Perhaps the question I get asked most is, “What are the biggest trends in experiences?”
Everybody loves trends. The media loves writing about them. We all want to know what they are, we all want to stay ahead. Skift did an excellent piece recently on five key trends to watch.
But trends change. They come, they get written about, and there’s next year’s article, which serves up five more.
As the team prepares for Arival 360 | San Diego next week, I’ve been thinking most about the big, persistent challenges our industry faces. Each of these themes pose challenges for operators, resellers, and technology providers. They create friction for consumers in the travel experience. But they could also present enormous white spaces of opportunity for the operators, innovators and platforms that figure it out.
So here are our seven big challenges (NOT trends!) in travel experiences.
7. It’s Getting Crowded
I’m not talking about overtourism (see #2), but about tour and attraction ticket products, especially in key destinations.
Viator offers 950 tours of the Eiffel Tower, GetYourGuide has 582.
GetYourGuide has 800 listings for the Colosseum. Viator offers 1,000+.
As a consumer, which one is right for me? Which one should I choose? Do I want the full day or the half-day? Should I do the small group or the larger group? And what’s the difference between the $50 tour and the $95 option?
Some platforms, such as Civitatis and Headout, are focused on building curated marketplaces to make these decisions easier for customers, and many travelers are also turning to social media and even Generative AI tools like ChatGPT to help plan their trips.
What does this mean for operators? How can operators stand out from the increasingly crowded landscape of competitive tours, tickets and experiences? How can you differentiate yourself online and on OTAs? How can you ensure you’re getting seen on social, getting found on Google and by AI search tools? Should you lower your prices? Spend more on marketing or commission? Add more inclusions to your experiences?
Tao Tao, COO of GetYourGuide, will give a talk from the online travel agency perspective at Arival 360 | San Diego on how operators can break through the clutter. Peek’s John Lynch will then do a deep-dive workshop on the same topic.
We’re also hosting a series of workshops on all things digital marketing and growth, including:
- The Art & Science of Conversion with Seattle Ballooning and TripWorks
- Conversion Rate Optimization: Tour Description Tune-Up with Kelsey Tonner of Guest Focus
- The Heart of Marketing: Why Creative is More Crucial Than Ever, with the Von Mack Agency and Far Horizons
- Performance Bookings: Unlocking Traveler Growth Through Strategic Digital Marketing with Propellic
- Skyrocket Your Direct Bookings with Brandon Lake of Moab Adventure Center and Resmark
- Leveling Up Your Social Media with travel influencer Ravi Roth
- Google Things to do Best Practices with Magpie Travel’s Christian Watts
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6. Personal Mass Tourism (the Airbnb Conundrum)
We hear it everyday in tours and attractions. Travelers want unique, authentic, personal experiences. But there’s only one Sistine Chapel, only one Eiffel Tower. How can our industry deliver these unique experiences, to the masses, day-in, day-out, especially for the most sought-after attractions sites that attract the growing numbers of travelers from all over the world?
This is the vision laid out, albeit sparsely, by the CEO of Airbnb recently, regarding the relaunch of Experiences in 2025. They will include experiences offering iconic attractions and sites, but with a unique “twist” for Airbnb.
This is not a challenge for Airbnb alone, but for all operators and sellers of experiences. Travelers seek authentic, memorable experiences. As tourism demand continues to rise, and especially for the must-see sites and attractions around the world, the challenge to deliver those experiences in a meaningful way will only be greater.
At Arival 360 | San Diego, we’ll delve into the challenge of how to design, and scale, personal, unique experiences with Walt Disney Imagineering Executive Creator Director Caroline Boone, who was also an early team member of Airbnb Experiences. Veteran tour guide Dara Mihaly will lead a workshop on Designing Tours for Tomorrow’s Travelers.
5. To Grow or Not to Grow? (Or, How to Scale the Long Tail)
I like to cycle. Several years ago when attending a conference in Amsterdam, I looked online for a cycling excursion. I had a vision of a vigorous afternoon trek through the Dutch countryside, but all I could find online was a long list of similar city bike tours (GetYourGuide currently lists 90). I could see some windmills, eat a cookie, sample some cheese, and hear from a streetworker in the Red Light District.
All of those tours looked like fun (ok, maybe not all) and had great reviews, but they weren’t what I wanted. I did eventually find a private cycling tour, buried on page 14 on Viator. It was a listing from an individual guide – a school teacher by day, a cycling guide on weekends, when he got a booking. He didn’t have a website, and only listed on Airbnb and Viator.
The vast majority of operators are small, even micro businesses (see our analysis of the size of the operator landscape – an update is on the way). They may serve just a few hundred guests per year (in some cases, far fewer). Many are individual tour guides. They can be side hustles, or simply side passions.
These micro operators can deliver amazing, unique, and very personal experiences for their guests. But they are much harder to scale. The only way to grow is to offer more experiences, which requires more guides and hosts. Often this may not even be possible, because the experience is so tied to the individual host delivering the experience.
And for most of these operators, growth is not a priority. Just one in four operators say they are focused on aggressive growth of 10% per year or more. The rest plan for mild growth, holding steady, or don’t even plan at all.
For many operators, this is a lifestyle choice and passion-first business. They would rather be leading tours, telling stories or taking their guests on the water than managing their Google business listing or setting up their booking system API to OTAs.
This reality presents a big question: How can the rest of the industry best serve and inspire those less growth-focused operators? Booking systems want their business, OTAs want their listings, destinations want potential visitors to find them, and consumers want to book them online.
When more operators engage, the whole industry benefits, but none more so than the operator and the traveler.
At Arival 360 | San Diego, we’re hosting a series of workshops on growth:
- Elevated Leadership for a Performance Culture, a workshop by tour and activity business advisory firm Cultivate Advisors and designed for medium and large businesses.
- Ready to Scale Your Business? An extended workshop and discussion forum on how operators can scale
- Two workshops on M&A and Buying & Selling a Tour Business
4. I’ll Take One Booking System, Please
You can’t scale the Long Tail if you can’t surface it. Making all of the amazing tours and experiences discoverable for travelers today requires technology. This remains a major obstacle.
In our 2024 Global Operator Landscape survey, we had one startling result: some two in five operators said they are not using an online booking system. It was 39%, to be exact.
Think about that for a moment.
What if 39% of airlines or hotels did not use a reservation system? What would travel look like? It probably wouldn’t resemble anything like what we experience in 2024, and overtourism almost certainly would not be an issue.
For our industry, however, a substantial percentage of operators are offline. And it’s not just small operators. It’s not just operators in less developed countries. It’s medium-sized and even large operators serving thousands of guests a year in the Americas, in Europe, in Asia.
The state of technology adoption – or lack thereof – has enormous implications that ripple throughout our industry. It affects consumers’ ability to find and book the experiences; it limits the ability of OTAs and other tourism resellers to offer them to their customers. And it adds cost and risks of errors across the travel booking chain.
If you are looking for new technology, or considering a change, more than 60 providers of technology for the tours, activities and attraction sector will be attending Arival 360 | San Diego. We’re also running two key workshops to help you find the right tech: Introduction to the Experiences Industry: Tech & Distribution, and Choosing the Right Tech for Your Experiences Operation.
3. Not Content with Your Content
On a family vacation to the Caribbean this summer, I had booked an excursion through an OTA (which shall remain nameless). When the day arrived, we took a taxi to the meeting point as instructed in the app. But there was no boat – at least not for us. We called the operator. It turns out we had the wrong meeting point. The correct departure point was on the other side of the island.
There we were, at a random marina on a Caribbean island, no excursion in sight. I did, however, have three family members looking at me with a certain expression I will remember for some time.
We made the best of the day (fortunately there was a beach nearby). The operator responded very graciously, and I received a refund that same day. But this shouldn’t be happening in 2024. The operator loses, the reseller loses, and the customer loses. And yet it happens all too often. Did the OTA have an error? Did the operator set up their product correctly or keep it up to date?
Content and connectivity management are table stakes for modern tours and activities businesses. But too many operators – a majority – continue to rely on manual processes, according to Arival’s forthcoming Global Operator Landscape 3rd Edition.
Arival 360 | San Diego will feature an in-depth workshop on content management and connectivity, Content Management: Distributing Amazing Content Across Multiple Channels, and OCTO, the non-profit industry standards organization for connectivity, will host an introductory meeting and announce its new content capability for the OCTO specification.
2. Overloved, Overcrowded
Many might contend this should be in the top spot, and they could be right. Traveler demand for experiences and seeing the iconic sites is only increasing. But there’s only one Acropolis, one Sistine Chapel, one Venice, one Barcelona.
This challenge has been years in the making, and is now confronting the tourism industry like never before. The rise of anti-tourism protests across Spain, along with the impact of climate change on weather across the continent, has led some to suggest Europe may have reached a tipping point.
From Amsterdam to Athens, Italy, Spain and even Scotland, more and more destinations and attractions are considering or implementing policies, restrictions and fees to manage tourism, before our most beloved icons of tourism become loved to death. And this isn’t limited to Europe, either — destinations from Japan to New Zealand, Canada to the Caribbean are introducing measures to help manage increased visitation to their most popular places.
Our industry – operators of tours and attractions – is very much on the front lines. This issue will be a defining one for the foreseeable future, and will be a particular focus of our upcoming Arival 360 conference in Valencia in 2025.
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1. The Discovery Dilemma. What to Do!
This industry has a problem. A big one: it’s not an industry at all.
Our sector of travel and tourism – travel experiences, or tours, activities and attractions – is an amalgam of 150+ industries or sub-categories. If you’ve attended an Arival event, you’ve probably seen this slide before.
This is both the most wonderful aspect of experiences, and perhaps the most challenging. In a typical destination, I might be able to choose from a food tour, a hot air balloon ride, tickets to a baseball (or football) game, a private guided museum tour, or tickets to a theme park.
Which offers should we provide to potential customers? How do we know what they might be interested in, unless they’re directly searching for a specific activity? And just because I did a sightseeing tour on my last trip, doesn’t mean I want to do it on the next one. How do we attract or retain potential repeat customers?
It’s also a challenge for all of the technology providers and resellers in our industry. The way travelers plan and book a walking tour will be different from a white-water rafting trip or visit to an observation deck.
Many of these sub-sectors of experiences have unique operational requirements. Helicopter tour operators need to capture the weight of each guest. Food tour operators may want to capture food allergies or dietary restrictions. Some adventure operators require waivers. More and more theme parks and attractions are offering an expanding array of ticket types, package upsells and offers.
The many different needs of travelers and operators across these sectors is also giving rise to innovative startups targeting key segments underserved by the larger platforms. For example:
- The outdoor experiences OTA Captain Experiences has a filter by species for its fishing experiences.
- Theme park specialists such as AttractionTickets.com. Attraction World and Undercover Tourist offer dozens of ticket types for theme parks not found on other platforms.
- The Batch offers experiences designed for parties such as bachelor, bachelorette and birthdays, with distinctive group-booking capabilities.
- Sportswhereiam.com is aggregating professional sporting event tickets specifically for resale through travel distribution channels.
Arival’s just released Guide to OTAs & Digital Distributors lists 150 platforms, many with distinct strategies. Some specialize in geographic markets, such as Japan’s Veltra, while others focus on a particular product segment, such as Traveling Spoon and Cesarine for culinary experiences, or bike tours specialist Baja Bikes.
Arival 360 | San Diego will feature a Future of Distribution Forum, where we’ll hear from three distinct specialist OTAs – Batch, Virgin Experience Gifts and TripShock – on their distinct approach to selling experiences and the customer and operator needs they serve. Then our panel of operators and experts will ask them key questions about their approach and give direct feedback.
30 September – 3 October 2024
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Tackling Experiences’ Biggest Challenges at Arival
It’s helpful to stay on top of trends — we have nothing against them — but at Arival we try to focus on the bigger picture, and the broader themes underlying many of the “trends” you’ll hear about in catchy headlines. “Coolcation,” for example, is a trendy term that has arisen due to the underlying challenge of overcrowding and heat waves driving travelers to look for alternatives.
With each of the challenges discussed here, we are focused on providing our sector — operators of tours, activities, attractions and experiences, as well as the innovators, platforms and technology providers that support them — with the knowledge and resources to understand and address these challenges and find the opportunities they present. At the upcoming Arival 360 | San Diego event, we’ll be working through many of these challenges with leaders from across the sector, on stage and in practical hands-on workshop sessions. We hope to see you there!
This article includes select findings from Arival’s forthcoming Global Operator Landscape 3rd Ed., based on a survey of more than 7,000 operators conducted between April-June 2024. Arival acknowledges the support of launch partner GetYourGuide, as well as strategic insights partners the Catalan Tourist Board, Expian, Rezgo, TripWorks and Viator. Arival will publish results beginning in October 2024, and share summary results with all survey respondents.
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