Articles tagged “tours and activities”

In Skift's top stories this week, Bookings Holdings goes on a buying spree, activities booking site Peek receives a major amount of funding, and a hotel CEO sees growth opportunities in smaller cities.

Peek survived the pandemic when so many tours and activities' operators went into hibernation or worse, and now it has another $80 million in the bank for expansion. With business-to-business software as hot as it is, that's not a bad place to be.

Tripadvisor could likely have more resources to invest in Viator's growth if it spun out the tours and activities brand into a separate public company. A nice way to better compete against Softbank-funded GetYourGuide and Klook.

Hopper is the latest travel brand to try its hand at selling experiences. It's taking on a task that's harder to do well at scale than it might seem.

Google's attractions ticket beta has been among its least elegant in travel to date. This has angered many tour operators because it couldn't have come at a more inopportune time.

GetYourGuide, which has been trying to break into the U.S., scored a major partnership by securing a deal with Expedia.

Perhaps you spent the pandemic moving house, baking bread, or home-schooling your kids. Tripadvisor spent the crisis tweaking its product mix to sell more subscriptions while also refreshing its mobile app. Mad props to everyone for making the most of things.

Airlines have complained about the hidden costs of online travel agency web-scraping for years, but Southwest takes that sensitivity to a much higher strategic level. Kiwi apparently is adept at out-maneuvering Southwest's page-scraping roadblocks so the courts will have to sort it all out.

Eventually, Google's new Tickets feature may turn out to be one of the most important developments in a long time for the tours and activities sector. Google will certainly move to monetize the feature with paid ads, and it will ultimately expand to tours, and other products, too.

The superapp is where it's at in Asia, so it's not a surprise to see Singapore's flag carrier broaden its e-commerce playbook. Yet looking worldwide, it's remarkable how many airlines are now going direct-to-consumer in selling non-flight products and services.