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Headout expands global partnership with Merlin Entertainments across Asia. Sep 23, 2026 Headout, home to the world's best real-life experiences, today announced the expansion of its global partnership with Merlin Entertainments across Asia, bringing four leading Merlin attractions in the region onto the Headout platform through direct integration. SEA LIFE Bangkok, Madame Tussauds Bangkok, Madame Tussauds Singapore and Madame Tussauds Hong Kong are now live and bookable on Headout. The expansion builds on a longstanding partnership between Headout and Merlin Entertainments across the US, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. With Asia now part of that footprint, Merlin gains access to Headout's growing base of international and long-haul travelers, while Headout guests can discover and book even more of Merlin's iconic attractions around the world. The direct integration also makes the booking experience faster and more seamless, with real-time availability and instant confirmation. Travelers can book using local currencies and payment methods, with flexible options including Book Now, Pay Later, making it easier to plan and pay for experiences on their terms. "Asia is an incredibly important growth market for Headout, and we're excited to grow our presence here alongside Merlin. Merlin operates some of the world's most recognisable attractions, and bringing more of them onto Headout makes it easier for travelers to discover and experience them. We've built a strong partnership across markets globally and see plenty of opportunity to build on that success together across APAC." - Parth Maheshwari, Regional General Manager, APAC, Headout The expansion marks the next chapter in Headout and Merlin Entertainments' global partnership, as the two companies continue to make world-class experiences easier to discover and book for travelers across Asia and beyond. Images in this article

The system behind a slot that stays available | Headout Hackin' A booking can look available right until it fails at checkout. Clockwork checks inventory exactly when it matters, reducing ghost slots, protecting partner APIs and making the path from discovery to booking far more reliable. | July 28, 2026 Headout Inc noticed a simple problem guests were facing: the time slot they had chosen could disappear just as they were about to book. Hundreds of guests encounter this on Headout every day, not always because demand suddenly spiked, but because the availability Headout Inc showed them was already out of date. Somewhere between its last check with the supply partner and the moment the guest tried to pay, someone else had taken the slot. Internally, Headout Inc call this a Live Inventory Check failure. To the guest, it simply feels like a broken promise. So Headout Inc decided to fix it during Hackin' and called it Clockwork. Why fresher inventory is not a simple fix. Headout connects guests to experiences through dozens of supply partner systems, each with its own APIs and restrictions on how often Headout Inc can ask what is still available. The obvious solution is to refresh inventory more frequently, but every partner limits the number of API calls Headout Inc can make, and exceeding that allowance can throttle every experience connected through the account. Headout Inc had a fixed budget of calls and needed to spend it where it would have the greatest impact. The idea of an intelligent sync optimizer had surfaced before, but the problem could still be managed manually, with someone increasing the frequency of one tour and reducing another when failures became visible. That approach worked just well enough to delay a better one. When Hackin' at Headout began, the ability to configure every tour independently had just shipped, giving Headout Inc the foundation to build the system properly: fully automated, with no manual knobs. The scoring problem became a systems problem. From the outside, Clockwork looked like a ranking exercise: score every tour by how urgently it needed fresh inventory, then assign a sync frequency. The first brainstorming session revealed the iceberg underneath. Booking velocity mattered, but a fast-selling tour with a high failure rate required a different response from one selling just as quickly with almost no failures. The model had to balance several signals, ignore small fluctuations so it did not react to noise, and treat frequency changes proportionally, so moving from 15 to 30 minutes felt equivalent to moving from six to 12 hours. It also had to respect rate limits across tours sharing the same partner account, distribute the budget fairly when demand exceeded supply, detect zero-inventory segments wasting calls, pause broken tours automatically and spread schedules out so refresh jobs did not fire together. Every feature had to coexist without producing contradictory behaviour, and one aggressive configuration could overwhelm a partner API and throttle the entire account. Clockwork had stopped being a weekend scoring model and become a genuine systems design challenge. Proving that fresher data changed outcomes. Before building the complete system, Headout Inc tested the eight tours with the highest Live Inventory Check failure rates and increased their sync frequency to once every 15 minutes. The aggregate failure rate fell from 10.6% to 4.7%, more than halving the problem and confirming that stale inventory was a root cause Headout Inc could directly influence. Headout Inc then extended inventory windows for tours from a major theme park partner, fetching availability further into the future than before. That generated hundreds of incremental bookings from guests planning months ahead, bookings that could not have happened earlier because the inventory had never been available to see. Three people, one production system. Madhav and Himanshu built the scoring engine, rate-limit distributor, pipeline and dashboard, while Shriyan brought the product context needed to ensure the team was building something complete enough for production, not merely clever enough for a demo. In less than two days, the team worked through the partner constraints and failure modes that had kept the idea on the backlog and turned it into a functioning system. What is live now. Clockwork is now in production through a phased rollout across Headout's supply partner network. It scores tours, adjusts sync frequencies, respects partner-level rate limits, pauses broken tours, reduces calls to zero-inventory segments and diffuses schedules so jobs do not spike simultaneously, all without manual intervention. The next step is to extend inventory windows across more partners, turning the theme park experiment into a platform-wide capability. Hackin' at Headout is its internal hackathon, where small teams have less than two days to turn real problems into working products. Interested in building with Headout Inc? Explore open roles at Headout.