With GoBe, Royal Caribbean Offers Land-Based Tour Packages
By Andrew Sessa. Photos: Getty.
If you love cruise shore excursions but always wished you could take them even further ashore, Royal Caribbean Cruises LTD—which will debut the world’s largest ship next year—has just the thing for you.
The company recently introduced the online booking platform GoBe to help you arrange high-impact travel experiences that go well beyond the port, and it’s not just for Royal Caribbean passengers, or cruisers in general, but for anyone going practically anywhere and by any mode of transportation. Offering thousands upon thousands of tours and activities in some 900 cities around the world, GoBe hits such landlocked locales as Beijing, Mexico City, and Milan, in addition to waterfront destinations, letting you pick and choose from a vast array of potential adventures to put together your own itineraries.
“Inland destinations across the globe have been underserved,” says GoBe managing director Billy Campbell, explaining the impetus behind the startup. “Travelers around the world continue to focus on experiential travel and search for these tours and activities on multiple apps and websites.” GoBe, in contrast, provides a one-stop shop. “We believe travelers and locals deserve an easy-to-use digital platform,” continues Campbell, “to research, compare, and book tours and excursions using the device of their choice.”
With GoBe, you arrange your trip by selecting from group excursions, which are set-departure options that see you joining like-minded fellow travelers; private outings, which are adventures held solely for you and your crew; and one-of-a-kind, custom-made “Travel Creations,” that can be anything you’d like them to be.
The range of experiences—searchable by destination (including cruise ports), type of interest (biking, history, culture, etc.), activity level (mild, moderate, strenuous), and duration (under four hours, four to seven hours, seven to twelve hours)—is indeed extensive. It ranges, notes Campbell, “from architecture walking tours and culinary adventures, to wildlife exploration and over-the-top bucket-list experiences.”
Just a pair of examples bear out that breadth: an all-day, hands-on, family-friendly lucha libre wrestling adventure in Guadalajara, Mexico, say, versus a romantic helicopter ride over Rome, followed by a gourmet lunch at a top ristorante.
Campbell also points to an entirely custom itinerary organized through GoBe for a father and daughter during an eight-hour layover in Istanbul. They enjoyed a full day of private, expert-led tours of the city’s most important sights, plus skip-the-line access at each landmark. Afterwards, says Campbell, “the father remarked that he hadn’t impressed his daughter like that in years.”
Royal Caribbean’s launch of GoBe follows the news of several other major travel companies getting in on the tours and activities game. Airbnb began offering guests curated experiences through its “Trips” program this past fall, and in March, just before GoBe got off the ground, Marriott announced its investment in the platform PlacePass, which would allow guests staying at the company’s 6,000 hotels to book from a list of 100,000 experiences in 800 locations in 117 countries.
GoBe debuted with numbers not so far from those, plus plans to add hundreds of tours each week, allowing it to triple the quantity of activities available around the world by the end of the year.
This story originally appeared on Conde Nast Traveler.
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