The services, which have been optimsed for all smartphone devices, complement the company’s existing local-language sites as well as its portfolio of mobile tools including the Viator Ultimate Experience Guide iPad application.

Users can research tours and activities, read reviews and book in their preferred language or call to speak to a Viator agent.

According to the company bookings on its French, German and Spanish sites have grown steadily in the past year.

Viator now offers nine local language websites including Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Japanese and plans to develop further services this year.

I had drinks with my mate Jack (name changed to protect the innocent) at the weekend.

He’d just returned from eight days in Hawaii and I was keen to hear how it went. To be honest, I was pretty sure what he was going to tell me, but let me give you some background before I get to that.

Real life

Jack is thirty-something, single and as red-blooded as the next guy. Outdoorsy without being a jock, enjoys a drink and loves a good restaurant, etc. etc.

His travelling companion was an old schoolmate of his from the UK, they’d travelled together before so there wasn’t going to be any issues of them wanting to go in different directions.

Eight days of surf lessons, sun, seafood, cocktails and etc. all surrounded by girls in bikinis, they hoped. So far so good.

Neither had been to Hawaii before, so Jack’s mate had a long call with a friend of his in New York who had spent a few months there last year.

Apparently an Hawaii expert, she was quick to suggest what sounded like a pretty good plan: four days in Honolulu and then four days on the neighboring island of Maui.

The boys were excited, bookings were made, bags were packed.

The Honolulu part of the trip went well, with well-earned hangovers each morning, washed away by noon thanks to the surf lessons on Waikiki Beach.

Plenty of bars, great food, people to meet (see “bikinis”, above) and generally all the sorts of things the boys were looking for.

Day five, and they’re off to the airport, vaguely wondering why they are leaving paradise and hoping that it was just going to get better. It didn’t.

And that’s not to say that there’s something wrong with Maui… it was just the wrong place for these two guys, who simply couldn’t recreate the Waikiki experience they had come to enjoy so much.

“Everyone was a couple! We could see ourselves coming back here in ten years with our families, but as single guys… No, it just wasn’t for us.”

The heart of the issue

That’s the problem with the whole social travel model, right there.

Your friends, no matter how well meaning, are not travel experts. They’re not going to ask you the right questions or make the right assumptions about what turns you on.

They’re just going to tell you what they like, which may be miles from anything you’d enjoy.

[The boys' Hawaii expert, it turns out, is a botanist who loves long walks with her husband while listening to Enya on her iPod. Vive la difference!]

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating you forget your real friends, your Facebook friends, your family or your colleagues completely, nor am I suggesting you traipse down to see a travel agency instead.

Save for the minority of agents who are truly experts on something (see Conde Nast’s annual list for what I mean) there’s as much bad advice to be found there as there is good.

What I am suggesting is that relying on your friends is as likely to result in just plain awful advice as it is in good advice. There’s no getting around it.

Instead of building your plans around input from others, blend their suggestions with lots of your own research.

Academics who study happiness will tell you that the anticipation derived from researching an upcoming vacation will be every bit as uplifting and energising as the vacation itself. And it will ensure you have the best vacation for you, not the same vacation your friends had.

So what about all those companies we’re seeing emerge with sites that channel advice from friends, all to help your planning process?

They’re good fun, and sure to provide some great ideas that will enhance your trip. Just don’t rely too heavily on them: the very best person to plan your next vacation is still you.

NB: This is a guest article by Rod Cuthbert, founder and chairman emeritus at Viator and founder and CEO at Qewz.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

The company launched as a consumer-facing proposition in March this year (TLabs Showcase – Pocketvillage], but has now thrown its product feed into a service for partners.

At the same time the main site has also been given a new look, primarily to showcase what is on offer on the feed to potential third party users of the API as well as display information about each product such as geo-location, content, images and what the company calls a “pocket rating” to highlight how unique is each tour and activity.

Pocketvillage says it will have around 20,000 products on the system, and the API, but the figure increases substantially to around 50,000 when route variations and tours in multiple languages are included, a process which the likes of online travel agencies Viator and Isango use in their product count.

Co-founder Jann Kleen claims the new site and services will help push the company closer to its goal of becoming a Kayak for tours and activities.

Through a Holidays tab on some of the airline’s websites, travelers can access tours and activities from Viator in the airline’s route network, including for New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, Japan, Europe and the US.

The new offering is branded Air New Zealand Activities and it is powered by Viator.

Viator has plenty of distribution partners — including Air France, British Airways, Air Asia, Delta Air Lines, InterContinental Hotels, RCI, Wyndham and Priceline — although Air New Zealand is the first to use Viator’s new API.

Air New Zealand’s websites access Viator’s destinations activities in the standard way that other partners do by linking to Viator’s white-label offering.

Where the new API comes into play is with Air New Zealand’s email marketing.

When Air New Zealand sends confirmations and other pre-travel emails to passengers, Air New Zealand accesses the new Viator API and sends tours and activities offers to them based on their destinations, says Ken Frohling, vice president of business development for Viator.

Ultimately, the goal will be to customize these offerings based on the type of traveler, Frohling adds.

A Viator spokeswoman says the new API is being “offered to a select group of Viator partners” and “there are plans to open it to a wider audience early next year.”

The map enables users to find and book  hotels and tours, following deals with Expedia and Viator, around the historic sites they are interested in visiting.

The map can also help consumers who have already booked a hotel to put together an itinerary around local historic sites.

The interactive map joins a range of other enhancements added to the site such as guides available by country, city or theme such as famous figures.

Google Street View has also been added to the site as well as the ability for Historvius to add relevant YouTube videos to its database of historic sites.

The UK-based site was unveiled almost a year ago to help open up lesser known historic sites to the public.

At a global level the online travel agency is plotting a massive increase in the number of tour and activity services products available on the site.

The company will not share current product volume or revenues, either by type or country, but some figures close to the strategy were predicting a few months ago that tour and activity products globally and the Local Expert virtual concierge pilot in the US would hopefully generate around $1 billion in gross bookings a year by 2015.

Officially, Expedia sees the focus on its tour and activity products as part of a wider strategy to change the perception of the online travel agency as a flight, hotel, car hire and package holiday-focused service.

Andy Washington, the new managing director for the UK, says Expedia is no longer “just about palm trees and price points”, with a concerted effort being put in to positioning the brand as an “end-to-end travel service”.

The most significant way of doing this is to increase the range of valuable (both commercially and consumer proposition) in-destination services for purchase at the same time as the “commoditised” flight and hotel products on the site.

Expedia, of course, has been in this area for quite some time, but is clearly making a big play to tap further into the growth around tour and activity products being sold via the web.

Washington will not go as far to to say Expedia sees tours and activities as the next significant – and still relatively untapped at a mass-market level – frontier in online travel, but admits technology has played a major part in recent years in bringing suppliers closer to consumers for bookings.

But the growth of the larger activity OTAs such as Viator and Isango, alongside the myriad of startups entering the sector such as PocketVillage [TLabs], Flextrip [TLabs] and GetYourGuide [TLabs], illustrates that there is certainly now some degree of bounty to be had.

Still to be determined, Washington says, is exactly how the expansion will come about, whether its through contracting individually with suppliers (in the same way the company handles hotels) or partnering with a technology providers such as Rezgo or TourCMS to handle some elements of the connectivity required.

Expedia’s soon-to-be ex-sister brand TripAdvisor penned a deal with GetYourGuide in March this year to ramp up the user review giant’s tour and activity offering.

NB: Disclosure – bosses of Rezgo and TourCMS are both Tnooz Nodes.

Specifically in North America, 56% of millennials noted they are either “actively planning to” or “on the fence” about leaving their employer, citing “lack of career growth opportunities” as the number one reason for their departure.

It’s no secret those of us who fall into the Gen-Y demographic grow tired of jobs we master much quicker than prior generations.

But with our above-average need to be continually challenged come the perks of rapid learning speeds, tech savvy and the jaw-dropping light-speed at which we multi-task our way through a workday.

Yet, the stats show the unique needs of the Gen-Y workforce are clearly not being addressed by managers at large organizations not just in North America, but globally, despite truckloads of information available to corporations on exactly that.

The highlights below are just a few of many from the report that should scare the apathy out of any company not currently focusing on improving Gen-Y retention:

• Gen Y reports the highest % of disengaged employees in the workplace globally at 25%
• Lack of visible career growth opportunities & little direct feedback from managers are top reasons for leaving
• Direct size/engagement correlation: The larger the company, the more disengaged young employees
• Technology ranks worst of all sectors in total % disengaged

So, what does this mean for the travel industry, especially at larger companies like airlines, hotel chains, GDSs and travel management companies where Gen Y is statistically at greater risk to become disengaged?

Small is to Sexy as Big is to Bureaucratic

To dig deeper into this issue, I asked a few of my millennial peers to share their thoughts, with all having worked for both start-ups and large companies in travel.

Kelly Gillease, VP of marketing at Viator and a Yahoo alumna, shared why she’s found the perfect fit in a smaller environment:

“The most critical factor for me is that my work has an impact on the business. I strongly like working in organizations where I can see the day to day impact my ideas and initiatives have, on the bottom line, and throughout the organization.”

But when stating what comes to mind when considering the alternative of working for a giant like those mentioned above, Gillease, Evan Konwiser, co-founder of Flightcaster, and Kyle Duffy, VP of global accounts at Revinate, all describe their apprehension with one word: bureaucracy.

“I think [airlines and GDSs] can be exciting companies with massive challenges that I’m itching to try and solve,” says Konwiser. “I’m just deathly afraid of getting stuck in a job that doesn’t excite me or motivate me.”

Gillease isn’t as interested, identifying her optimal company size at 100-150, where you know everyone’s name.

“I would seriously be concerned about an airline or GDS being crushed under the weight of their own bureaucracy,” she says.

And when sharing how action-oriented her current employer is, she fears a role in middle management at a larger organization would be ineffective:

“While I would love to try to solve all their [airline or GDSs] problems, I’m not sure they’d let me.”

Middle management = a kick in the shorts

When it comes to middle management, the general consensus seems to be… well… that it sucks.

Gillease noted two key challenges she thinks explain why it rarely is an enjoyable rung on anyone’s career ladder.

• Too many mediocre managers clogging the ranks due to lack of accountability
• Little-to-no influence in big decisions due to too much hierarchy

While I’ve personally chosen to muddle through the middle, I’ve found my biggest challenge isn’t one listed above. Instead, it’s remembering to relentlessly do the same things with the same gusto that got me there in the first place.

Otherwise, I risk being lulled into a state of complacency, and that puts anyone at danger to become disengaged. That’s also why I have to remind myself it’s okay to be impatiently over-performing my way out of the long slog through the middle.

But even in middle management, I believe there are opportunities for millennials to learn a TON.

Personally, I feel lucky to be learning the guts of the most complex industry in the world from a giant 50 years in the making. That knowledge will be priceless to the future leader I plan to be.

But on the days I envy my peers climbing the start-up ladder faster than I can walk from the parking garage to my cubicle, I have to remember that my passion for our business and thirst for knowledge is why I’ve chosen to learn on this path… And the travel distribution mothership is one hell of a teacher.

But when stumbled into by a millennial without having proper expectations set up front, middle management at any large company can be kryptonite to long-term retention.

Is location really everything?

Location is another important factor in technology recruiting, as both Konwiser and Gillease point out.

“Location is a big deal,” Konwiser states. “Where is travel tech? Dallas, Atlanta. Chicago. None of those cities can support thousands of top talent engineers.”

Gillease shared another perspective.

“The stability of working at a GDS and the more family-friendly nature of their locations (cheaper real estate, better public schools) does make them appealing for people who are really geared toward an easier family life.”

She’s quite right.

But it begs the question, will the companies that are good at retaining employees interested in “stability” and an “easy family life” be the same ones best positioned to compete in a rapidly evolving technology ecosystem? Especially one touting more attempts at start-up disruption than almost any other industry.

Maybe. Maybe not. But as Gillease points out, it’s possible the continued globalization of our workforces one day makes location a moot point. Time will tell.

Duffy has had experience working at an airline and an OTA owned by a GDS, and from his perspective, some employees at large companies are enjoying that stability a little too much.

“It takes a long time make significant changes [at an airline or GDS]. Many of the employees are ‘lifers’ who are happy receiving a paycheck and float along.”

What’s apparent is that by nature Gen-Y will shun the concept of “lifetime employment” and gather broad ranges of experience. But conversely, in one of the most complex industries in the world… it goes back to the core question: Will it become difficult for today’s large travel companies to be successful long-term without retention?

Winning the millennial talent war

Ultimately, Konwiser believes that the biggest challenge will not be merely filling cubicles, but competing with the rest of the industry for those recruits who are truly the cream of the crop.

“The startup world is so sexy nowadays and it’s so easy to be on your own, even at a young age. The biggest concern [for GDSs and airlines] is how to fill out the ranks with people that have options.”

So, if we agree the battle to retain young leaders today will ultimately impact the industry’s winners and losers tomorrow, who’s winning the war?

NB: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabre Holdings, its partners, customers or subsidiaries.

Launching simultaneously in 25 cities around the world, member-only deals will include tour and activity-related products from its database of suppliers and uses the new technology platform created for the launch of the Viator iPhone application in May this year.

Membership and access to the deals is free.

Viator says the deals are all exclusive and guarantee something in the range of 25%-75% off the existing sale price. Launch markets include Auckland, Barcelona, Las Vegas, Munich, Las Vegas, San Francisco, New York and Zurich.

Keen to differentiate between it and the countless other flash sale/member-only sites spreading around the web, Viator says it is unlike other offerings because members can “search tours and activities by destination and book specific dates and times — from up to 60 days to just hours in advance”.

Neverthless, Viator isn’t the first player in the tour and activity space to head down the member-only route.

Recently funded Zozi switched its business model after seeing the deals space grow, while EpicThrills is a relatively new entrant to the marketplace with its own take on flash sales in the sector.

Viator is also eager to talk up the technology behind the system, a process it claims will eliminate issues other deal sites have such as multiple deals being sold simultaneously.

“Viator tour operators can use the system to self-serve deals any time, providing real-time distribution to travelers searching for future and last-minute things to do.

“Because these deals are date- and time-specific, Viator helps tour operators with yield management in high- and low-demand periods while preserving quality and service levels.”

Who and what are you?

Azurever is an aggregation platform which compares tours and activities from many providers (such as Expedia, Viator, Isango, Octopus, City-discovery and thematic operators in opera, trekking, etc) and is focused on answering european market specific needs (multilingual translation, development of european favorites destinations).

Azurever is an open platform specifically designed to be used by other portals through distribution partnerships.

The team:

• Arnaud Calteau – has worked for ten years in the e-tourism market and launched self-financed destination guides.
• Collin Moretto – former consultant, worked in improving banks and companies online performance.

We are both travel freaks, always looking for original and unique experiences. As French travelers, we found it was very difficult to find activities in our mother tongue and in our favorites destinations.

So we decided to launch a portal that could help other european travelers like us to find the best deals and personalized activities on their travel spots.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We self-financed the first steps of the project and since 2010 we have been funded by business angels for our international development.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Tours and activities market is actually focused on American travelers needs. It is also very fragmented with a lot of actors and poor comparison features.

Azurever helps european travelers to find unique experiences, in their mother tongue and at the best price.

We want to develop European markets with unique features, accessible through our portal and a network of partners websites. So far, we have more than 200,000 unique visitors looking at our catalog each month.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Azurever is offering a one-stop shopping area when visiting a tourist destination.

• Loca expertise: We select, traduce and compare the best activities from the biggest resellers and producers to adapt them to local tourism markets in Europe.
• Rich content: We have the most extensive catalogue on the European market (more than 15,000 tours and activities) mixing free content and pre-packaged activities.
• Multi-support: We are developing social media widgets and mobile applications to offer access to our content from every channel and every location.

We have also built a distribution program with a selection of European websites. Our first partnership is with Via Michelin Voyage, launched at the end of May 2011. Several other projects are coming up.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

• B2C: Travelers looking for unique experience at their holidays spots (www.azurever.co.uk)
• B2B: Any website that wants to provide activities, but mainly european travel guide websites and e-tourism portals (hotels chains, airline companies).

After launching in the French market in 2010, we opened our English version this year. We are planning launches of our Spanish, Italian and German versions at the end of 2011.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes, we verified the concept with a panel of 100,000 visitors. The metrics were good enough to validate the concept.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Commission fees by the distributors or the producers of each activity. Revenue sharing with our partnership programs.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We’re specialized on the European market and with translation features.
• Expansion in French, Italian, Spanish and German speaking areas where big players don’t have a strong presence yet.
• We are going fast and we built a 15,000-product catalog in less than a few months.
• A strong network of partnerships to distribute our products.

Weaknesses:

• New company with no established brand name. We need to develop recognition via partnerships to enhance our visibility.

Opportunities:

• The activities market is a fast growing segment, specifically in Europe.
• Customers are getting more and more comfortable with searching and booking experiences on-line.

Threats:

• Time to market – there are a number of big travel websites with huge marketing budgets ready to get into this emerging market, when it is mature enough.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

A few professionals argued that “destination dervices” is huge hassle for small money and the competition will be dramatic when the market starts. This is true, but with our business model the more competition, the better.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Close to break-even. 500,000 visitors per month, with an active and happy travelers community.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

As well as publishing an elevator pitch-type questionnaire for each business, Tnooz committed to following up with each startup after 12 months or so to see how well (or not) each performed.

GetYourGuide is a Switzerland-based tour and activity platform, first featured on Tnooz in March 2010 [TLabs Showcase - GetYourGuide].

Are you making money yet?

Yes. By virtue of running an e-commerce platform we started making money shortly after launching the customer-facing site.

What has been the biggest problem – building the product/service or marketing it to consumers/travel industry?

As with most two-sided e-commerce platforms, the product side tends to be easier to build in the short-term than the customer side, which has also been our experience. For inherently non-viral products, it simply takes longer for marketing and business development efforts to start showing results than for the product and sales teams to get products on board. In the long-run, however, you can’t have one without the other.

Biggest assumption in the business plan that was wrong?

There wasn’t any particular assumption that went blatantly wrong, but in retrospect you could say that we were a bit starry-eyed with some expectations about our first foray into the travel space.

Is your current customer base as predicted?

Yes.

Did you achieve your 12 month goals? If not, why not?

Yes. 12 months ago we set out to reach 5,000 products and come close to profitability. Both goals have been reached.

Has the problem you were trying to solve changed?

No. When we started GetYourGuide, there were two intertwined problems we set out to solve.

One was the lack of industry standards or protocols in the tours and activities industry, which particularly catered to the techy DNA of our founding team.

However, looking at the general history of business, standards have always been set by either a regulatory body or, more often, by companies or conglomerates with the largest market power.

The latter route is what we are trying to take by creating the largest digital repository of bookable tours and activities and building strong B2C and B2B distribution channels around it.

The other problem was the lack of a marketplace for customers to transparently compare and book local tours & activities around the world.

Growing up with open marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, we couldn’t think of any other way for e-commerce to work. It was for this reason that we often have to fight the fact that intransparency rather than transparency constitutes one of the core tenets in travel.

There are many sound historic reasons why travel developed this way, but we also think that the multi-billion dollar tours & activities sector is ready for modern e-commerce just like hotels and flights had to be ten to twenty years ago.

It will take time to solve these problems, but we like to think that the bigger the challenge, the more rewarding success will be.

Which startup that has launched in the past 12 months did you think “Ah, wish we had done that!”?

One of the things we learned from meeting and reading about successful entrepreneurs is that ideas themselves are worth little compared to the full array of other factors required for success.

In travel there have been a few start-ups that took interesting twists on existing ideas or implemented ideas for which the time was ripe, such as peer-to-peer room rentals, but none of them would have been impressive without their impressive execution, so it’s difficult for us to answer the question whether we would have performed similarly given the same initial business idea.

If you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?

Enjoy the ride.

GetYourGuide on Tnooz since March 2010:

• The latest round of innovation in travel, London-style
• Making money from tours and activities on the web
• TripAdvisor expands activities channel through GetYourGuide
• Ultimate guide to the specialist tour and in-destination activity market
• Lipstick on a pig – The challenge with activities distribution
• Why the activity segment is an iceberg of Titanic dimensions

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

The short (ish) answer is that very few travel-related businesses have even entered the programme, despite it being around for over 12 months.

One of the first was the Virgin America airline, selected in April 2010 as one of a number of major consumer brands to trial the long awaited platform to give Twitter a revenue stream outside of selling data to search engines.

More recently, Asia-Pacific online travel agency Zuji got in on the act through its Australian office, becoming the first company in the country to give the channel a test.

Last week, of course, there was an eruption of inevitable gushing from fans and raising of eyebrows from critics when Twitter’s director of revenue said to advertise on so-called trending topics (a tweet at the top of the time-line of a popular topic) could cost around $120,000 per day. Yes, six figures – $120,000 per day.

Given the secret world around Promoted Tweets, Trends and also Promoted Accounts (Twitter apparently doesn’t like customers talking about it so much), getting hard data out of companies as to how well the concept performs is actually rather difficult.

Another travel company that has given the experiment a proper go is Viator, joining the programme with a dedicated campaign earlier this year.

It has embarked on two elements of the “Promoted” advertising platform: Tweets and Accounts.

Vice president of marketing Kelly Gillease says the company was buying advertising on Facebook but wanted to see how the Promoted Tweets worked, especially as it appeared to show how a brand can engage with a particular audience.

Viator will not share details of costs around the campaign and Twitter does not disclose how it goes about targeting different Twitter users, but Gillease reckons when a particular campaign has been put in place the response has been “good”.

The word “good” is rather flimsy, but Viator considers gaining followers to its main @viator account and seeing Twitters users taking part in sales and promos as a sign of success.

Results have been similar when using Promoted Accounts, Gillease says.

Examples of how Viator has targeted different groups include appearing on specific search terms, such as “shore excursions” (as above) and other destination-related phrases.

It has also appeared on far bigger volume searches such as “iPhone”, plugging its own iPhone application.

The company also appeared at the top of search results for #TBEX last weekend, ensuring its name was in front of hundreds of travel bloggers either in attendance or following the conversation from the event in Vancouver, Canada.

Gillease says Viator it “excited” to be part of the beta test for Promoted elements of Twitter and will continue it for the foreseeable future.

But how does working on promotions through Twitter fit within Viator’s wider marketing strategy?

Gillease says no other channel has lost out as a result of trying the Twitter beta (it’s using new money, in other words) and, perhaps most significantly, the general click-through rate from promoted content appearing on Twitter is comparable to the other channels it uses.

The Viator Tours & Activities app for iPhone, developed in-house, and the Viator Ultimate Experience Guide app for iPad, developed for Viator by Hot Studio in San Francisco,  take different tacks.

The iPhone app features in-app booking of tours and activities and Viator did a lot of back-end work with suppliers, ensuring that some 80% of the product can be booked within 48 hours of the activity.

Coupled with a relaunched mobile website a few weeks ago, the close-in bookings that are available as part of the iPhone app are especially useful for smartphone-wielding travelers.

Barrie Seidenberg, Viator’s president and CEO, explains that most of the company’s suppliers can release last-minute inventory via what is essentially an extranet and block out these activities and tours when they are sold out.

The Viator iPhone and iPad apps are different from one another and neither are carbon copies of Viator.com, says Scott McNeely, vice president of product.

“Neither are bringing Viator.com to mobile apps,” McNeely emphasizes.

Among its features, several of which emphasize close-in bookings, the iPhone app has a What Can I Do Today section, where results can be filtered by activities today, tomorrow or a future date. And, a What’s Near Me feature outlines and maps available activities based on your GPS-detected location.

The app also conveniently offers tours that you can hitch onto right from your hotel.

Meanwhile, users can submit photos and reviews, including verified reviews from people who booked tours via Viator, through the apps and website.

The iPad app is more inspirational and less about booking. Unlike the in-app booking featured in the iPhone app, to book through the iPad app you have to launch a  Safari browser and book on Viator.com.

McNeely says the iPad app, which features customized city guides for Viator’s top 100 cities around the world, is geared for people musing about travel before a trip and they may not even have a destination in mind.

You can navigate to the top 100 cities by rotating a 3-D globe and each city guide features content from experts as well as images, some 95% of which have been contributed by users, McNeely says.

Future plans call for in-app booking on the iPad app, as well.

Viator’s tours and activities can be booked in U.S., Australian and Canadian dollars, as well as in euros and Great Britain pounds.

In the intermediary layer of this sector, deals have been struck between those who own the consumer and generally a singe intermediary (eg. the recently announced deal between TripAdvisor and GetYourGuide).

No intermediaries have all the product, hence when these bigger deals are announced only a subset of end suppliers are involved (with the other suppliers in the same destination often locked out).

The reason for this is because intermediaries, historically at least, have contracted their product manually and only needed to work with a few suppliers in each destination to attain good global coverage.

The game has now moved to the next logical layer, with the launch of Pocketvillage. Formed by five young entrepreneurs from Germany, Pocketvillage is a metasearch for tours and activities.

The partner list reads like the who’s who of the sector. Now a consumer can go to a single website and search all the silos that existed previously in one place.

Live on the site today are Intrepid Travel, GAP Adventures, responsibletravel.com, Urban Adventures, Tripbod, TourCMS (disclosure), GetYourGuide, Viator, AirBNB. Many more intermediary partners announced. Flights are provided by Kayak via a standard affiliate partnership.

Here is a clip of the launch at ITB:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaHJxdjVFOM

Linking up with all these websites has been a fair technical challenge. Here we talk to Jann Kleen (CTO) about OpenTravel standards in the sector:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiYF0eWS47I

The core question that Pocketvillage has to address is what is it going to do with all the ingredients it now has at its disposal.

Will it try to make a fruit salad (each ingredient retains its individual taste and can be recognized as separate by the consumer) or will it make a blended fruit smoothie?

Will be interesting to watch how they grapple with this core positioning decision.

In fact, the current state of activities distribution is one of the findings of the PhoCusWright report [When They Get There (and Why They Go)] about the tour and activities market that I found most surprising.

Because the tour and activities segment is dominated by small long tail businesses who, as the report indicates, have small budgets and little or no technological sophistication, the idea of direct connects (like those in the airline space) are simply out of the question.

With only 14% of these businesses having any kind of central reservation system, it makes it very hard to electronically aggregate product across the segment. Hence the reason why so many intermediaries and aggregators exist in this space.

But being an aggregator in the activities space is no easy task. It involves a tremendous amount of work to source, load, and maintain activity content on a product by product basis from small businesses all over the World. Companies like Viator, Isango, Kijubi, and GetYourGuide are all based on this model.

Once product is on the sites (identified in the PhoCusWright report as Online Activity Specialists I or OAS I), the aggregator now has to get it to market. This may include driving traffic using natural search, pay per click campaigns, affiliates, and other creative techniques.

When the tour or activity is booked, the aggregator issues the customer a voucher and, after some specific period of time, the operator of the tour or activity receives their net fee for the sale, usually around 70-75% of retail cost. For the most part, the tours or activities are sold on a free sale or request basis. Nothing is real-time.

So, for the bulk of the “source” products that exist in the activity distribution supply chain, we have content that is neither controlled by the supplier or available for booking in real-time (except as free sale). Already, you can see we have a problem. So now the fun begins.

Now that these aggregators have spent the time to catalog and organize all these activities, it’s time to build scale and deliver the content through partners. In many cases, these partners are OTAs or other third party sales organizations. In some cases, the partner is what is referred to in the PhoCusWright report as an Online Activities Specialist II or OAS II.

Are you still with me?

So these OAS II businesses are essentially meta aggregators or aggregators of aggregators. OAS II businesses, such as BeDynamics and iSeatz, pull in feeds from OAS I companies and combine them all together to make super feeds. For this, the OAS II will get some split of the commission from the OAS I, usually around 6-10%.

Now that the OAS II has aggregated all this tour and activity content, they develop some kind of unified interface that can then be integrated into another website, like an airline, cruise, travel agent, hotel, or destination website.

For this service, the OAS II splits their commission with the partner website, usually 50% of net commission, or between 3-5%.

Once on the site, the tour or activity is ready to be purchased by the traveller. Based on an average per person booking value of $100, we are looking at a $25 commission being split three ways, $15 for the OAS I, $7 for the OAS II, and maybe $3 for the partner website.

Since the OAS I is usually the one handling payment and customer service costs, their net is probably closer to $10. Each link in the chain needs to pay for marketing and technology costs out of this revenue.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a whole lot of sophistication happening behind the scenes here. Content writers busily bang away on keyboards writing “unique content” in order to avoid getting stung by Google duplicate content algorithms,  XML feeds are being pulled into programs and deduplicated, sorted, and added to some local cache database for the purposes of “fast search”.

There are images, videos, and location data being added to the mix at every level. There are vertical search engines, mobile applications, mobile websites, widgets, gadgets, interactive maps, social buying, email offers, and all kinds of other cool and inventive things being created on top of this OAS I and OAS II layer.

In the end however, there is one important and critically fundamental player missing from this distribution chain… the supplier.

Once the product content is loaded, in most cases, the supplier is out of the picture until the customer actually experiences the tour or activity they purchased.  In many cases, the customer doesn’t even know who is delivering the tour until after they’ve booked it.

For many long tail businesses, distribution just doesn’t make sense. Not because their products are too complicated or “unique” to be delivered electronically, but despite all the sophistication, technology, and innovation focused on the mid-tier of activity distribution, intermediaries only accounted for about 5% of the online travel activities market in 2009.

Don’t despair though, that percentage is predicted to increase to 8% by 2012.

Let’s face it, the cat is out of the bag now folks. It’s only a matter of time before some smart Harvard grad spends a week in a basement with a supply of chips and red bull and figures out a way to completely transform this dysfunctional segment by developing a new wizbang interface that will make it easier for travellers to book activities.

Except, like the so many other layers of make-up on this proverbial pig, it will be just another shade of lipstick.

The deeper problem, and the one that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later, is that there is a fundamental disconnect between the activities supply chain and the source of supply.

As I have mentioned in my two previous articles about the size of the activities market and how destinations need to focus on activities, this segment needs supplier engagement in the worst way.

For the distribution chain to continue to thrive and to scale, it needs content. As more and more intermediaries enter the playing field, they are going to demand a piece of a pie that relies on human intervention to curate and manage.

The answer is for technology partners at all points of the distribution chain to start finding ways to make the supplier accountable for their content and availability. This means pulling product content and availability directly from supplier reservation systems and distributing them through the chain and pushing bookings back through the chain directly into the reservation systems.

There is nothing to say that points in the distribution chain can’t add value or augment content in order to maintain a competitive advantage over others in the chain, that’s their prerogative, but at the end of the day, the supplier is managing inventory and bookings from multiple channels in a single source.

What we want to avoid is the operator receiving bookings via fax and email, which are both the predominate method for receiving confirmations from intermediaries today.

Don’t expect suppliers to push this mandate, however. These small businesses don’t know and frankly don’t care about XML messaging schemas, APIs, or standards.

They care about running their businesses and providing their guests with the best possible experience they can. That means that the people who have to push this mandate are the people at businesses that service this small business market.

Everyone from the reservation provider to the OAS I, OAS II, hotel, airline, cruise, and destination company that wants to tap into this market needs to buy into the concept that the buck stops with the supplier.

This is not about cannibalizing an existing market or undermining anyone’s existing market share, if this works EVERYONE stands to benefit from the influx of content.  More direct access to content means more diversity, choice, and more opportunity to segment products by niche.

Maybe then, those new shades of lipstick won’t just be for decorating the pig.

NB: Author is CEO of Rezgo, a sponsor of the PhoCusWright Report.

NB2: Photo credit - Theilr

The introduction of Viatorcom.jp to the portfolio is the latest in a line of sites in local languages following the launch of sites in Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish in early-2010.

The total has reached eight in recent years after Viator added to its original English site with services for French, German and Spanish users in 2009.

Viator says the launch of its first local site in Asia comes as PhoCusWright data continues to illustrate the fast-growing marketplace amongst Japanese travellers for booking services over the web.

Nearly 80% of the population has access to the internet and online travel accounts for 20% of a $65.7 billion travel spend in the country.

Early indications from testing show that Japanese travellers are booking the traditional tourist attractions around the world, such as helicopter flights over the Grand Canyon, the Moulin Rouge show in Paris and visits to Stonehenge in the UK.

With the introduction of its Worry-free Shore Excursions in popular ports from St. Thomas to Istanbul, Viator says it offers an “attractive alternative to the often pricey tours provided by the cruise line…”

“Viator has worked hard to ensure each Worry-free Shore Excursion will enable passengers to return to the ship on time,” the company says. “In those rare circumstances where passengers miss their departure, the traveler will be transferred to the ship’s next port-of-call courtesy of Viator.”

Of course, if passengers miss the departure because they decided to stop in a local saloon after the shore excursion or spend a couple of hours perusing jewelry shops, then that’s another story. When it is not the passengers’ fault, Viator will provide the transportation, worth up to $1,000, to the next port of call. The terms and conditions of the pledge are here in section 21.

Viator’s Worry-free Shore Excursions also are included in its Low Price Guarantee, another competitive challenge to cruise lines.

Between the price guarantee and the transport pledge, Viator really is giving cruise passengers a reason to book their shore activities with Viator and independent of the cruise line.

Consumers looking to book a shore excursion from Viator, which specializes in the panalopy of in-destination activities, can view them on Viator’s Cruise Port Pages.

A display about a St. Lucia Catamaran Day Sale, for example, includes a price calendar, recent photos of the 8-hour tour, user reviews and, of course, the ability to book the activity.

If the sailing takes longer than expected or there are other delays beyond the control of the cruise passenger, Viator pledges to get passengers to the next port if they missed the boat.

Viator acquired the Sydney company – its first since a change in management structure when founder Rod Cuthbert left as chairman in September 2010 – for an undisclosed fee.

OurExplorer launched in 2008 and has grown quickly to include 2,000 registered tour guides in 500 destinations around the world on its books.

The system works by allowing users to search for guides in a particular destination, view their availability, ask questions and make a reservation with deposit.

Many of the guides offer services for a range of attractions in any given location and have set rates published on the site as well as videos and copies of official tour licences.

The deal makes a fair amount of sense for Viator – and perhaps signals an intent to broaden its remit through acquisitions – as it will be able to integrate the service into the main tours and attractions platform, although officials say the OurExplorer brand will continue to run operate independently.

Viator offers some 5,500 destination activities — event tickets, tours and attractions — in 450 destinations in 75 countries.

Through private label deals, iSeatz offers ancillary services — including hotels, car rentals, activities, ground transportation and airport parking — to clients, including Delta, Air France, KLM, Air Canada and Amtrak.

Under the agreement, iSeatz now gets direct access to Viator’s inventory of destination activities and Viator can obtain wider distribution of that product through iSeatz clients.

iSeatz says the partnership means that iSeatz clients will now have the option of integrating activites from Viator into their booking paths after customers purchase their flights or rail tickets.

The agreement means the two companies, which competed somewhat in the activities arena, now will be able to gain a stronger foothold as airlines and other supplier seek to attract more ancillary revenue from consumers.

And, consumers will get the option to do more trip-planning about in-destination activities on airline or rail websites before they depart for their vacations.

The “things to do” transaction site enables users to transmit recommendations to their networks on Facebook and Twitter, but stopped short of deeper social network integration for now.

President and CEO Barrie Seidenberg says deeper Facebook integration is “very much part of our future roadmap. We believe Viator is all about travel inspiration and sharing information. That said, as a transaction-based travel site, it’s important that we fully understand how our community wants us to integrate with social websites, including Facebook.”

Over the next few months, Seidenberg says, Viator hopes to identify how users would prefer to integrate Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other social platforms.

To pull off the site improvements, Viator wrote basic content covering 3,000 top global attractions to provide an overview, points of interest nearby and a mapped location. It also that linked content to existing product reviews.

It’s interesting that Viator chose to create the content itself — a substantial undertaking — without aggregating it from the usual suspects.

Viator has for some time enabled members who have purchased a tour on the site to write a review or upload a photo, but it has added the ability for them to submit “traveler recommendations” and to share them with their Facebook and Twitter networks.

The company also added user profiles to the site so other users can click on a public profile and view all of that member’s recommendations and photos in a single location.

Thus, if users click on Rio de Janeiro Soccer Match and Stadium Tour, they can read Viator-written highlights, schedule details and tour and pricing options, and also check out user reviews and photos.

A booking widget sits alongside the basic information.

There are 15 user reviews currently available for the stadium tour and you can click on the author’s profile to get a sense of who they are.

Two user-taken photos of a match were also readily available for viewing.

“The tour-related reviews and photos, which we have had on the site for the past few years, require that you actually purchased and experienced that tour,” Seidenberg says. “That is not changing. It is a critical quality-control feature for us. Unlike other travel review sites, our tour-related reviews and photos come from confirmed travelers with first-hand experience.”

“By opening up more of a dialogue on the Viator site, we are giving travelers access to more information they can use to plan their trips, which also creates a more active community,” Seidenberg adds.

And, Viator hopes a more engaged community will lead to plenty of more customers using that booking widget.

In the travel business, these two ways of distributing products and services to travelers are quite different.

The problem is that travelers are generally unaware of the difference and, as a result, don’t understand what they are getting when they look for experiences through a curator or an aggregator.

Let’s first define the terms.  According to Oxford, the term “aggregate” means:

verb /agrigayt/ combine into a whole.

The term “curate” means:

verb select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition).

Already you can see that the verbs mean entirely different things.  Aggregation implies combining a variety of objects to create a whole, whereas curation implies selection, organization, and care.

In the travel business, aggregation is very much the combining of distinct sources of product and delivering it as a single unified list of products from which the traveler can choose the best product for their needs.

In the case of airlines and hotels, this would be done using a combination of direct connects and GDS connections. When a traveler searches for a given location and time of year, the system scours through the various sources for the best matches and displays the results.

The system makes no judgments on the quality or appropriateness of the product but rather provides an unbiased (or so it would seem) list of matching results. In the case of the aggregator, the accountability of the product or service delivered is usually left to the supplier who actually provides the service since, in most cases, the aggregator will make it clear that they do not take responsibility for the deliver of the service.

Curation is a very different approach to delivering products to consumers. Although there may be an aggregation component to the curation process, primarly for the purposes of sourcing the products for curation, the curator is then responsible for selecting the products that they feel are the best fit for their customers, organizing them, and maintaining them in the collection.

When a traveler searches for experiences from a curated source, they are relying on the experience and expertise of the curator to ensure quality, viability, and credibility of the source.

In the case of curation, the customer may not even know the source until after the booking is made relying entirely on the reputation of the curator.  It’s a little bit like the old saying “Any friend of Jim, is a friend of mine”.

To the traveler, it may be difficult to know whether a travel site is an aggregator or a curator just by looking at it.  One way, I have found is to look at their tag line or mission statement and see if they fall into either of these criteria:

• The site is most likely an aggregator if it claims to have the largest number of sources (ie. hotels, flights, car, whatever), promotes the number of locations or properties/flights (ie. 50,000+ hotels), and offers customer reviews but does not provide it’s own reviews/editorial.  Many online agencies and metasearch sites like Expedia, Travelocity, and Kayak would fall into this classification.
• The site is most likely a curator if it claims the best selection of products from reputable sources, promotes the quality of the products over the quantity, offers a combination of customer reviews and editorial, and manages & updates the source content directly. Many experiential travel sites like Viator, isango!, Kijubi, Expedia’s Activities/Attractions, TravelDragon, and others would fall into this category.  The reason why most of these sites curate is partly because aggregation of content for experiential product is almost impossible given the lack of standard distribution standards and systems.  Curation does occur in other more traditional segments such as hotels.  The Mr & Mrs Smith site, for example, would be considered a curation site for selected boutique hotels.

In the end, the two methods for distribution offer their own benefits.  Aggregation will most likely offer the most number of choices and require the consumer to filter and sort based on their preferences.

Curation, on the other hand, will provide a fewer number of choices defined by the curator’s preferences and presented as a collection.  Both options are valid and serve consumers in different ways.

How effective the two options are depends a lot on the reputation of the brand and the trust the consumer has with the site.  In the end, both approaches provide consumers with choice and that is never a bad thing.

Pic: Espos.de on Flickr and Shopkitson.