Risk is a judgement. When I set off to sail over the Atlantic (twice), or drive London to Kathmandu (4 months), run a marathon (twice), cycle 1000 miles John O’Groats to Lands end, race a 21 foot boat from the UK to the Fastnet rock and back (and win), or just be a startup founder, […]

Part of the global shift from serving international tourists to local residents has been a shift of product makeup from tours to attractions. To better inform why this is not easy, or even sensible, if you are a tour reservation platform, I thought I would jot down what the key differences between a tour and […]

With conference season around the corner, and yield management likely to be on the list of discussions, it is worth writing an update as to where we are at on this topic: What is yield management? According to Wikipedia, Yield management is a variable pricing strategy, based on understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in […]

Much of the press and social media coverage from Arival Event last week in Las Vegas has focussed on the announcement from the stage that TripAdvisor Experiences (previously known as Viator) is giving preference to suppliers on their Bokun reservation system over and above other tour suppliers using other reservation systems. For example see this […]

Something isn’t quite right at Viator. Viator is the largest global retailer of local tours & activities and as such are a vital part of the tours & activities landscape for many suppliers, growth that has accelerated since their acquisition by TripAdvisor in 2014. However in recent months criticism of their strategy has moved from […]

As I was reading back through the tour & activity sector overview white paper I wrote end of 2013 and published last week I came across a few paragraphs outlining the two approaches that could be taken by tour & activity retailers (e.g. the leading online travel agents) when connecting to supplier systems via API […]

If you follow technology news you will have heard about autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars. However we haven’t discussed the impact of autonomous vehicles on local tourism yet, either on this blog or more generally within the travel industry. I started speaking in public about this topic at World Travel Market 2017 but no one […]

When OTAs started they curated (hand picked) the tours and suppliers they wanted to resell. This was because featuring a tour was a manual task – there were no APIs or distribution systems with content you could just plugin – and curating ensured focus was on where human time could make the most impact. Basic global […]