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When online tour search and booking site TourRadar picked up $6 million in funding in May, it marked more than just a victory for another start-up. The Austrian company has gained momentum in a space that has eluded the tour-operator sector until now: a proper online tour-search tool, with customer reviews and a booking marketplace.
“For us, we see this as a positive sign for the growth of adventure travel and the tour industry as whole,” said Leigh Barnes, director of Intrepid Travel North America, one of the larger operators that sell inventory on TourRadar. “At the end of the day, it’s a new channel that will be good for the industry.”
TourRadar launched in 2010 as an Australian company focused on lead generation. In 2013, the company moved its headquarters to Vienna, picked up its first round of investments and pivoted into a transactional booking-engine model. The company also created an app five years ago that enabled people to meet online before a tour began. The app became very popular and helped TourRadar make its name.
Travis Pittman, CEO of TourRadar and co-founder with his brother, CFO Shawn Pittman, said that it wasn’t easy to get tour operators onboard at first. The brothers hit the travel trade-show circuit to make their pitch to all tour operators.
“Slowly but surely, as we started to prove ourselves, they started to take more notice and care about what we were doing,” Travis Pittman said.
TourRadar now sells more than 500 packaged tour brands, including G Adventures, the Globus family of brands, Intrepid Travel, Trafalgar, Insight Vacations and Contiki. The site features more than 20,000 tours in about 200 countries, ranging from youth and adventure tours to luxury escorted ones. And unlike many of its predecessors that essentially operate as tour discounters, TourRadar has price parity with operators and only runs occasional sales and promotions, according to Pittman.
One of the site’s main draws, for both consumers and tour operators, is that it offers some 50,000 consumer reviews. Tour operators have struggled to claim an online space where consumers could go for comprehensive tour reviews. The biggest player in the travel review arena, TripAdvisor, has declined to create a specific category for tours and tour operators.
“We’re a bit like TripAdvisor in a way but for the multiday tour industry,” Pittman said. “Anyone can go to TourRadar and leave a review about Trafalgar or Contiki. We want to be that authority in the industry, where if someone is thinking of doing a tour, they can come to TourRadar and find reviews about those particular trips.”
While larger tour brands give TourRadar credibility, Pittman acknowledged that helping consumers sift through and work with smaller, lesser-known operators provides just as valuable a service, if not more so. When travelers work directly with smaller operators, he said, it can be risky — such as wiring someone in Tanzania $5,000 and hoping they show up at the airport.
Instead, he said he hopes that TourRadar can serve as an “Airbnb-style platform” between the consumer and the ground operator, ensuring that the operator “is legit, he’s going to show,” Pittman said.
For travel sellers, seeing a company such as TourRadar gaining traction might seem like a potential threat to their business. TourRadar is ultimately providing consumers with information and tools to make tour bookings on their own, and tours have remained one space where travel agents still hold some sway due to the fact that the bookings are often complex and that there hasn’t been a good place for consumers to do it themselves online.
And tour operators still offer some of the most lucrative commissions in the travel industry.
But TourRadar and the operators it works with insist that the travel trade shouldn’t feel threatened.
Paul Wiseman, president of Trafalgar, said, “I do not know of any product purchase that does not begin or involve the internet today, so embracing that as one potential way to have your travel agency services displayed to customers is vital. We view the internet as the window through which everyone will look to shop, and each agency should clearly identify why the customer should shop with them. All our travel agent partners are consumer-facing, so we do not see any difference.”
In fact, TourRadar sees travel agents as potential partners. The company has signed an agreement with Amadeus in the Asia Pacific, and once the integration is complete (Pittman said it has been a slow process), agents in the Asia Pacific region with access to the Amadeus GDS interface will be able to search and book tours on TourRadar at no additional cost to the agents.
“If it works, we’ll roll it out globally,” Pittman said, adding that TourRadar is also in talks with other GDSs.
“I don’t think travel agents should really be too worried,” he said. “I think the bulk of people who still book tours through travel agents will continue to do that. … We are definitely not going out there to just squash travel agents.”
As for the argument that tours are too complicated for travelers to properly book on their own and require lots of customer service throughout the process, TourRadar is hoping to offset a fair amount of the customer service burden by providing ample information on its site that would answer many of the questions and concerns travelers might have. For example, there’s an extensive FAQ section about all the tours, customer reviews and photos. And if customers still have questions, TourRadar has a team of agents manning the phones.
Source: travelweekly.com
