Tickets, Please: Attraction Access for Tour Operators

With popular attractions busier than ever and timed ticketing now commonplace, accessing attraction tickets is a growing challenge for tour operators

Silhouettes of cable cars against a vibrant sunset sky, with a neon "Tickets" sign in the foreground.

As more travelers prioritize experiences, and seek to experience attractions in unique ways, there is a growing opportunity for tour operators to include attraction visits – and tickets, – as part of a tour.  

However, the growing popularity of attractions, especially in the most visited destinations, has made access to attraction tickets increasingly challenging for travelers and tour operators alike. Limited availability of tickets and the advent of timed ticketing — hot topics at the latest Arival event in Berlin — have added a new level of complexity to the already complicated relationship between tour operators and attractions. 

For tour operators, there are numerous questions to working with attractions beyond getting tickets: What if they close on short notice, as the Acropolis has done on numerous occasions for heat waves? Will the attraction allow you to lead your tour inside, or send your guests in with a pre-made audio tour to explore on their own? Do you need an agreement with them, or is it easier to ask for forgiveness than permission?

There are a lot of unwritten — and some written — rules when it comes to visiting attractions on tours, and these can differ by country and company. This article delves into the opportunities, challenges and best practices for operators including attractions on their tours.

The Opportunity: Travelers Want Guided Experiences at Attractions

As Arival research shows, more attractions visitors are looking for guided experiences. Nearly half of U.S. travelers and one in three European travelers who visited a cultural attraction or museum last year did so via a tour. 

Bar graph comparing U.S. and Europe: stand-alone tickets vs. tours/passes for attractions. U.S. favors tours more, Europe prefers stand-alone tickets.

There is a growing opportunity here for both tour operators and attractions to work together and respond to this shift in traveler preferences, by making it easier for travelers to visit attractions as part of a tour. 

A well-done tour can enhance the visitor experience for both the attraction and the tour itself. “Generally people who are on tours that include or are inside of attractions have a better time, and their reviews are much better,” observed Stephen Oddo, Founder of Walks, which offers self-guided walking tour products, many of which include entry to popular attractions. 

“When we are able to upsell somebody from a single ticket to a tour, the people are much more satisfied than with just a normal ticket,” shared Luuc Elzinga, CEO of Tiqets, the online travel agency that focuses on visitor attractions and other ticketed venues. 

Tours can also help to bring personalization of the guest attraction experience to the next level. “By opening up themselves to the tour operators who are specialized in different target groups on that experience,” Elzinga noted, “it really uplifts the whole experience.” 

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The Challenge: Access to Tickets for Tour Operators is Increasingly Complicated

Despite the opportunity in working together, the relationship status of many attractions and tour operators is currently “it’s complicated.” 

This is a fragmented sector of the industry, according to June Chin, CEO of Context Travel, and the rules and standards can differ country by country, and attraction by attraction. 

“It makes the barrier to entry high,” said Chin, explaining that some attractions have very complicated contracts for tour operators, others you have to book online, and still others leave operators no option but to “get in the same line as all the families.”

The introduction of timed ticketing to many popular attractions in order to manage increased demand has also wreaked havoc on operators. 

“Last year was the first year where we really experienced serious issues in trying to get enough tickets to fulfill demand,” said Walks COO Roisin O’Sullivan, speaking on the Hot Topics panel discussion at Arival Berlin. She said Walks has an entire team dedicated to purchasing attraction tickets the moment they come on sale. “It’s increasingly hard to buy tickets as a human being, because they’re going so quickly.”

Walks & Devour Tours COO Roisin O’Sullivan, Tiqets Founder Luuc Elzinga, President of Gray Line Tours Gudrun Thorisdottir, and Arival VP Content Stephen Joyce discussed timed ticketing and attraction ticket access challenges during the Hot Topics session at Arival 360 | Berlin 2024. Watch the full session here.

Additionally, with some operators experimenting with new and different ways of offering experiences, such as self-guided audio tours, attractions may be skeptical. “There will always be issues when you take a market to a more mature level,” said Elzinga.

So where do we go from here?

Best Practices for Tour Operators Accessing Attractions

There may be no industry standard for the relationship between tour operators and attractions, but there are certainly some best practices operators can follow in order to build positive and mutually beneficial relationships with attractions. 

1. Build Relationships 

Building relationships with the attractions you work with is an important first step. If you’re just starting out, or approaching a new attraction, find out who to talk to, and when. 

Approaching the right person at an attraction is an important first step. Many attractions have group sales departments, which is a good place to start.

Three diverse professionals greeting each other with handshakes
Approaching the right person at an attraction to discuss ticket access and building a relationship with them is an important first step. | Photo: Pexels / Sora Shimazaki

Timing is also an important consideration. “Summer isn’t the time to establish these relationships,” said Chin. “Outreach in the fall, winter.” Like operators, attractions are at their busiest in the midst of peak season. Wait until there is some breathing room before you reach out for new contracts.

Building relationships seems obvious, but it can be a tough hurdle if you have to overcome the sourness of an attraction’s past experience with tour operators. “Over the last 10 years there’s been momentum against tour operators inside of major attractions,” explained Oddo. If an attraction has had a bad taste left in their mouth from disrespectful tour guides and groups, or shady operators trying to skirt ticketing rules, they may be less amenable to developing relationships with other tour operators. 

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2. Differentiate Yourself with Professionalism & Quality

One of the best ways to establish positive relationships and overcome any negative past experiences an attraction has had with tour operators is to differentiate yourself with professionalism and quality. Demonstrating that you’re a “real value-add provider” and that your tours compliment the attraction’s goals will go a long way towards building a positive relationship. 

Managing guests is one of the benefits tours can add to attractions. “Make sure you — and your staff — are being respectful and understand what that place is trying to achieve,” said Oddo. Having professional and well-trained guides that model respectful and responsible behavior to their guests is essential. 

Tour group photo in front of the Parthenon ruins
The ability to manage their guests inside attractions and enhance the experience are important benefits tours and well-trained guides can provide. | Photo: Pexels / Matheus Bertelli

Demonstrating how your tours enhance the guest experience is another way tour operators can differentiate themselves. “If you do great work usually it shows,” said Daphne Tsevreni, Co-Founder of Clio Muse, which creates self-guided tours and offers skip-the-line tickets and audio tours for hundreds of attractions. 

When Clio Muse approaches a new attraction, Tsevreni explained, they introduce themselves and give examples of what they do. Some attractions are wary of working with them at first, and “the availability that the attractions give you at first is limited,” she shared. 

“But when [the attractions] see that we’re doing a good job it gets easier,” said Tsevreni. 

“In the end they see we have specific ratings, a very big portfolio of tours and tickets, very big volumes of sales, and the audio guides that we have content wise it’s really, really high quality… Now sometimes the attractions want to sell the audio tours themselves.”

Finally, being professional means keeping things above the board. “Don’t play games with pricing,” warned Oddo, citing the example of “shady underhanded operators” purchasing tickets of a cheaper type, or other tactics like food tour operators blocking off tables on Open Table rather than working with the venue directly. “That can work for a while but it’s a really good way to permanently burn yourself… Being the professional one will win out long term.”

3. When You Can’t Go Direct, Work with Ticket Resellers 

Ultimately, building relationships and demonstrating your professionalism and quality will hopefully enable you to establish clear contracts with the attractions you want to work with, and get the tickets you need to run your tours — more on that below. 

But first, what if you can’t establish a contract, or the attraction isn’t providing you with the tickets you need? Are there other options?

“With the world of travel there’s a million layers,” said Lori Timony,  SVP of Global Trade Sales and Business Development at Go City and co-host of the Experience This! travel show. “You’re always going to be taking a risk if you don’t have a direct contract, you 100% want a direct contract, but there’s a lot of attractions out there that are not going to give you a direct contract.”

Hands passing document with blurred cityscape behind
Having a clearly defined contract is the ideal scenario for tour operators working with attractions, but it’s not always possible. | Photo: Unsplash / Van Tay Media

There are other ways of getting tickets, if you can’t get them directly from the attraction. Many operators purchase tickets through online resellers, for example, to include with their tours. 

“When you’re selling an attraction that you don’t have a direct contract for, you take a risk, but it’s one way of getting in the door,” said Timony. “If you’re doing it, you need to make sure everything you’re doing is on the up-and-up.”

Not everyone follows this advice. Timony shared a cautionary tale of an operator who was blacklisted by a large OTA for re-selling attraction tickets alongside a self-guided audio tour without a contract and without informing the attraction of the tour. When the attraction found out about the listings, and saw that the audio guide was filled with mistakes and the content was inaccurate, they demanded the OTA remove that listing. The OTA discontinued not only that tour but all the tours the company was selling. 

So how do you avoid getting blacklisted? Relationships, professionalism and quality can go a long way. In the example above, how might that story have ended differently, had the company first attempted to build a relationship with the attraction, and had they provided a quality product?

Ensuring you’re working with reputable OTAs that have their own contracts with the attractions is another approach. “We are going to be in touch with the museum or attraction and we explain to them that it’s really helping to improve the whole customer experience,” said Elzinga from Tiqets, which supplies attraction tickets to hundreds of tour operators. 

4. Know Your Ticket Types & Plan Ahead for Volume

Regardless of how you get your tickets, ensuring you have the tickets you need when you need them can be one of the most complex challenges of working with attractions. With more attractions implementing timed ticketing and dynamic pricing, and more travelers booking last minute, projecting demand for those tickets, and knowing when to buy them, is only getting harder. 

“The earlier you can plan the better,” said Chin. “We wind up pre-purchasing a lot of our inventory, but you have to know how to forecast, you have to know how to plan.” 

Fall and winter are the best time to engage with attractions, Chin explained: Context Travel plans in the fall of the previous year for the following year, paying attention to forecasting and traveler booking trends. 

“The behaviors are changing post-pandemic: when they’re booking, how far out they’re booking,” Chin added. “A lot of the demand has become more last minute … there’s no way you can play if you’re just buying the tickets as demand comes in. You have to be able to take some inventory risk.”

Arival research confirms this: U.S. travelers booked 60% of tours within a week of taking a tour in 2023, and one in five travelers booked the same day of the tour itself. 

Fan of Space Needle event tickets held in hand
Planning ahead for ticket volume can be a challenge when travelers book so last minute, but forecasting and flexible ticket types can help. | Photo: Unsplash / Andy Li

Having flexible ticket types is also ideal. “When it comes to tickets, it’s really hard if it’s dated,” explained Tsevreni: open-date and open-time tickets are the best case scenario for Clio Muse. “Audio tours do not have availability limits, so the only thing that has a capacity limit is the attraction.”

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Where Do We Go From Here: What’s Next for Tour Operators & Attraction Ticketing

While there are some best practices operators can follow regarding attraction ticket access, the reality is the most in-demand attractions hold most of the cards. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon as demand for these tickets continues to increase.

However, as the pressures of overtourism increase, tour operators and attractions alike will continue to be impacted: ideally, they will find a way to work together to address it.

“We should have a better connection with attractions as a tourism industry,” said Tsevreni. 

And with changing traveler trends, the need for collaboration has never been greater. “This is an inflection point year,” said Chin. “In 2024 there will be a bit more of a shakeout about who’s able to get this right.”

For operators and attractions who want to explore the latest issues and insights in the in-destination experiences sector and have the opportunity to connect with one another in-person, join us at the next Arival event

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