects travelers with local guides in more than 180 countries. After 17 years on a chat system it built itself, it moved its messaging to TalkJS in about two months, with its full message history, zero downtime and zero data loss. Guides and travelers now see the booking details next to the chat. Conversion had been flat before the move, and the rise came in the first full period after launch.
“Integrating TalkJS has given us a stable, monitored, and scalable messaging surface we can keep building on.”
Sebastian Leder, Senior Product Manager, ToursByLocals
Chat features for travel booking platforms
Translate messages between travelers and guides
On the Growth and Enterprise plans, TalkJS translates user messages in real time with the Google Cloud Translation API, using your own API key. Translation is charged separately. Each reader can turn translation on for a conversation and switch back to the original. It works in the Classic JavaScript SDK, React Native and Flutter. System messages aren’t translated, so send booking updates in the traveler’s language.
The chat UI itself comes in more than 30 languages, set per user, and switches to a right-to-left layout for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
Share tickets, itineraries and meeting points
Turn on file sharing for a role, and travelers and guides can send PDFs, images, Word documents and calendar (.ics) files, up to 100 MB each. Location sharing sends a meeting point as a pin with a Google Maps link. Voice messages are there for a quick note from the road.
Add chat to your web and mobile apps
Use our ready-made chat UI for React, React Native, Flutter or Web Components, or build your own UI on our Data APIs for JavaScript, Kotlin and Swift. Moving off a chat you built yourself? Import your users, conversations and messages, with their original timestamps, through the REST API.
Travel booking chat notifications by email, push and SMS
A traveler on the road isn’t watching your app, and a question about tomorrow’s meeting point can’t wait until they open it.
When a traveler or guide is offline, we email them after a delay you set, up to 15 minutes, with the messages they missed in one email. They hit reply, and the answer shows up in the chat. You can also send mobile push notifications through APNs and FCM, with guides for React Native and Flutter. SMS works too, and it’s charged separately.
Travel marketplace chat pricing
We price TalkJS per monthly active user, with unlimited conversations, messages and message history, so a long back-and-forth about an itinerary costs you the same as a one-line question. Basic is $279 a month with 10,000 monthly active users included, Growth is $569 a month with 25,000 and adds message translation, and Enterprise is custom. Every plan includes a free development mode, so you can build and test your chat before you pay. See pricing for what each plan includes, or compare TalkJS with other chat APIs.