Simplifying Booking Friction for Tour Operators on the Digitization Gap
Photo Credit: People enjoying a theme park experience. Source: Ian Romie Ona, Unsplash People enjoying a theme park experience.
Skift Take
The experiences sector is the notorious last frontier of digitization that sees consumers yo-yoing from online to offline and everything else paper-based in between. A modern booking system is a good starting point for any effective digital strategy.
Tour operators need to make serious inroads into tech adoption to capitalize on the forced digital offshoots created by the pandemic. A Skift 2023 Megatrend forecasts that the global tours and activities software market is set to skyrocket, with a projected value of $1.2 billion by 2026.
And while the figure seems staggering, it's reflective of the hard truth that some 50 percent of operators don't have a digital booking system and will need to move quickly to make the most of recovering markets. Hence, the friction, as traveler see saw between the old and the new.
The estimated $1.6 trillion air, hotel and cruise markets are sold via connected, electronic systems that work seamlessly together.
The experience economy's lack of digitization and fragmentation amplifies the pitfalls of high operational costs due to manual processes. On one end of the spectrum, the customer experience could be better with gate-readable tickets as an e
