Tours & Activities Come of Age: Global Travel Activities Marketplace 2014-2020

Summary

The travel industry tends to get preoccupied by what is happening in air and hotel (since they drive the bulk of the global travel market), but it’s the activities on the ground that inspire travelers to go places. Travel activities, the aggregate of in-destination spend on tours, activities, attractions and events, is the third-largest travel segment and accounts for 10% of global travel revenue.

Phocuswright’s Tours & Activities Come of Age delves into the state of travel activities – specifically tours, activities and attractions – to assess the market landscape, the challenges ahead and the opportunities for distribution in the broader travel marketplace.

For tours and activities to come of age, it first needs to move out of the stone age and into the digital world. It is one of travel’s longest long tails and comes with all the challenges of fragmented small businesses. Small suppliers are the driving force behind the sector; more than half of tours and activities suppliers generate less than $250,000 annual revenue. From reservation to redemption, business is still mostly manual, and more than 80% of gross bookings are made offline. Fragmentation, limited technological advancement and lack of standardization within the sector present major hurdles to centralizing inventory efficiently and distributing online to consumers on a global scale.