The Last Outpost of Travel: A Deep Dive into Tours, Activities and Experiences 2023

Report Overview

The market for tours, activities & 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 is rapidly shifting online, making it an attractive space for online intermediaries to consolidate market share from small offline players as they onboard online. 

However, Google, not one to miss the party, has also entered the space with its ‘Things To Do’ tool and similar to its role within other verticals in the travel industry, 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 un-sophisticated 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.