Intro to GetYourGuide and tour/activity distribution (Via Tnooz)

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Permalink Reply by Tao Tao on March 4, 2010 at 11:05pm

Thanks for the introduction Alex.

At this point we're really just trying to get more suppliers on board and looking for industry feedback as we try to figure which distribution channels to hit and what features to implement or not given our limited ressources. Sometimes it's funny when we get emails saying that "we won't upload our tours unless you add the function to black out public holidays" and when you do implement it, they don't use it. Similar story about XML. But it's an exciting industry to be in as you must know better than most people.

Well, if anyone has any suggestions where we can improve, just leave a comment here or drop me a note. Of course, if you're a supplier of tours & activities, feel free to sign up as well.

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on March 5, 2010 at 8:32am

Hi Tao Tao

One thing that would improve your site would be to take a TourCMS Marketplace feed :)
Give you a few more suppliers and lots of - 100% accurate - tour descriptions, dates, current prices and availability info. You could still take the bookings on your own system etc - and deal with them using your existing business processes - and charge whatever commission you charge - just use the feed to give you more tour descriptions / dates / prices / availability (and suppliers)

:)

cheers
Alex

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Permalink Reply by Tao Tao on March 5, 2010 at 9:25am

Hey Alex,

believe it or not but it's on the agenda for our CTO to look at! It's just that we only have 1.2 people working on the backend and a project like that might take him a week or so for a clean integration and with the backlog of things to do (and suppliers screaming for features), I think you get the picture. Is there a way we can get a peak into what and how many suppliers are on the Marketplace with how many products?

Cheers,
Tao

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on March 5, 2010 at 10:13am

Hi Tao
We have about 70 or so specialist tour operators using TourCMS as their back office (accounting etc) - but not all in our feed at this time.Some of these tour operators only run 1 or 2 tours (which is fine!) and others run 20-100.

We also have some in German but would need to check whether they are in our public facing system or not. Companies can load the same tour in multiple languages if they wish.

Suppliers screaming for features - well yes - that is why you can get them to use us - who have gone through that period already - and you can access a simple dataset via XML.

We are not consumer facing - nor do we have any deals with any travel websites. We are a back office / bookings management system!

Cheers. Alex

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Permalink Reply by Tao Tao on March 5, 2010 at 1:46pm

Hey Alex,

Thanks for the info and good point of about "outsourcing" the backend system although - and I wouldn't be honest claiming otherwise - from a business perspective we would of course prefer suppliers to use our own system. But truth be told I think Marketplace is a good way to get a lot of products with clean data in a short amount of time so let me get back to you when we're ready to move forward with it.

In any case, do let me know if you would like a personal contact to a certain supplier on GetYourGuide and would like to pitch TourCMS to them. I don't think the big ones would be willing to, but perhaps some others.

Cheers,
Tao

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on March 5, 2010 at 2:09pm

Hi Tao
We have been building a back office for "years" and if you look in our forums we are still getting a lot of requests coming - http://community.tourcms.com/

Never ceases :)

Lets have a conversation out of these forums (!) when you are ready!

cheers

Alex

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Permalink Reply by Peter Syme on March 7, 2010 at 4:24pm

Hi Tao

Great to see another company operating in this space. I am a supplier and one of our biggest challenges is distribution if not our biggest challenge.

That said so many distribution models rely on us using their system to upload tours etc. Now you would think that as a supplier that is what we would want to do but the crunch is resource. Many suppliers just do not have the resource to constantly upload product and importantly keep it up to date. We are customer facing beasts and that is where our efforts and resources go as that is what keeps us in business.

Their is not one distribution model available that will supply the volume required to a supplier therefore we need to be on many many different platforms and that is a major resource issue.

I do see the day coming when we will be able to upload one data set of all our product and tours into some sort of system that fires into companies like yours. I know Alex is working on this with tourcms as many others are as well.

The industry is moving very fast at present and people are waking up to the opportunity in the activity, tours and adventure spaces which will help all of us when you tech guys get it all sorted!!

Regards

Peter

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Permalink Reply by Tao Tao on March 18, 2010 at 9:07pm

Hi Peter,

sorry for my late reply. I only read your post now. I fully agree with you that time constraint on part of the suppliers is a big problem and also the biggest barrier to creating a good real-time inventory of tours & activities. At the same time, I think there's still a big opportunity in, let's say, less technologised regions of the world. When we got, for instance, the biggest inbound operator in China to sign-up (who by the way still hasn't uploaded a single tour...) they haven't even heard of Viator, let alone any of the other players.

And you're absolutely right that people are waking up to the big opportunity in activities. I just came from ITB in Berlin where I attended the Phocuswright conference and one key theme was diversification of revenue streams. Expedia is hardly making money off flights anymore and hotels are also slowly realizing their market power to OTAs. Not saying activities is going to be as big, but it's going to play a role, and even more when you consider the disruptive element that e-commerce could play for traditional tour operators. A lot of our (prospective) Asian suppliers make 98% of their bookings from tour operators and I think there's a margin for players like TourCMS or us there. And when the head of Bing Travel has heard of your company, you know you're at least not in the completely wrong industry niche.

Ultimately, I think whoever can get the most bookings for suppliers will have the edge, which is why our main focus right now is not only supplier but also distributor acquisitions (although I don't think we're the only one driving that strategy). I'll also be the first to admit that we have zero competitive edge in the Anglo-Saxon space (it sucks when you talk to someone and they are already about to sign Viator as a content partner), but there are also a lot of other geographic and content segments to go into.

Cheers,
Tao

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