A View from the Testbed — Tours & Activities Tech
Yesterday, Cheyne Cole and I discussed the swiftly emerging space of tours and activities.
Last week at Travel Tech Con in San Francisco much dialogue was devoted to the technical emergence of the tours and activities space from a booking, transaction and planning perspective for both operators and travelers.
This part of the travel world remains fragmented from the operational level connecting through to the customer facing aspect of online shopping for products and services.
Overcoming the immediate provision of customer facing inventory will be a lesser challenge with the ability to expose product on electronic channels. For many operators this will be achieved in a manual allotment style process with some inventory being placed online in a static manner with static pricing.
The real challenge will lie in the ‘channel management’ capabilities of inventory and the ‘non real time’ nature of products and services - think keeping information up to date in multiple ‘systems’. Systems, in some cases being a software based operational platform. In many cases being the spreadsheet or paper diary…
The current circumstances raise a number of questions;
Will a standard method of data transmission between systems be introduced amongst all players in the electronic market?
Will existing channel management providers broaden capability into cross sector consolidation and management of the data?
What possibilities exist for on the fly packaging of various products and services from various providers in the chain?
There are many more…
Today we still see (and experience!) challenges with unfulfilled room bookings through some of the biggest platforms in the business in a sector that is more accustomed to an electronic management platform and connectivity.
There is massive opportunity in this space, although the road ahead will contain much pain for the travelling customer who perceives in an electronic world that once booked, all is confirmed.
