The Road Ahead for Selling Tours & Activities Online

Destination Planning is undoubtedly the most complicated and overwhelming part of the Travel Planning Customer Journey. Don’t get me wrong — I am not saying booking a flight or a hotel is easy. But compared to the amount of research that is tied to the process of planning what exactly to do at a destination, securing a seat in a plane or a room at a hotel is relatively less complicated. Also, while most travelers won’t mind compromising on the kind of seat they get on a plane or the type of Room they spend a night in, none would settle for a mediocre experience at the destination — no matter what their budget is. Because, that is the very reason why they are going there, and that is the Best part of Travel!

[Image Credit: Marchex]

Given this fact, it is no surprise the Tours and Activities sector is getting so much love from investors of late. According to Research data from ARIVAL, around 1.2 Billion USD has been pumped into this sector — just in the last couple of years! And while a lot of media and articles have focused on the funding itself, not many have actually talked about What these OTA’s should be/could be doing with this cash, and the kind of innovations they should be looking at.

Image Credit: ARIVAL

In this article, I outline my take on Where these players — who are directly connected to the supply and operators — should really focus on to deliver a Delightful Customer Experience for the Digitally Savvy Travelers. This is only looking at the marketplace from a consumer perspective, and I will follow up with a separate article to talk about from an Operator angle. At a high level, I believe the innovation and evolution need to take place across 5 key pillars, all converging towards a common goal of building a Frictionless Customer Experience. The snapshot below calls out these 5 pillars and what aspects of the Customer Journey they represent:

1. A Robust Marketplace

In the current climate of selling Tours and Activities online, every time a big OTA — like Klook or GetYourGuide — receives a fresh round of massive funding, the first thing they declare is how they going to use the cash injection to ‘Expand’ their inventory. In my personal viewpoint, OTAs should stop racing against each other in terms of inventory. It’s not the Quantity of the Inventory that would matter the most eventually, but the Quality and the Variety of the Catalogue. So, building what I’d like to describe as a Robust Marketplace is going to be the differentiator as well as a game-changer in the coming years.

So, what would a Robust Marketplace include exactly? It means having the option to book various types and ‘flavors’ of Destination products so that you avoid the users potentially abandoning and going to another OTA that specializes in a different type of Destination experience. This is similar to the model big OTA’s in the accommodation sector — like Agoda and Booking.com — are trying to evolve into. Now, you don’t have to go to a different marketplace to look for vacation rentals or homestays. You can get all of them in addition to Hotels, Hostels & Apartments right inside their marketplace itself — like a one-stop-shop for all Accommodation types — not just hotels!

In the Destination Products industry this would mean covering the below high-level categories:

• Traditional Destination Products: These are the typical tours and activities that are experienced as part of a group. Like the City-sightseeing & Hop-on Hop-off tours or the standard attraction tickets and shared day tours.
• P2P Tours: Personal Guide based tours hosted by local experts with special insider tips. Caters well to travelers who prefer to avoid a bigger crowd and traditional’. Provided now by players like Vayable, WithLocals, etc.
• Transportation products: Like Rail tickets, Transfers, Taxis, etc.
• ‘Unique’ Experiences: Activities where the traveler (or local) engages and interacts closely with a host/expert to learn something new (anything from cooking to an art skill!)
• Logistics Products: This involves anything from getting a WIFI/Sim card to getting your basic ‘needs’ fulfilled. Like a Ride-hailing or a Local food delivery option. Remove the pain of having to download a brand-new app to take care of such needs every time you are in a new region (think: Uber, Didi, Grab, Ola, Kareem, etc.!!)
• Locals-Engaging Products: Discovering and Buying Destination products should not be limited to just Travelers, but also extend to Locals alike. So having options to find and book tickets to Festivals, Events, and Concerts, etc., is important

With that being said, adding more and more products to the inventory is only going to make the Product discovery process more cumbersome. So, baking in a good Product Discovery flow is crucial as the inventory expands — something I drill into in the later part of this article.

Customized Tours: On top of all the points mentioned above, one of the biggest deterrents around inventory that discourage travelers from Booking Destination products online is the inability to configure or customize an itinerary (or options involved) of a tour according to their personal taste and preference. So, if the Inventory can allow users to do this, where they can pick and choose components of a tour to add or remove — and get the tour repriced dynamically — that will be a welcome innovation that might even turn the offline vs online booking ratio upside down! Eagerly waiting to see who delivers this first.

2. Inspirational Destination Discovery

Most of the OTA’s selling tours and activities today are quite ‘transactional’ when it comes to engaging a user searching for things to do at a Destination. It is either pitching cliched static lists like ‘Most popular’ or artificially personalized lists like ‘Recommended for you’ etc. — which are potentially not relevant to most users. Some OTAs like GetYourGuide don’t even bother to do this, but directly get to displaying a list of products that the customers can book! It is high time these platforms moved away from being a ‘Transaction Platform’ towards a ‘Planning Platform’

This is the very reason why customers jump to destination-research portals like Lonely Planet, CultureTrip, or even TripAdvisor (where most customer journey begins, if not Google). Of course, I am certainly not recommending the OTA’s to start building robust Destination content like the City guide sites, but at least attempt to move up the Customer Journey funnel. Below are some ideas on this front:

• Inspirational Rich Destination Content: This could be syndicated (to validate) and then created in-house depending on the impact on conversions. But the approach should be to make it more Appealing and off-beat than the ‘Lonely planet’ kind of bland Destination tips. For example, focusing more on Blue-lists like “What do in Amsterdam in 48 hours” or “Most Instagrammable spots in Berlin” etc. The important thing to ensure is binding this to relevant products, by allowing users to book something they are impressed within the content they are reading and not be a pure-play content provider! Like how blogs and videos providing beauty tips allow you to instantly buy the products that are talked about in the tip itself.
• Intelligent Notifications for Product Discovery: The fact that the users have a Destination-Product App in their pockets has to mean something when they are actually on the ground, at the destination! So, apps need to start making intelligent recommendations based on Users’ current Location on-the-ground, in a connected fashion. Example: If the user has booked a Canal Tour, recommend an attraction that’s popular at the end of the tour, around the expected finish time. Or even take it further and suggest interesting events happening around the location in run-time.
• Smart Insider Tips for Exploring the Destination: Start signing up locals and “Insiders” to share content and tips that could help travelers ‘Live Like a Local’ and getting the authentic version of a place. Like getting to know where the hidden gems are etc. This could be delivered to the booking users as a freebie based on the kind of product they booked. IF they booked a ‘Pub Crawl in Shanghai’ share a ‘Coolest speakeasy bars in Shanghai’ kind of insider tips — that can be consumed only via the app. Another incentive to motivate them to book via the app.

3. Assisted Product Discovery

Search & Discovery is undoubtedly the most challenging stage in the Destination planning customer journey. While I am not undermining the potential friction points in the Flight and Hotel booking customer journey, they are far more straightforward and easier when compared to what the users go through when booking Tours & Activities. It is quite easy to shortlist (for most travel types) the kind of Flight or Hotel that match your preferences. But in the case of Destination products, it is an entirely different story — in terms of Volume of products, Variety of Categories, and Inability to understand the ‘Type’ or ‘Feel’ of the experience. So below are some ideas around how to ease the search fatigue via Assisted Product Discovery.

• Natural Language Search: Enable users to get to the products that match their interests the most via Simplified text searches like “Water activities near Amsterdam” or “Kids Friendly activities in South of Bali”
• Personalized Product listings: This is not deep personalization, but a very basic one where-in you could show users targeted products based on their Travel Type (Business Travel, Family Travel, etc.), or based on Demographics (example: Middle eastern customers vs Asian Customers, etc.) or even based on their Interests (example: Likes to Socialize, Adrenaline Junkie, Backpacker etc.)
• Intelligent Grouping of Products: This is by far one of the biggest UX pain points when trying to narrow down — or directly searching for — specific activities/products. Thanks to the lack of Content Curation & Regulation, several ‘flavors’ of the same product shows up as a part of the product listings, sometimes making it very hard for the user to differentiate one from another. This is because most platforms allow multiple suppliers to sell the same products or the same suppliers to sell various ‘packages’ of the same product! For example, when you search for a popular attraction like ‘Berlin Tower’ or ‘Petronas Tower”, you get a dozen products that almost look similar but with mild variations(snapshot below) — where the user might end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out the cheapest (at the same time, the best) option.

Au Contraire, this is not the case in the case of Hotels where when you look for a ‘Hilton in Kuala Lumpur’ you pretty much get to the right product almost instantaneously. So, while one approach could be to curate this on the supply side to keep the choices clean, another way to address this is via machine learning based intelligent grouping and de-duping of similar products (like how hotel aggregators are doing for room types and hotels). Doing this is very crucial, as the inventory is only going to grow more and more as the industry evolves digitally.

• Travel Type-based Shortlisting: While Standard filters like Price, Duration, Category etc. are useful in narrowing down product listings to a smaller set that might suit a traveler’s interest — they can still face a cognitive overload as a result of the overwhelming volume of products they need to sift through at popular destinations (like Bali or Amsterdam). So, the OTA’s need to go beyond ‘Static Filters’ and surface ‘Dynamic Tags’ to quickly filter results that don’t just narrow down based on the product types but based on their Taste and Travel type.

For example: Tags like ‘Hits with Kids’, ’Romantic’, ‘Senior Citizens’, ‘Halal’ etc. could empower users who are on such travel ‘modes’ to quickly get to what is most relevant to their trip type. They can potentially go from 2000+ products to 20+ most relevant products within a few taps & clicks. This kind of product ‘tagging’ could be done by either via manual curation or machine learning driven automated labeling (if you have to scale) Below is an example of how Marriott (powered by PlacePass) Is doing ‘Tagged’ Collections by Travel type and Traveler Type.

• Related Product Recommendations: Recommending Products related to the one a user is currently viewing has been one of the biggest conversion levers in the eCommerce platforms across various domains. However, the entire Travel Industry has been lagging behind on this front and this would be more of a boon in the Destination products sector. Currently, some of the platforms like GetYourGuide etc. are attempting to do it, but seem to do it in a more manual way where in most of the cases there is not much realistic relevance to the products being displayed under a ‘You might also like’ and the product being viewed! For example, a ‘Hamburg Bus tour’ is being shown as ‘recommended product’ on the ‘Berlin Hop-on Hop-off bus tour’! This should be instead done in a more scientific way using techniques like Collaborative Filtering or Content-based filtering (or a hybrid approach) like how Platforms like Amazon or Netflix are nailing it

4. Delightful On-the-ground Experience

Considering how much effort is being applied towards the ‘Online’ part of the experience when it comes to Tours and Activities, not much innovation has been done on the ‘Offline’ part of it. Meaning, around the stages of the customer journey when the customer is on the ground, or between the post-booking and pre-experience stage. Below are some examples of what could be done to enhance the experience at these stages:

• Personalized Guides & Hosts: While a Destination activity like visiting a Theme Park or a local attraction can be booked without concern or compatibility checks, choosing a tour hosted by a guide is an entirely different matter. Getting the right kind of Guide who will cater to the specific interests, taste, and background of Customers is important as that’s what makes or breaks the experience at the end of the day. For example: A History expert is better suited to guide a tour around colonial neighborhoods of Salvador if the Customers part of the tour are very keen on History and Heritage. Similarly, A Foodie guide is a perfect match for a traveler, passionate about savoring local food, even if the tour is a City Sightseeing one.

This could be done via some additional data collected in Booking Forms, and showing detailed Guide Information & Profile to the Users in Product Details pages (when applicable) like how Vayable or WithLocals kind of platforms do. This will allow customers to choose the guides that suit their personality and taste the most, as well as Operators to assign the right kind of Guides/Hosts to the customers

• Seamless Customer Support: Since Tours and Activities are typically booked when a user is traveling outside their home location, the customers should have the option to communicate with customer support via the App itself instead of going via traditional modes of communications like Phone or Email. At a bare minimum, having Chatbots for Basic support queries and in-app chat conversations with customer support is required
• Direct Communications with the Operator: While most marketplace apps like Ride-hailing or Delivery apps have gotten into directly connecting the Customer and the Service provider via app functionalities without any need for a phone call or other modes of communications, The Travel industry apps have not caught up on this front. Apps need to start providing In-app messaging and data calls for quick resolutions (like Uber or Grab). So, they can easily reach out directly to the operators to update details and get clarifications about logistical issues (like pick up location, time, etc.)

5. Rewarding for Loyalty

Rewards have been a big hook to get Customer Loyalty as well as retention In the travel industry-for both online and offline bookers. While other sectors in the industry have gone deep enough into this — including OTA’s like Expedia, Hotels.com & Agoda — The Destination Products sector seems to be severely lagging behind. Price discounts can only go till a certain distance to bring a customer back, and beyond that, it depends on peripheral factors like Loyalty programs. By Loyalty rewards, I am not just referring to earning points/credits, but also reaching special ‘privileged status’ where those customers might get treated differently while booking or post-booking (like cancellations on non-refundable products, etc.), and on the ground (Special treatment by the operators, etc.)

Currently only KLOOK seems to be nailing this — at least from a rewards perspective — and hopefully drawing a good amount of retention as a consequence of this. The other players need to catch up soon. Else I don’t see a compelling reason why a traveler like myself would want to go book in different platforms when one of them is consistently rewarding me with valuable credits — not just for buying, but also for every action (like writing reviews) I perform on their platform!

Summary

In summary, while there are a lot of platforms out there packing thousands of destination products that travelers could easily book online, most of their focus has been on ‘digitizing’ the offline portion of the suppliers and operators, and not on ‘enhancing’ the product discovery, research and selection experience for the Consumers. It is time that these platforms start investing on this front and balance the experience on both sides of the marketplace. Amazon.com wouldn’t be where they are today, if not for the brilliant Search service or the Recommendation service they have that enables you to find the right product (from a selection of billions of products) and buy it instantly (Sorry, cannot say the same for their extremely poor search on Prime videos!), or their fulfillment experience that ensures customer delight. So Why can’t the Travel platforms — esp. ones selling Destination products — emulate that before aspiring to be the ‘Amazon of Travel’!