How TourRadar Repositioned Its Platform to Become the World’s First Adventure Booking Platform
In 2019 and early 2020, sales were exceptionally strong and TourRadar was the leading source for people to book multi-day tours online. However, we noticed that a significant portion of our web traffic did not convert. This made it clear that many people were choosing to book elsewhere, such as through their local travel agent, directly with the operator, through some other travel organizer, or piecing the entire journey together themselves. Then, COVID-19 hit.
The pandemic virtually ground things to a halt, and after several months of adapting to the global situation, TourRadar’s leadership team paused to address this fundamental challenge: how can we really have a major impact in the multi-day tour space? We found our answer in a book called Play Bigger. After reading just one chapter, it was clear that TourRadar needed to undertake the book’s category design process. To understand why you first need to understand what the process is.
What is Category Design?
In order to truly innovate and become a category leader, you can’t simply be satisfied with making things better, you need to make things different. By understanding the ecosystem your company can thrive in, the problem your customers are facing, and the solutions you (can) provide them, you’re defining your category and formulating a strategy to be crowned the category leader.
This all sounds great, however, category design is big and complicated. Let me break it down in greater detail. As listed in Play Bigger, the primary steps are:
- Define the Problem
- Category Identification
- Category Blueprint and Ecosystem
- Point of View (POV)
- Mobilization
- Lightning Strike
- Flywheel
Define the Problem
First, you need to understand who your customers are so you can define why your business exists. Selling more widgets doesn’t explain the purpose of your business, but if you are solving your customers’ problems, then you’re on the right track.
At TourRadar, we defined the problem as “Travelers want to get away for multiple days, but don’t know where to go, what to do, how to organize the trip themselves, or who to trust to organize it.” And we were well on the road to solving this issue since our marketplace was largely successful. However, as mentioned earlier, we were still missing a big piece of the pie. This piece was the distributors, or travel agencies, OTAs, and other travel organizers who book billions of dollars worth of tours every year for their customers. We needed to solve their problem by helping them utilize technology to access the multi-day tour supply and the tools required to facilitate the transaction between their customers and the supplying operators. At this point, you want to yell huzzah and start tackling the challenge, but you are only one step into the process.
Category Identification
This is the toughest step. You have your customers, you know their problems, and you have a solution for them, but how do you define and label the category you are in? Uber didn’t just fall upon the category name Ride Share on the first go. They originally described their category as a Transportation Networking Company, which was accurate but not as descriptive or catchy as it could be.
A category name has to have a marketing ring to it so that your industry peers and the press pick it up. At TourRadar, we went through multiple iterations but eventually landed on the name Adventure Booking Platform. Making the change from “multi-day tours” to “adventures” was no small decision, as “multi-day tours” is a widely used term by the travel industry. In a recent keynote speech, I explained why TourRadar embraced the word adventure, but, for this article, let’s just say we felt the term was more marketable to mainstream travelers and would attract a larger Total Addressable Market (TAM).
The “booking platform” part was more difficult. We needed to both embrace our B2C marketplace and our willingness to open up distribution channels as described above. Finally, we needed to outline our working relationship with our operator suppliers. In the end, the common thread was booking adventures, and hence the Adventure Booking Platform was born.
Category Blueprint and Ecosystem
In this step, you have to map out the industry and how your category fits in. Who are your customers and partners? How do you interact with each?
An actual diagram clearly outlines the structure of the industry. The blueprint shows how the industry, your business, and the relationship between them will evolve over time. As I described above, an Adventure Booking Platform has three major “arms” called Adventure Marketplace, Operator Tech, and Adventure Distribution. From there, you can add details to outline all the threads and working relationships.
Point of View (POV)
Your POV needs wordsmithing as it becomes your doctrine, your Magna Carta, and your battle speech for the months ahead. Make no mistake, this is not your elevator pitch since it has much more content to cover. First off, it should tell a story and address the customers’ problems. It should then clearly outline how your category, which now has a catchy and descriptive name, solves this problem. Also, if you can put the POV to video and music it will only resonate more. At TourRadar, we had a much more complex POV but decided to simplify it once we were ready to present it to the world.
Mobilization
Mobilization time! Now, take everything mentioned above out of the boardroom and mobilize your team. This is critical because everyone has to get behind the changes your company is going to undertake. In fact, Play Bigger went to great lengths to suggest that you can leave no one behind. Although this never seemed to be an issue at TourRadar, we still left the necessary time for teams to question the strategy. An all-hands launch meeting, followed by a series of departmental follow-up sessions, worked well for us. Once everyone is satisfied to move ahead, the mobilization step is effectively complete. Now you have to choose an actual date and a moment for your Lightning Strike.
The Lightning Strike
This is the singular moment where you put your category plans into action. It’s much more than a product launch or a brand re-launch. This is where you showcase your newly defined category and declare your place as the category leader.
Timing is everything and the vehicle you use depends on the best way to get your Lightning Strike noticed. Play Bigger used examples like tradeshow takeovers, or even running your own event. TourRadar did the latter. In our case, we had to find the right moment to talk to the travel industry, while still leaving enough time to complete the Lightning Strike’s critical initiatives. It also meant getting everything done just before a host of other online events and a huge Black Friday Sale. To complete such an event in anything less than six months is extremely tough, yet TourRadar did it in five.
There is no right way to do a Lightning Strike. I had the chance to speak to Dave Peterson, one of the authors of Play Bigger, and he suggested it was acceptable to try several things knowing some initiatives might not work. However, the hope is that you cash in enough chips from the other bets. Needless to say, the more effort, resources, and people you can put behind it, the better the result. At TourRadar, we ran a two-day event for the whole multi-day tour industry. Together, we discussed travel trade, the pandemic, sustainability, and diversity. Moreover, we announced TourRadar’s new Adventure Booking Platform category. We have collected some of the video content here.
The Flywheel
Life after the initial Lightning Strike is described as the Flywheel and subsequent Lightning Strikes. Like the engine part that spins on momentum, the more inputs you give it the faster it spins, or, in this case, the more strikes the better. Simply declaring yourself as the leader of this new and wonderful category after just one Lightning Strike rarely does the trick.
For TourRadar, we will need to continuously drive home the Adventure Booking Platform by evangelizing it at interviews, meetings, and other events. We will also have to prove that we can effectively distribute adventures. Finally, rather than simply winning market share, we will need to constantly innovate in order to prove that we truly are the category leader. We want our customers to know that TourRadar is the best place to book life-enriching adventures.
Want to know more about Adventure Together?
Click here to access the recordings and let’s start embracing a whole new world of travel, together.
Christian Wolters is the Chief Marketing Officer at TourRadar, co-host of TravelTech Toronto, and an avid sailor.
