Even the most well-known, and well-funded destinations would like more money to fuel their international marketing efforts, making partnerships the only feasible way to get there.
It will be interesting to see if more countries contract out large content marketing programs to established media companies, especially without any editorial oversight as was the case here with Switzerland.
Sure, cutting the average monthly wait time by more than 40% is a significant improvement. But you can bet the international travelers still waiting in those one hour or two hour-plus lines will make it their mission to bad mouth their experience to anyone who will listen.
Without serving a real need of a large sector of the traveling population, it will be difficult to ever truly get many of these startups off the ground.
Yelp's adding tours and activities' bookings highlights the mainstreaming of the sector but the way Yelp is doing this is modest and not a game-changer. Yelp hasn't acquired a tours and activities provider and isn't putting a lot of resources into in-app bookings, both of which rival TripAdvisor has done.
Making Airbnb lawful might actually give regular citizens a chance at using it to make an extra buck, but to say that's the gross majority of its hosts in London, or any city, is a tale of two very different cities.
If someone can find us a positive story about Thailand tourism we'll give them $20. Heck, make it $50, since we know we won't have to pay up any time soon.