Services · Mobile app development · Tourism apps
Codeeo builds tourism apps for London sightseeing operators, attractions, river trip companies and walking and food tour businesses. Visitors buy timed tickets and passes, track a hop-on hop-off bus or boat on a live map, switch the commentary to their own language and get directions that use the Tube, the Elizabeth line and Thames piers. Behind the visitor app sit a crew app for guides, drivers and front of house staff, and an admin system that shows every sale, scan and refund across your products.
London visitors compare everything on their phone before they choose. An app of your own lets you sell to them directly, keep their details, and look after them during the visit instead of leaving that relationship to a reseller listing.
200+ companies servedFrom a first store to an ADX listed developer
Features for London visitors and crews
London's visitors arrive from every continent, stay a few days, and try to fit the South Bank, Westminster, the Tower, a West End show and a market or two into tight schedules. They rely on contactless payment and their phone for everything, and they expect to change plans on the move. Operators here also sell through many channels at once: their own site, online travel agencies, hotel concierges and partners. The features below are the ones London operators ask for most. We choose the mix in discovery: a food tour company needs group check-in and dietary notes, an attraction needs timed entry and a visit guide, and a sightseeing bus company needs live vehicle tracking and multilingual commentary. All of it runs from one admin system, so prices, capacity and changes stay consistent across every channel you sell through.
For hop-on hop-off buses and river services, the app shows where each vehicle is, the next arrival at every stop and pier, and which stops are affected by a closure. GPS units on your fleet feed the map, and visitors stop guessing whether they have just missed the last departure.
Fewer complaints at stops and fewer calls to your control room.
Location triggered commentary plays as the bus or boat passes landmarks, in the language the visitor chose at booking. Scripts are managed centrally, so a rerouted bus or a new landmark only needs new content, not a new release. Children's versions of the commentary can run on a separate channel.
Every passenger hears the tour in a language they understand.
Single entries, multi-day passes and combined tickets with partner attractions, with QR codes that work offline at the gate. Bundles are priced and split by partner in the admin system, so revenue sharing is clear at the end of each month. Staff at the gate scan from any phone running the crew app.
Bundles sell without a spreadsheet to reconcile afterwards.
Directions to meeting points and attractions use Transport for London's open data, so visitors see nearby stations, step-free access and current line status. For tours starting at a pier or a station exit, the app shows the exact spot with a photo. Visitors arriving at Heathrow, Gatwick or a mainline terminus get a first route to their hotel area and their first booking.
Visitors arrive at the right exit, not the wrong side of the road.
Apple Pay, Google Pay and card checkout with Strong Customer Authentication handled by your payment provider, plus tickets saved to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. Refunds and partial refunds run from the admin system without logging into a separate payment portal. Overseas cards are handled without extra steps for the visitor.
Faster checkout and fewer abandoned bookings.
Capacity and prices sync with the online travel agencies and booking platforms you already sell through, where they offer an API or a channel manager. One departure has one pool of seats, so a tour sold on a reseller cannot also be sold in your app.
No double sales across channels.
Guides and drivers see their shifts, scan tickets, count boardings at each stop, log incidents and receive route changes from the control room. Food tour guides see dietary notes and allergies for every guest before the first tasting. Boarding counts per stop help you plan where to add vehicles.
Crews act on the same information the office sees.
Group leaders book once for a whole party, add names later, pay by invoice where you allow it and receive a single entry code. Teachers can see accessibility information and risk assessment details you publish for school visits. Coach drop-off times are held against the booking.
Group business handled without email chains.
Screens built to WCAG 2.2, with step-free routes, accessible toilets, quiet times and seating marked on maps. Under the Equality Act, service providers must make reasonable adjustments, and the app is a practical place to show what you already offer. Access details are kept current from the admin system.
Disabled visitors can plan the visit with confidence.
Annual passes, member entry, priority booking for exhibitions and a digital membership card in the wallet. Londoners who visit several times a year get offers that suit them, while overseas visitors see the products that make sense for a short trip, from the same admin system.
Local visitors return more often and renew without paper forms.
Who this is for
London has every kind of tourism business, from global sightseeing brands to a two-person street food tour in the East End. The ones that gain most from an app are those with repeat customers, several products to sell, or a visitor experience that continues after the ticket is scanned. Our tour booking app development in London is shaped around that: we find where visitors and staff lose time today, and build to fix those points first. Operators that only sell a single product through resellers may not need an app yet, and we will say so in discovery rather than build something that sits unused.
Your product is a network rather than a single tour. Visitors need to know where vehicles are, which stops serve which sights, and how long their ticket is valid. Your control room needs to reroute around marches, road closures and events. An app with live tracking, commentary and route alerts puts those answers in the visitor's hand and cuts crowding at the busiest stops by the Thames and in the West End. Tickets valid for a day or more live in the visitor's wallet, and expiry reminders prompt an upgrade before the ticket lapses.
Live data matters more than visual polish here.
For an attraction, the app's value starts at the entrance. Timed entry, a floor plan, narration by room or zone, exhibition updates, membership cards and a shop or café offer at the end. We connect to your ticketing system where possible, and give your learning and curatorial teams a content editor so they can update stories without waiting for a developer. Free entry museums can still use the app for exhibition bookings, donations at the end of a visit and trails for families, so the visit is planned rather than improvised.
Members and annual pass holders are the users to design for.
Tours through Borough Market, Shoreditch, Covent Garden or along the river rely on a guide meeting a group at a precise spot, at a precise time, with the right dietary notes. A focused app handles booking, meeting points, check-in, allergies, tips and reviews, and gives you a direct channel for the repeat Londoners who now make up a share of many food tour businesses. Guides can see at a glance who has arrived, who is running late from the Tube and who has paid a deposit for a private tour.
A small, sharp first release suits these operators best.
Operators bringing coach groups, student trips and incentive groups to London need itineraries, rooming lists, entry times, coach schedules and emergency contacts in one place. A group app keeps each traveller's day in their pocket, and a coordinator view shows where every group is. Coach timings are planned around the Ultra Low Emission Zone and central London parking and drop-off rules your drivers already follow. Group leaders can message their travellers through the app instead of a personal phone number.
Itinerary changes reach everyone at once.
How we work together
Codeeo has delivered 200+ projects across the UAE and the US. Our team of 80+ is spread across Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi, and we are rated 4.7 from 23 Google reviews. We work remotely with clients in London, with discovery, design reviews and demos run by video call. Operators usually begin with a fixed scope first release, then move to a retainer for new features and seasonal content. Larger groups with several attractions or a fleet often prefer a dedicated team. Cost depends on how many apps and user roles you need, live tracking hardware and data, the number of languages and recorded commentary, and integrations with ticketing, payment and reseller systems.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
Native or cross platform builds chosen per product, with offline ticket validation, real-time location services and a content system your team edits. As tourism mobile app developers for London operators, we keep the architecture simple enough for your own staff or another supplier to maintain. Hosting scales for summer weekends and big events.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
Scope, integrations, languages and content, more than screens.
A simple booking app for one walking tour costs far less than a sightseeing network with live tracking, multilingual commentary and reseller sync. The heaviest items are usually integrations with ticketing systems and travel agencies, live vehicle data, recorded audio in several languages, and offline validation at gates. We price after discovery, once the first release is written down, so you are paying for agreed features rather than estimates. Ongoing hosting and support are scoped separately so you can see both.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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