The OCTO community has approved two new capabilities: Pickups and Dropoffs. Both are now part of the OCTO specification and available for implementation.
These capabilities address one of the most common operational challenges in tours and activities: getting customers to and from an experience. Until now, every integration handled location data differently, leading to inconsistencies, booking errors, and a lot of avoidable support overhead.
The Problem
Many tour and activity products involve picking customers up from hotels, transit hubs, or other locations before the experience begins. Some also need to drop customers off at a specific point afterward.
Without a shared standard, this information was typically passed through free-text fields, unstructured booking notes, or bespoke API extensions that broke across different platforms.
These aren't edge cases — they're everyday problems for any business running tours with transportation. The Pickups and Dropoffs capabilities give the industry a shared language to solve them.
How Pickups Work
The Pickups capability allows suppliers to define pickup options for their products. These can be structured locations — a curated list of hotels, landmarks, or meeting points — or service areas defined by geographic boundaries. Customers select their preferred pickup point during booking, and that selection flows through the OCTO API to the supplier in a consistent, machine-readable format.
The capability also supports coordinate-based validation. When a customer enters a custom address, the system can confirm whether it falls within the supplier's service area before the booking is confirmed — catching errors at the point of sale instead of on the day of the tour.
How Dropoffs Work
The Dropoffs capability mirrors pickups at the end of the experience. Suppliers can offer fixed return locations, allow customers to choose from a set of predefined options, or accept custom dropoff points within a defined service area.
The same validation and structured data model applies. Whether a customer needs to be returned to their hotel, a cruise port, or an airport, the information is captured consistently and passed through the booking chain without ambiguity.
What This Means for the Industry
Define exactly where you operate
Specify structured pickup and dropoff locations or service areas for each product. Reduce miscommunication and no-shows caused by unclear location data.
Better booking experience
Present pickup and dropoff options directly in your booking flow. Give customers a clearer experience and reduce post-booking support queries.
Implement once, connect everywhere
Full schema and endpoint support across OCTO Core. No more custom workarounds for each distribution partner.
Read the Full Specification
The complete documentation for both capabilities is available now on the OCTO docs site.
What's Next
With Pickups and Dropoffs now part of the standard, we're turning our attention to selecting the next capability. This is driven by member input — we want to hear directly from the people who use, implement, and rely on the OCTO standard.
Have an idea for the next capability?
We're gathering suggestions from both technical and business teams across the OCTO community.
Submit a Capability Idea