The Traditional Shopping Cart Doesn’t Work for Tours and Activities

I love my job! As CTO of Peek, innovation leader in the tours and activities space, I get to work with incredibly smart people and together we develop amazing, industry-first features, improving the lives and businesses of our customers.

Like this week. We released Peek Pro Bundles and solved one of the hardest problems in the tours and activities industry when it comes to selling online: intelligently upselling additional experiences and maximizing per-booking revenue. It has been one of the most exciting projects to date.

Wait, back up, what’s the challenge here?

The tours and activities industry is moving online at an incredibly fast pace. These days, customers, especially millennials, expect to be able to book experiences online, ideally on their mobile phones. To meet this demand and grow their businesses, experience providers are now partnering with innovative technology companies like Peek to power their online and offline business.

The switch from taking bookings on the phone to selling them online is not always easy though. One major challenge is the ability for operators to upsell their customers on additional experiences. It’s easy to gauge a customer’s interest when building a personal connection on the phone and getting them excited about other offerings and premium packages. However, this personal connection does not exist online. How can operators sell their additional offerings to visitors on their website?

The Traditional Shopping Cart

Many booking providers for the tours and activities industry already provide online shopping carts to allow customers to buy more than one activity. Similar to the ones used by big online retail stores like Amazon, these shopping carts are all based on the same basic functionality: add an item to the cart and continue shopping.

In reality, however, booking a horseback riding class from a tour operator is more complicated than buying a t-shirt on gap.com. For one, an activity might book out while sitting in a cart, waiting for the customer to return later to complete the purchase. Booking an activity also requires a lot more steps, such as selecting a date and time, answering questions, and considering additional services like hotel pick-up. As a result, the retail shopping cart model can actually decrease online revenue because customers are forced to repeatedly fill in the same information for each of their activities, adding a lot of friction to the purchase process. This increases the likelihood of the customer dropping off completely. Instead of selling two activities, the operator sells none.

Looking for Alternatives

When we at Peek looked into solving this problem, we decided to take a step back and research other industries and their online sales processes. We discovered that instead of looking at online retailers, the best model is actually, not surprisingly, the travel industry.

Specifically, online travel agencies such as Expedia and Orbitz have solved this problem very well. Just like our tour operators, OTAs sell multiple products, such as flights, hotels, and rental cars, all of which require a significant amount of information. But when purchasing a flight, the customer doesn’t have to start from the beginning again when adding additional products like a hotel.

Instead, the OTAs take advantage of the fact that the customer already provided key information about where they are going, when they will be there, and how many people are traveling when they pick a flight. Leveraging that information makes upselling a hotel or rental car as easy as checking a box during the booking process. It’s the online travel equivalent of “would you like fries with that?”

Peek Pro Bundles

Taking a cue from these companies, we rethought the shopping cart entirely and developed Bundles, the first intelligent, in-booking-flow upsell technology for the tours and activities industry. Built on a powerful, multilateral rules engine, Bundles leverages context to simplify the upsell, allowing operators to offer additional activities without the dramatic increase in friction. With Bundles, upsells can be configured to only be available within a set time window of the primary purchase, for example, on the same day. Tickets can be locked in to match the tickets for the primary activity. Combo packages can be created with discounted prices for every additional activity.

Beyond the upsell, there are other, far reaching applications for this technology. Same day/next day ferry return tickets, pick-up and drop-off transportation management, weekly repeating classes, VIP upsells, and corporate packages are only some of the more complex use cases made easily bookable online.

Bundles is currently in private beta with a select number of operators and the initial conversion data has been impressive. These operators have seen a 20–25% increase in average order value when offering additional, bundled activities.

Peek Pro Bundles is not just another shopping cart. It’s advanced technology allowing tours and activities operators to intelligently upsell additional experiences, maximize per-booking revenue, and improve customer experience with more options — without impacting conversions.

Where We Go from Here

The success of our Bundles feature is only one of several ways the sophistication of tours and activities operators is catching up with major players in travel. It’s been exciting to be on the forefront of this trend as an integral part of the coming-of-age for the tours and activities vertical.

As more and more experience providers in this $100bn industry get wired up, there is a growing opportunity for technology providers to help them navigate this process by incorporating the learnings and best practices that major players in other travel verticals developed as they went through similar evolutions in previous decades.

Learn more about how Peek Pro is helping tours and activities providers with their business.