Skift Take
Tripadvisor’s tours & activity subsidiary, Viator, is currently a market leader in its sector but the size of that lead over rivals is shrinking.
In our latest report, Skift Research looks into Tripadvisor’s different business segments and the unique challenges each faces. Its core hotel metasearch model is slowing, facing challenges from Google, but still provides the lion’s share of corporate profits. To re-accelerate growth, Tripadvisor is investing heavily in its experience and dining products.
The below excerpt focuses on Skift Research’s proprietary analysis of online tours and activity inventory on Tripadvisor’s platform and how that compares with competitors. Get the full report here to stay ahead of this trend.
Preview and Buy the Full Report
Viator’s Market Position
We believe that Tripadvisor, through its subsidiary Viator is the largest online booking site for day tours and activities in the world. Based on its latest filings, Tripadvisor has over 395,000 tour listings available for sale on its sites. For context, we believe that the next largest platform, Expedia, has 210,000-plus listings available. And the five largest tours and activity booking sites have a collective 705,000-plus listings, meaning that Viator/Tripadvisor contribute just over half of that total volume.
Viator has aggressively grown the size of its experiences platform over the last two years, but during the same time the competition has gotten much tougher.
In Skift Research’s 2018 State of Tours and Activities we conducted a proprietary analysis of tours and activities inventory on five major online distribution platforms: Viator, Expedia, Airbnb, GetYourGuide, and Klook. The goal was to understand approximate current market shares and regional presence. For all sites, we compared how many listings were offered to consumers across 100 of the most popular tourist destinations worldwide. By holding the selected cities constant, we were able to make an apples-to-apples comparison of how these booking sites stacked up directly against each other in key markets. The original February 2018 study collected data on nearly 70,000 activities which we believed to represent nearly 46% of the total volume of tours available on these sites.
Skift Research updated this analysis in October of 2018 and then again in September of 2020, giving us time-series data on the evolution of the tours and activities platforms on these sites.
Viator grew by 54 percent in just that first six-month period in 2018, going from 38,000 listings in those top tourist locales to 59k by October of the same year. It continued to add supply at a breakneck pace over the last two years with tour inventory more than doubling from October 2018 through September 2020, growing at a 56 percent compound annual rate. Overall, from when we first started building this dataset, Viator has added more than 105,000 listings in the cities we track. We believe it has added more than 265,000 listings across its full platform.
Preview and Buy the Full Report
However, while Tripadvisor has been growing the supply of tours available to book on its site, so too have its competitors. Most notable is Expedia, which converted its Local Expert platform to allow for self-serve onboarding and saw listings grow dramatically. As a result, Viator’s market share of listings in the top 100 destinations we tracked actually declined, from ~57 percent in 2018 to 48 percent in 2020.
Preview and Buy the Full Report
Subscribe now to Skift Research Reports
This is the latest in a series of research reports, analyst sessions, and data sheets aimed at analyzing the fault lines of disruption in travel. These reports are intended for the busy travel industry decision-maker. Tap into the opinions and insights of our seasoned network of staffers and contributors. Over 200 hours of desk research, data collection, and/or analysis goes into each report.
After you subscribe, you will gain access to our entire vault of reports, analyst sessions, and data sheets conducted on topics ranging from technology to marketing strategy to deep dives on key travel brands. Reports are available online in a responsive design format, or you can also buy each report à la carte at a higher price.
Have a confidential tip for Skift? Get in touch
Tags: skift research, tours and activities, tripadvisor, viator
Photo credit: Despite COVID-19 challenges, booking tours online has strong growth potential. Janis Oppliger / Unsplash