Lucrative Opportunities in Tours, Activities and Experiences: New Skift Research

The market for tours, activities, and experiences represents one of the most opportunistic and untapped prospects within the travel industry. It is highly fragmented, with a long tail of small suppliers, and it is rapidly shifting online. That makes it an attractive space for online intermediaries to consolidate market share from small offline players. 

Google, not one to miss the party, has also entered the space with its “Things To Do” tool. As it does with other travel verticals, Google acts as both friend and foe to the online travel agents (OTAs).

Skift Research’s proprietary web scraping analysis of Google’s “Things To Do” shows that whilst many OTAs list on Google, taking advantage of its vast scale and power as a search engine, Google persistently prioritizes the direct option over third party OTA sites.

Could Google potentially dis-intermediate the OTAs and give power to the direct sites, similar to the practices conducted by Google Hotels? Or does the highly fragmented and largely unsophisticated nature of the industry demand a strong aggregator, with direct bookings less likely to gain traction? 

We look to answer these questions in this report, as well as provide an overview of the tours, activities & experiences market, comparing it to other verticals within the travel industry – showing how it is the last outpost of travel in today’s distribution landscape. 

What You’ll Learn From This Report

• The key numbers of the tours, activities & experiences market: Market sizing from 2006-2022 with estimates out to 2025, online penetration levels, mix of online direct versus online intermediary, total addressable market (TAM) available, estimated market share of the largest OTAs
• A comparison of the tours, activities & experiences market with other verticals in the travel industry
• Google’s role in the selling of tours, activities & experiences, with unique analysis based on our proprietary web scraping of Google’s “Things To Do” tool

This is the latest in a series of reports and data products that Skift Research puts out to help you analyze the biggest trends in the travel industry. Tap into the opinions and insights of our seasoned network of staffers and contributors. More than 200 hours of desk research, data collection, and/or analysis goes into each report.

By subscribing to Skift Research, you will gain access to our entire vault of reports conducted on topics ranging from technology to marketing strategy to deep dives on key travel brands. You will also be able to access our proprietary Skift Travel Health Index, Skift Travel Company Tracker, Hotel Tech Benchmark, and data from our regular traveler surveys.

A Deep Dive into Tours, Activities and Experiences 2023

The tours, activities, and experiences market is a lucrative and underexplored opportunity in the travel industry. Its high fragmentation, influx of small suppliers, and rapid shift from offline to online makes it a goldmine for online intermediaries to gain market share from traditional offline players.

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