Articles tagged “tours and activities”

Don't miss the forest for the trees: TripAdvisor is evolving into a well-rounded travel planning AND booking site. If hotel bookings on TripAdvisor eventually fall short of expectations it would be a big blow, but then tours and activities, restaurant reservations, vacation rentals, hotel metasearch and reviews can all play a role in taking up some of the slack.

As with anything Google does, you can expect Google Trips to be very much a work in progress that goes through numerous iterations before it becomes available to the public. But its beta release expands Google's footprint in the travel ecosystem especially since so many consumers begin their trip planning in the search engine and explore destinations with the Maps app.

Google tends to favor digital products over human-facing services but it's possible that a new "travel assistant app" could blend the two. Then again, they've tried this before.

Just as Airbnb has had a transformative impact on the home sharing and vacation rental business, it hopes to do the same by going beyond just offering stays into offering actual travel activities and experiences to its community. It'll be very interesting to see how they do it.

TripAdvisor believes tours and activities will be its next billion-dollar revenue business and it is upgrading its platform to enable consumers to book tours on the TripAdvisor desktop and apps. It's all about revenue and making TripAdvisor a stickier site to book everything on the planet. Flights anyone?

Taking advantage of locals to improve the frequency of use for travel services is simply smart. Why more companies don't do this is beyond us.

Even as competition in the online tours and activities sector ramps up, the market faces a range of challenges. The biggest obstacle is making more tour products available digitally.

Industry consolidation and innovation is ramping up as the tours and activities sector finally comes online. But a range of technical and logistical challenges still hold the sector back. How are tour operators adapting, and what strategies are helping them thrive in this dynamic environment?

25 Moments that Mattered in 2015: To make our selection of 25 moments, we thought back to the stories that drove reader engagement and sparked discussion among both travel experts and the general public. Some stories were quick blips that represented bigger things while others were narratives that built slowly through out the year. Each one, though, spoke to where we are right now when it comes to the big business of global travel.

With Expedia acquiring Travelocity, Orbitz Worldwide, Wotif and HomeAway since 2014, it isn't hard to imagine Expedia adding GetYourGuide to its portfolio -- although with this latest funding round the price tag just went up.