Articles tagged “tours and activities”

Expedia's strategy is worth a shot: Focus on hotels and other core products while competitors the Priceline Group and TripAdvisor play around with restaurant reservations, and tours and activities. If Expedia sticks to its focus-on-what-we-got strategy, it is a huge gamble.

With GetYourGuide's latest funding, making it the most heavily funded startup in the annals of tours and activities, a potential acquisition price just got racheted up. With TripAdvisor's acquisition of Viator, the market indeed is a "land grab" now for global expansion.

Tripadvisor has been dancing around tours and activities for a while, as it is a natural fit for it, and with Viator, it makes its first large foray into it.

Brands are jumping on the experiential travel trend, but their marketing messages are empty without on-the-ground research needed to deliver a truly authentic, one-of-a-kind experience.

Qunar is a technology company with a big vision and an enormous opportunity as the Chinese traveler busts out into the world. He won't say it outright, but it's clear that CEO CC Zhuang likes where he sits, and wouldn't want to stop the momentum with the complications that a merger with Ctrip would bring.

As online travel agencies expand their grip into vacation and business travel destinations, their large mobile user base gives them an advantage, as does the fact that as a rule they have much greater technology resources than do hotels.

Mobile will be transformative to the tours and activities market if and when vacationers think nothing of picking up their mobile devices and see what tours are available in the next hour or so -- then booking them.

Tours and activities are indeed a huge potential market, but it is highly fragmented and still mostly offline. There is a substantial upside when the market catches up with the mobile revolution.

Although a stretch, GetYourGuide has frequently likened its desire to ramp up and aggregate the most tours and activities it can for each destination to that of Booking.com. Along with the founder of Qunar, GetYourGuide now has a Booking.com veteran, its former CEO, on board to help in the tour and activities company's expansion efforts.

TripAdvisor isn't an online travel agency because it doesn't take flight or hotel bookings. But, given its desire to expand further into a solution for in-destination tours and activities, you can make the argument that it is a more well-rounded one-stop shop for travel than many of the travel booking sites.