- Kind
- Application
- Status
- Running on Drupal 11 at opendestinations.org
About OpenDestinations
OpenDestinations is a free travel and tourism data platform built on Drupal 11. It organises large datasets of destinations, attractions, accommodation and travel services, and it is free to use for tourism boards, destination marketing organisations and travel businesses presenting their regions.
Features
- Global destination data
- Automated data extraction
- Interactive maps
- Itinerary builder
- Free for tourism
What is OpenDestinations, and what is it not?
It is a working travel and tourism data platform, running publicly at opendestinations.org and built on Drupal 11. It is not a Drupal.org project, so there is no composer require for it, no release archive and no issue queue. The links on this page go to the running platform rather than to a download.
The public site is a neutral travel information service: it carries no paywall and does not monetise its content. That matters for reading the rest of this page, because "free" here describes the platform and its data, not a free tier of a commercial product.
Why does a destination dataset need so many entity types?
Because "destination" is not one kind of thing. A region, a city, a mountain and a beach are all destinations, but they are compared on different attributes and nobody searches for them the same way. An attraction may be a museum, an archaeological site, a park or a religious site. Food and drink are classified by course, by cooking style and by type. Events and festivals carry dates and recurrence rules that a page of prose cannot express.
Modelling each of those as its own entity type, with its own fields, is what makes the data comparable rather than merely readable. You can only ask what a week costs in one place against another, or what is worth doing in a given season, if cost and season are structured fields. The alternative, one generic page type with a free-text body, gives a site that can be read but not queried.
Where does the data come from?
From automated extraction and enrichment against open sources, rather than from hand-written copy. The platform credits Wikidata and Wikipedia among the sources behind its knowledge base, alongside machine assistance used to summarise and classify what is pulled in. Coverage runs to country level across every global region, organised into destinations, attractions, food and drink, and events.
What does "free for tourism businesses" actually mean?
There is no licence fee to use the platform, and the public site charges nothing to read. What is never free is the work around it: standing up your own instance, loading your region's data, designing the front end and hosting the result are project work, and that is what an engagement covers.
The part worth checking before you commit to any platform is what you are left holding afterwards. Everything we deliver is handed over with its source code, which is what stops a data platform from becoming something you rent indefinitely. The argument is set out on why you own what we build.
Who is it for?
Tourism boards and destination marketing organisations that have to present a region coherently rather than one attraction at a time; travel businesses that need structured inventory behind a booking or planning flow; and research or policy teams that want the comparison layer more than the marketing layer. The wider sector work (hotel booking systems, venue systems, restaurant ordering platforms) sits on the hospitality, food and tourism page.
How do you get it?
Look at the running platform first, then talk to us about an instance of your own. It sits alongside our other platforms listed under Products, which we deploy and customise the same way and hand over as a running system with its source code; the adaptation work itself is Drupal development. Development work carries a warranty of one year by default and up to three.
Further reading
Want an instance for your region?
Standing up your own instance, loading your region's data and designing the front end is project work. Tell us what you need to show.