Full Video: What's Next for Tour Operators at Skift Forum Europe 2022

Skift Forum Europe

Skift Forum Europe was held in London, England on March 24, 2022. Find out about future Skift events through the link below.

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As damaging as Covid was for tour operators, the inability to conduct trips provided companies in the sector a valuable opportunity to reevaluate their all aspects of their businesses.

Ulla Heffer Böhler, chief operating officer for the Travel Corporation, and Travis Pittman, the CEO & co-founder of TourRadar, told Skift Senior Travel Tech Editor Sean O'Neill at Skift Forum Europe 2022 on March 24 what changes they realized they had to make. Böhler said Covid forced her company to take another look at, among other things, group sizes and domestic offerings while Pittman stated TourRadar was forced to look at what markets it was targeting.

Watch the full video of the conversation, as well as read a transcript of it, below, to hear how Böhler and Pittman used the pandemic-induced pause to develop new tours.

Sean O'Neill: Hi, Ulla. Hi, Travis. Thank you. The pandemic was especially hard on the multi-day itinerary based tour operator segment. Partly because of the start stop, start stop nature of the restrictions, which made it difficult to stitch together inventory at the last minute. Also, you have the cross border nature of your demand, your customers coming in. However, we're going to assume that is going to be behind us. We're going to have a forward looking conversation today about the opportunities in the multi-day sector, especially digitization and the new focuses on experience brings a lot of opportunity.

If you have any questions, if you're here or are watching us online, please use the questions in the app and we'll get them to towards them at the end.

Ulla, I'd like to start with you please. Last year, the chairman and founder of The Travel Corporation, Stanley Tollman, he unfortunately passed away. But before he did, he had a message about the opportunity that's now facing the company. Maybe you can tell the audience here about that.

Böhler: Absolutely. My pleasure. And thank you for having me here today, Sean. So Mr. Stanley Tollman, our chairman and founder who sadly passed away last September, was an incredible man and visionary, and he's really built TTC from the ground up over many decades. And throughout the pandemic, he really was our guiding light. Having lived through so many crisis before and always navigated them brilliantly.

And in September, shortly before he passed away, his message