Mobile users with tours and activities – a perfect match, right? Perhaps not so obvious after all, with Kayak deciding to end its partner deal with GetYourGuide.
The US-based travel search service discontinued its contract with GetYourGuide after realising the idea of being able to book in-destination things-to-do and attractions had not resonated with users.
The partnership was signed in August 2011 and saw GetYourGuide featured as the sole provider of tours and attraction on the Kayak apps. It was the first such deal Kayak had signed with a tour and activity platform.
Users were able to search for various products and then make a booking within a GetYourGuide-branded screen.
Hopes were high for the pair to have a good run with the service, especially given Kayak’s apps at the time were soaring in popularity in the US.
Unfortunately for both parties, take-up for the service by users has not materialised at all, with Kayak saying activities have just not proven to be a popular feature of the apps.
On why the partnership was discontinued, a Kayak official says the company makes “decisions to add and cull features based on usage and plans for our product”.
GetYourGuide, which recently completed a capital raise of $14 million and was quoted as saying it would “bet the house on mobile”, appears reasonably relaxed about such a high profile deal coming to an end.
Acknowledging the partnership’s failure, CEO Johannes Reck says consumers looking for flights and hotels (Kayak’s main audience) are “way too early to research activities”.
“However, once they are in-destination, it is a completely different story and that [is] what we will focus on in the future.”
Reck says there is not change in terms of what the company is “betting on” and says it is seeing “good uptake” on its mobile website, with bookings more than doubling compared to the desktop service in the past six months.
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About Kevin May
Johannes is right. Where are you going is a different audience to what to do once you are there.
Having said that, OTAs are closer to end customers than flight metasearch – so OTAs could make this work, for sure (and metasearch running on a meta book model).
A big question is whether consumers want one app that has everything in, or 5 apps….. That will be an interesting aspect to watch going forwards….
Alex, agree with Johannes on the nature of travelers using the Kayak app. Though, find it a bit odd for a meta-search player to not implement a similar model for tours & activities and work with only 1 provider.
The consumer preference for 1 single mega-app vs multiple individual apps is something that remains inconclusive. Though people like to believe that a single app would provide a lot of convenience, vertical-specific plays are doing absolutely great. I hope someone finds an answer here, soon.
I am highly doubtful about a need for a single mega-app. Consumers already have a single mega app – the smartphone’s home screen. This will become even more evident as inter-app communication improves. A good example is driving/walking directions functionality, which (unless it is offline) is rarely embedded directly into travel and local apps. Instead travel and local apps usually launch the platform’s default maps app when user asks for directions.
We premised our entire PhoCusWright presentation on this very point way back 2011. Getting to the traveler in-destination is the key.
From this post, we have learned that Kayak users are not ready to book in-destination tours and activities at the same time as flights and hotels.
So, right now the majority of people are booking tours and activities in-destination. However, it has only recently become possible to book tours and activities in advance.
Can we imagine a situation where more and more people book tours and activities further ahead, leading to a reduction in the last minute availability of the best things to do in a destination? Which would in turn lead to more people booking ahead to make sure their place is secure on the best tours and activities, reducing further the last minute availabiltiy…
Or, with the rise in mobile bookings, will people book everything in-destination, including hotels, later and later?
I fully believe in the latter.
People have been able to book tours and activities in advance for years through sites such as AttractionTix, FloridaTix, GoSeeDo, Viator et al – The real issue is about consumer awareness of things to do and the fact they can be pre-booked with far greater security, surety, and confidence.
Travel will clearly continue to evolve into more of an on-demand service and mobile is the natural vehicle for this….but isn’t part of the essence of travel the anticipation of what awaits? Do we not start to lose this as we make the experience more of a commodity purchase?
I believe the chronology of booking will be strongly affected by scarcity. Just as it sucks to find out that there are no good hotel rooms available after you have landed it also sucks to wake up in the morning on the first day of vacation to find out that all the activities you were going to do are sold out till next weekend.
Someone had to take the chance and try it out. So it didn’t work, big deal. The fact that Kayak would even consider tours and activities is an achievement. I’m not sure the meta-search model works for tours and activities anyway. The idea of price comparing things to do is a little tough. How many different versions of hop-on hop-off tours in New York are you going to find and are they really going to vary in price that much? In order for meta search to work with tours and activities, you’d have to come up with a whole host of other criteria to search and sort upon.
Even though Kayak is a meta, this wasn’t a meta deal. There was one provider.
Perhaps there is another reason. The true nature of Mobile is still not delivering against its promise. If Kayak had been happy with the numbers (even for looks) that would have been sufficient to let them persevere. I believe that part of the problem here is that the application was hard to deliver on Mobile. Further I believe its an example of overhyped and misunderstood expectation of what Mobile can deliver vs what it is actually delivering.
And the real problem is that we are misdefining Mobile.
Cheers
Timothy
(At this point I will duck as all the mobile missiles head my way)
What I like most is to see Kayak experimenting with the total door-to-door experience. We spend a lot of time “getting” to a destination, but not much time thinking about how we will get around.
I gave a public presentation at Eye For Travel 2009 explaining why this type of deal does not yield great results. Alex B. I think you should have the handouts
It’s true that only a minority of T&A is prebooked, rest being sorted out at destination. However, one other common mistake is to take “tours and activities” as one homogeneous category. There is wide variance.
I remain hopeful that T&A can be sold in destination via the mobile – and time will tell.
With regard to the Kayak/GetYourGuide deal, I have been using the Kayak App for a year and even when I don´t book my trip through Kayak, I still forward my itinerary into their system and use the App during my trips. In the past year, I never received an offer via Kayak for Tours & Activities in New York, Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Paris, or St. Louis. The Kayak App knew were I was and never offered me a recommendation.
And, finding the Tours & Activities ¨stuff¨ in the Kayak Apps was far from intuitive.
Therefore, I conclude that poor merchandizing was the problem in this test (rather than lack of interest among users).
If anyone has information on different (more encouraging) results where the T&A stuff is better merchandized, I think that would be interesting to discuss.
An important obstacle to buying T&A at destination via mobile are roaming data charges and poor user experience in mobile checkout. Entering CC information on the phone is bad enough, but entering it on a slow open wifi at a coffee shop or hotel is just too bad.
I am a tours and activities provider and the vast majority of our trade is pre-booked weeks in advance. In excess of 90%. Mobile is having an impact but not a significant one on last minute bookings. No so far anyway.
Thanks for your comment Peter. As mentioned previously there is a wide variety of categories under T&A. In your category – rafting – prebooking is expected as people travel on purpose for this experience. For leisure city tours, hop on hop off buses etc the normal behaviour is still “grab all flyers in the hotel lobby when we get there”.
We run city tours and culture tours and various other soft style activities in our Morocco business and it is still majority booked prior to arrival. That siad that may mean we are doing a poor job at getting last minute in city bookings
I suspect that outside of our little travel tech bubble consumers didn’t even think to look to Kayak app for T&A. Kayak was never associated with in-destination activities.
In order for T&As to get traction on mobile for last-minute or in-destination bookings, my humble opinion is that you need to deliver compelling video and sufficient user reviews to get past the “research hump” most people are conducting pre-arrival. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to deliver that anywhere on any device either.
Johannes is absolutely correct. Travelers aren’t thinking about booking activities at such an early stage in the planning cycle. These transaction are occurring primarily in destination. Since Phocuswright put out their research in 2011 sizing the T&A market at $26B, presentation decks around the world related to the activities space have contained an obligatory slide entitled “A $26B Fragmented Market”. Given that the market leader for advance online bookings (Viator) is so relatively small, it stands to reason that a new paradigm needs to exist in order to create a billion dollar business in activities. Someone will solve the travel problem of “what should we do today and tomorrow” with a simple mobile solution that will enable transactions with activity providers. (an Open Table with transactions). Its just a question of who will do it and when. My bet is on Johannes and the team at Get Your Guide.