What is the right number of Rome Colosseum tours for an OTA such as GetYourGuide to feature?

Question came up at the Arival San Diego sector conference when Douglas Quinby was interviewing Tao Tao from GetYourGuide. It is a clever question as it sounds simple but the answer goes to the heart of how GetYourGuide see themselves, with many nuances and future looking aspects.

Are GetYourGuide a marketplace representing what tour operators supply to them? Are they are curator working on behalf of the consumer? Or are they something else?

Lets go through the permutations:

• 800 – GetYourGuide offer 800 options today (Evidence). So presumably GetYourGuide believe that 800 is the right number of Rome Colosseum tours for an OTA to feature. For comparison, Viator say 1000+ (Evidence), so GetYourGuide are not an outlier here. You might even consider GetYourGuide conservative 😉
• 5 – Selected based on consumers known travel preferences and then let the consumer decide from a shortlist
• 1 – Perhaps the AI knows you so well, you just get a single option, and you as a human can say “can we spend more time on the history” or “is there a roman actor?” and that single offer adjusts in live time around your requests. ChatGPT is training a generation to think about tweaking outputs through interaction, so consumers chatting to tweak the tour offer should not be seen as something consumers will never want or never do

Fundamentally, what GetYourGuide contract with the industry and what they display to consumers is a different decision. Contract 800, display 5, fine. Park that thought for the moment.

The above permutation list is all possible with how the web works today with websites and human operated web browsers. Tour operators will struggle with the adjustable option (the third) as with current human only approaches it isn’t commercially viable to operate multiple ad-hoc permutations outside of high end private tours.

But the wider context is evolving with the introduction of AI agents on the distribution side and AI tour guides on the supply side. Considering what is possible and commercially viable today (above) is no longer how we need to be strategic. The box is moving, you have to think out of it so you can go to where it is heading.

Defining AI agents

Jeremiah Owyang

AI Agents will perform the tasks on the internet that we don’t like doing: gathering information, filling out forms, completing tasks, and bringing the information back to us in a centralized user experience.

The AI agents will bring back the information will reassemble in the way we want: a multi-modal experience—text, voice, images, VR, AR, whatever suits us the users.

Source: https://web-strategist.com/blog/2024/10/13/will-ai-agents-kill-advertisements/

(Jeremiah writes a lot about AI agents, this particular blog post is a great one focussed on advertising / distribution, just lifted his definition from it, read his back catalogue for more. I am on team AI agent as the new web UX)

i.e. AI will browse, not humans operating browsers like today.

How will this change the OTAs role in sightseeing?

Is GetYourGuide’s role to provide the 800 options to a consumers AI agent? Then the AI agent makes the determination?

BUT surely GetYourGuide should be better at making the determination than a generic AI agent? Why would your iOS Apple Intelligence AI agent know anything about filtering down 800 Colosseum tour options? i.e. shouldn’t GetYourGuide be sending say 10 different tour options to the iOS Apple Intelligence AI agent and now the AI agent can’t pick something inappropriate, and hopefully picks something just right? But if GetYourGuide know how to filter 800 to 10 today, why aren’t they today? Do they actually know how to do this? Or is there some other reason not to do this today?

What if the client’s AI agent gets better over time (as it surely will), wouldn’t they be able to find the tour operators website and book directly?

What is GetYourGuide’s purpose if client side AI agents work out how to book directly? Does GetYourGuide have to “pay” the AI agent to motivate them to use their booking funnel vs direct booking?

Is GetYourGuide’s concern here that if they start helping AI agents by filtering 800 to 10, ultimately they push the consumer value up the funnel to the AI agent, and GetYourGuide becomes a low value part of the chain just like reztech currently below them, and worse, one that is able to be routed around by consumers booking directly. Good, but not good enough if you are VC backed to the level GetYourGuide is.

But if GetYourGuide don’t help AI agents, they can be sure that at least one peer OTA competitor will, leaving GetYourGuide on the wrong side of the next tech evolution.

What do I think?

I think the future is the tour product itself is adjusted by the consumer’s AI agent, e.g. ok this is a 5 hour tour, but we are taking this diversion and spending an hour and a half in a restaurant before continuing as the customer is travelling with young children who can’t do a 5 hour tour without a break. This means this family can’t do the group tour, they need an AI operated hybrid experience (that also includes human tour guides for part of the experience, perhaps even tour guides shared with an existing group tour product).

In this scenario there is no concept of a direct booking as the product IS put together at the OTA layer, and then operated by the OTA’s AI tour guides (alongside human tour guides operated by tour operators and attractions ticketed by the OTA).

I call these platforms that can design, retail & operate experiences Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). They are not OTAs, they are not tour operators, they are not reztech, they are DXPs.

So, to answer Douglas’s question:

– Today GetYourGuide need 2 of every unique permutation….. e.g. there might be 20 ways of visiting the Colosseum, and therefore GetYourGuide need 40 tour options not 800…. got to keep the top ranked option for each permutation “on their toes” by having a second option fallback from a different operator 😉 Within those 40 I might accept that further tour operators provide supply against a set permutation….. so the current supply base can be kept broad within a narrow consumer pitch.

– Tomorrow GetYourGuide need to be contracting ingredients not pre-made meals. Instead of contracting tours, they need to be contracting tour guides. Luckily GetYourGuide has the right name for this pivot to the past! Using these externally employed human tour guides they need to use AI to build & operate their own GetYourGuide branded tours. Lets call them GetYourGuide Digitals. i.e. in an AI agent world, they need zero Colosseum tours from third party tour operators. Zero.

So, whatever the answer is, its not 800 😉 And Viator, its not 1000+ either 🙂

Also, this is why Tao Tao was on the stage rather than me 😉 But I was in the bar, and that is where the real debates and learnings happened.

Image: OpenAI