How Secret Food Tours scaled to 120 cities with one booking stack

Secret Food Tours is the largest food tour company globally, with experiences across 60 cities. Founded by Oliver Mernick-Levene, the company is known for immersive, neighbourhood-style food tours built for travellers who want local flavour without a generic “tourist menu” feel.

The problem: one brand, dozens of markets

Before TicketingHub, running global operations meant finding reservation tech that could work across regions, currencies, and commercial models—not a patchwork of tools per city.

Global operations: “We are global—we’re in 120 cities. We needed reservation technology that would allow us to operate in all of those different cities with different currencies,” Oliver says.

Pricing and timelines had to flex by market: different pricing, different timelines, and a workflow that stayed consistent for teams launching and operating tours internationally.

In practice, every launch raises the same operational questions: how do guests pay in the local currency, how does a new city team get selling without weeks of training, and how does head office keep one view of sales across every market? A system that solved this for one city but not the next would multiply admin with every launch.

Support mattered: “Others would leave us hanging for a long time,” Oliver says—slow vendor support breaks momentum when you’re opening routes and training partners.

“There weren’t many res-tech companies we could see that would do that,” he adds—until Secret Food Tours standardised on TicketingHub.

What changed with TicketingHub

TicketingHub became the all-in-one layer for launching products, opening new cities faster, and keeping sales ops coherent worldwide.

Ease of use: “What we love most about TicketingHub is its ease of use,” Oliver notes—quick setup for new products and new cities.

Pricing: “It’s the most competitive price out there.”

Customer service: “The customer service is fantastic. Every time we need help, they’re straight to respond to us.”

Scale across regions: the platform’s flexibility helped teams integrate pricing, languages, and commercial rules without reinventing the stack every time a city goes live.

Commercial outcome: “Using TicketingHub has allowed us to generate more sales, which in turn has allowed us to make a lot more money quicker,” Oliver explains.

Launching a new city stopped being a technology project. New tours are configured as products in the same dashboard — schedules, prices, and currencies set per market — so the playbook refined in one city carries straight over to the next. And when a configuration question does come up in a launch week, it goes to a support team that answers fast enough to keep the go-live on schedule.

How Secret Food Tours operates today

Today the company sells through two main routes at once. Travellers who find a tour on the brand’s own city sites book through TicketingHub’s embedded booking widget, paying in the local currency. Alongside that, marketplace listings on OTAs such as GetYourGuide and Viator connect to the same availability — so a booking from any channel lands in one place, and the same seats are never sold twice.

Behind the scenes, a central reservations team manages the day-to-day — amendments, group enquiries, private-tour requests — from a single dashboard covering every city, rather than logging into a different tool per market. The company also pulls its booking data through the TicketingHub API into its own internal reporting, so finance and operations work from numbers that update without manual exports.

None of this is new plumbing. The relationship goes back to 2014, and the early playbook — booking widgets on city sites, gift-voucher promotions in the holiday season, marketplace connections — is recognisably the same one running today, scaled up across continents.

What their setup looks like

• Booking widget embedded on the brand’s own city websites, selling in each market’s local currency
• OTA connections — including GetYourGuide and Viator — drawing on the same live availability as the website
• One dashboard for a central reservations team covering every city
• API access feeding booking data into Secret Food Tours’ own internal reporting
• Gift vouchers and promotional codes for seasonal campaigns

“Since we've been a customer, lots of things have changed. We've been with the system for more than 10 years, and every time we've needed to use it to scale up, to sell more tickets or to become more streamlined, it's been the perfect solution for us. We have looked at other systems, but this is by far the most economical, and I would recommend it to anyone, whether they're small, multi-city, or global like we are. We think it is definitely the best res-tech out there!”
— Oliver Mernick-Levene, Secret Food Tours

The takeaway for multi-city operators

For operators eyeing a second — or a fiftieth — city, the lesson is less about any single feature and more about what gets avoided: re-choosing a booking system per market, re-training staff per tool, and reconciling sales across systems that don’t talk to each other.

For Secret Food Tours, the through-line is operational: one reservation stack that supports multi-currency, multi-city rollout, and fast support—so growth reads as launching cities, not fighting software.