Welcome to the first edition of Destination EXP, the digital and print magazine that takes you on a journey of exploration and discovery through the exciting world of visitor experiences.
In recent years, there has been a significant shift of interest in our industry toward innovative tours and new attractions. With more people seeking out unique and authentic experiences, tour operators and attraction developers have responded by creating new and exciting options that go beyond the typical sightseeing tour. Moreso than ever before, travelers are seeking out those experiences which allow them to immerse themselves in different cultures, learn new skills or challenge themselves physically and mentally.
At Destination EXP, we will showcase these innovative new tours and attractions, providing you with the inspiration and information you need to ameliorate your own offerings. Our aim is to fill a void in travel publishing by providing readers with a compendium of the latest trends, destinations and experiences that are shaping the industry. Destination EXP is different from other travel publications as it focuses on activities rather than just destinations or OTAs or the technology behind the magic.
Of course, no discussion on the experiences of the travel and tourism industry would be complete without acknowledging the impact of technology. From AI-powered chatbots, AI-automated itinerary building, virtual assistants and efficiency-based technologies like mobile ticketing and self-driving vehicles, technology has transformed the way we travel and will continue to have a lasting impact.
Another specificity of Destination EXP will be a calendar of events on trade shows, in-person or virtual gatherings, conferences, conventions, and other happenings that matter to you and are relevant to our sector.
By addressing activities and experiences, highlighting the latest tours, attractions, and museums, exploring the impact of technology, and showcasing the transformative power of travel, we aim to provide you with an unavoidable quarterly refence bible you will be able to refer to more than once.
We believe that travel is not just about getting or staying somewhere, but more importantly, it is about the experiences provided, the emotions conveyed, and the memories created during a stay and whether you are a small operator of activities or part of a large cultural institution, we hope that Destination EXP will inspire and help you on your journey.
“Moreso than ever before, travelers are seeking out those experiences which allow them to immerse themselves in different cultures, learn new skills or challenge themselves physically and mentally.”
When I first interviewed Theresa Nemetz in 2016, she already had her eye on bigger and better things. The owner of Milwaukee Food & City Tours got the idea for her business while on a food tour in New York City. She came home from that trip and started sketching out what a Milwaukee food tour business would look like. By the time I caught up with her, she was poised to expand her business by offering pizza tours of Italy.
That entrepreneurial spirit came in handy when COVID-19 shut down the travel industry. “In some crazy way, the pandemic has just been an amazing pivot point and opportunity for us,” says Nemetz.
As her tour business shut down, Theresa saw other tour operators around the globe selling locally sourced culinary-themed gift baskets and immediately jumped on the opportunity. “When we started, it was about featuring Milwaukee food vendors but now my vision is to take that national. We started offering advent calendars and we did a Delicious Illinois advent calendar, a Delicious Ohio advent calendar, Delicious Minnesota and Delicious Michigan,” Nemetz said. Eyeing the future, Nemetz has plans to roll out a Route 66 box and a mighty Mississippi River box.
As Chicago gradually reopened to tourism, Nemetz strategically acquired two tour/DMC companies in the Windy City. As the current business owners were scaling back or retiring, “It has given us a chance to move into new markets,” said Nemetz.
At the same time, Nemetz admits she’s “not a Chicago girl,” but she’s surrounded herself with people that know Chicago. “I would have never gone into that city without having a great base of people. I’ve relied on the individuals that work for the companies, the individuals that started those companies to still be my partner and being able to open doors for us.”
As to the complexities of running a tour business in a new city, Nemetz said, “I don’t actually need to know exactly where everything is, but I do need to be able to sell it and I need to be out there networking. And you know, I’m really kind of looking at myself now as the Midwest girl as I’m expanding.”
Whereas most tour and activity companies focus on booking individual tourists, Nemetz has carved out a strong niche in the group sector. “You can go on to any of our websites at any time and you can book a tour and meet us on a street corner, and we take you out on a great tour. But where we’ve seen a huge increase in demand is on the corporate side with the private tours.”
“We’re starting to see corporate groups where people are calling and saying, you know what, we have not traveled for three years and my boss said we need to get everyone together.”
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Approximately 75% of the company’s business comes via pre-formed groups.
“We’re starting to see corporate groups where people are calling and saying, you know what, we have not traveled for three years and my boss said we need to get everyone together,” she added.
While her company is enjoying the fruits of their labor, Nemetz attests that it takes years to cultivate group business. “I think that one thing that really set us on the right path in developing what we wanted to offer to groups was mentorship. We have so many great strong mentors that have really taught me about group travel.”
As to how the firm develops group business, it’s a lot of networking, travel shows and building relationships. “Someone asked me by traveling to these travel shows, do I see the value? Do I book something? That’s really hard for me to answer because yes, I booked tours at these shows, but that’s actually not what the value is. The value is over the course of 10 years, who have I met and how have those individuals helped me to be able to open doors. Sometimes the long game is the way to success.
There are some people that we have talked to for literally five and six years and now they are just coming to us and having us plan their itineraries.”
Great Lakes cruising is flourishing with lines like American Queen and Viking joining foreign
carriers by offering a variety of summer itineraries across the Great Lakes of North America. Seeing this opportunity to be involved in the cruising industry, Nemetz understood the Milwaukee and Chicago markets, but didn’t know a lot about cruising initiatives on the Great Lakes. “I realized that there are so many individuals that want to cruise on the Great Lakes, to see this beautiful natural beauty in America that they may not have ever thought to go to. We’re starting to see a huge influx of cruises that are building ships to come onto the Great Lakes and have a whole entire summer season here.”
Nemetz started talking to cruise lines and offered to help build the infrastructure necessary to run day tours in various points. That bet has paid off as her new firm, Great Lakes Shore Excursions, hired 150 people this spring to facilitate tours in Chicago, Milwaukee, Duluth, Bayfield, Detroit, Cleveland, Alpena, Muskegon and Sturgeon Bay.
The process hasn’t entirely been smooth sailing. She found that while they could find people who are passionate about their community, they had no previous knowledge of how to lead a tour. “We’ve had to go in and teach them. We’re building out scripts, we’re working with local historians and we’re teaching them how to lead these tours.
Because a cruise ship pulls up to your dock with 400 people, they need 20 to 30 tour guides that morning to go and take people out.”
Nemetz points out that it’s important for the local community to embrace tourism. “We don’t want anyone to be upset that a cruise ship is coming to town. We want to be in the community meeting with the mayors, meeting with those Chambers of Commerce and asking them ‘what do you want to show off?’ So then when they come to, you know, to go and see the Apostle Islands, for example, and to go into Duluth and they go kayaking, you know these ships on the Great Lakes, they’re not a traditional cruise ship.
And when I’m seeing passengers coming off the Great Lakes cruises and I’m asking them what they think, they tell me they never knew this existed in the United States.”
As the Great Lakes cruise business is expanding, so has the future of in-destination tours in previously underserved areas. By 2024, Nemetz would like to see full-fledged tour companies in multiple cities. Nemetz cites examples like Mackinac Island where they are launching the first fudge tasting tour on the island.
As with any scaling business, the demands of an owner-operator are tremendous. “Really, my biggest goal right now is elevating to a place where I have a team of direct reports that I can really trust, they can do things well and be able to take the company to the next level. Because as much as I want to take things to the next level, I can’t do it by myself.”
Nemetz is building out a team of leaders within the food tour business and asking them to manage those cities. “They know we are going to be expanding into those other cities,” she said. At the end of the day, Nemetz says it’s all about great taste. “Whether it’s us sending you a gift box, or you getting off a cruise ship, or you showing up on a corner and doing one of our food tours, it‘s about delicious.” Delicious indeed. EXP
Listen to the entire interview with Theresa Nemetz at leisuregrouptravel.com/ traveling-tribes
The process hasn’t entirely been smooth sailing. [Nemetz] found that while they could find people who are passionate about their community, they had no previous knowledge of how to lead a tour.
Twenty years ago, I purchased a failing rafting operator in Scotland. The landscape of multiday and day tour operations was vastly different back then.
The early 2000s were marked by various challenges and pain points for tour operators. From traditional offline booking methods that did not scale to issues with real-time coordination and a lack of digital presence, finding new customers was an old-fashioned marketing and sales job. The industry has undergone a substantial
transformation since then. Today, with the advent of technology and changing customer expectations, new best practices have emerged to address these pain points. Looking ahead, these practices are evolving faster than many operators can keep up with.
In 2003, the reservation process for tours was often cumbersome and timeconsuming. Customers had to book their tours through travel
agencies that were still mainly paper-based or directly with the operator via phone or fax. Yes, the fax was a big thing back then. This method was prone to errors and often was just the start of a communication train.
Real-time communication is still a pipedream for many tour operators. We may have real-time booking on our websites, but how many tour operators can say they have real-time booking of
all the transport, accommodation, restaurant and activity partners we use? This can obviously lead to confusion and dissatisfaction when inevitable changes occur.
The customer of today is mobile addicted, and expectations are high. It is not the travel industry that leads on this, it is all the other sectors of society that serve people, from retail to takeaway food. It is online, it is simple, and it delivers in real-time.
The tour operator industry in 2003 lacked a strong digital presence. Most operators didn’t have websites and those who did often offered limited information. Online marketing was in its infancy, making it harder for operators to reach a wider audience and compete in the global travel marketplace, which was going through rapid growth.
I remember being astonished that all the booking confirmations were being sent out by post to the rafting operator I purchased.
Fast forward to today, and the tour operator industry has transformed significantly. The advent of technology and the digital revolution have brought forth new best practices that address many of the pain points from 20 years ago.
First, online booking systems, which started to surface around 2005, have streamlined the reservation process. I adopted SaaS reservation technology in 2007 and never looked back. The organizational change to the business allowed us to expand to several different countries rapidly. It allowed me to see
what was happening daily within the business, our operations, marketing and finance in realtime no matter where I was in the world. These reservation systems
allow customers to book tours at their convenience, offering realtime availability and automated confirmation. This has significantly reduced booking errors and
improved the overall customer experience. They also now allow retail partners to see real-time availability. Today, tour operators have the choice of a few hundred SaaS systems to help them manage their tour operations.
Communication has become more efficient and instantaneous, thanks to digital platforms. Tour operators can now provide real-time updates via emails, messenger apps, and social media, ensuring that customers, suppliers, and partners are always in the loop. If operators want to make sure they are addressing their customer’s needs in the best way, they need to be able to communicate via all these different methods in as close to real-time as possible. AI chatbots, implemented correctly, are a godsend for small operators as they will enable them to give a 24/7 presence to communicate with potential guests, which, if they are out guiding, is impossible.
AI can be used to personalize customer experiences, from offering recommendations based on past bookings to answering customer queries via chatbots. The strategic value of AI is not the productivity gain but the way it will enable tour operators to interact with customers at scale using the unique data that each individual tour operator possesses.
Peter Syme has enjoyed a storied career helping tour operators become more profitable. He is passionate about consulting and advising tour companies on sustainability, technology and helping them better connect with customers. He is a current partner at Tourpreneur.
An outstanding digital presence is no longer optional, it is a requirement to stay in the tour operator industry. Websites are not just informational; they are designed for engagement, complete with online booking capabilities, detailed tour information, customer reviews, and vibrant visuals. Online marketing, too, has become a key strategy, with operators leveraging SEO, social media, and email marketing to reach potential customers and stay engaged with past customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are widespread and very affordable or even free. These systems should be the jewel in your back-end business operations. Customers are expensive to acquire, and in an industry that sufferers greatly from irregular purchases, it is essential to manage the best possible communication across the whole customer journey from dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing and sharing. Technology will continue to play an even more pivotal role than it does today. The tour operating industry is going to be shaped by society-level changes in how guests use technology. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will streamline operations further. Today the ability to use it to increase productivity is huge. However, that is just stage one and one all tour operators should adopt quickly. It will make you more productive and save substantial costs and allow you to produce content and information at a scale that limited resources were preventing you from doing before.
Global travel numbers are expected to double by 2050, just 27 short years away, so generating demand for travel is not a challenge the industry faces. It is how we manage that massive demand in a way that serves the planet, the destinations and the people that live in those destinations. As more people become aware of the benefits and costs of tourism and its environmental impact, tough industry-changing decisions will be made. We are already seeing the start of this across many cities with new policies restricting tourism numbers. Tour operators will need to adopt more sustainable practices and be able to prove them.
The tour industry has come a long way from 2003 to 2023. However, many tour operators still lag in this digital-first world, which is understandable as very few entered the industry to be focused on technology. The challenges that once plagued operators may have technology solutions, but the world does not stand still. As an industry, we are still behind our customers in their use of technology. To thrive, we must do what we can to catch up.
As we look ahead, adopting even more innovative practices to enhance customer experiences and ensure sustainable operations is a must. The journey of the past two decades is a testament to the industry’s resilience and adaptability. Most, if not all, of the changes in the last few decades, have been around communication, booking, marketing etc. The next 20 years will see much more of that at hyper speed, but critically, the experience product that we all provide is actually going to change in ways that are equally exciting but challenging.
Today is the best possible time to be a tour operator of day or multi-day tours, and for many, both. However, digital awareness and ability are now a must-have if tour operators are going to deliver on the opportunity they have been presented with. EXP
Travel is back, and the in-destination experiences sector — what we at Arival call the Best Part of Travel — is rapidly expanding.
The experiences sector is projected to surpass pre-pandemic levels by 2024 , with some regions and individual operators already reaching that benchmark this year. Travelers are on the move, but the way they discover, plan and book travel has changed significantly: and that matters for operators and suppliers of tours, activities, attractions.
Here are a few of the top trends and issues we’ve been paying close attention to.
At the beginning of 2023, ChatGPT was just over a month old and already had over a million subscribers. Innovators throughout the experiences and travel tech space quickly recognized the potential in leveraging artificial intelligence for operators of tours, activities and attractions, and wasted no time getting started.
Myriad companies have already developed AI-enhanced tools built specifically to help operators with optimizing tour descriptions, booking automation, guest communication and even helping guests to write reviews.
The ability to book online is one of the top deciding factors for travelers when booking experiences, and mobile bookings now account for over two in five direct bookings for tours and activities and over half of direct bookings for attractions, according to Arival research (The 2023 Experiences Traveler, The Outlook for Operators).
In spite of the clear growth of online and mobile bookings among travelers, nearly half of all operators and three in five small operators do not have an online booking system.
Part of our mission at Arival is to help advance the business of experience operators, and we’ve developed — and are continuing to develop — resources and guides to help operators with that process. Our guide on How to Choose a Booking System is a good place to start.
As more travelers find, choose and book their in-destination experiences online, online channels — in particular online travel agencies (OTAs) —
“In spite of the clear growth of online and mobile bookings among travelers, nearly half of all operators and three in five small operators do not have an online booking system.”
Janelle Visser is a writer and editor with a passion for adventure. As Arival’s newest editor, Janelle brings a wide range of experience to her position including leading tours, operations, marketing and tour guide training.
will vastly outperform traditional offline booking methods. OTAs will nearly triple in global gross bookings and total market share by 2025, growing by more than 150% over the pre-pandemic peak of 2019, according to Arival’s Outlook for Travel Experiences 2019-2025 report.
Some OTAs are even making inroads into direct bookings , by developing booking or ticketing systems of their own, while others have taken the approach of acquiring specific booking systems, in either case expanding their revenue potential as online bookings continue to grow.
For operators of tours, activities and attractions, direct bookings are the holy grail. They mean less reliance on third party resellers, ownership of the customer, and higher earnings per booking without the amount lost to high commission rates. According to operators surveyed in Arival’s Technology and Connectivity report, “driving more direct online bookings” was overwhelmingly the top tech priority for large and small operators alike.
By far one of the top ways to and increase direct bookings is with Google Things to do.
Google Things to do allows travelers to find tickets and tours directly through Google’s Search and Maps, directly linking to suppliers and resellers of attraction tickets, and listing tours and activities that include searched-for points of interest in the experience. Experience operators can benefit from an “official site” badge and ensure their experience offerings are listed and optimized to take advantage of this powerful, free marketing channel.
A growing segment of younger travelers in particular are redefining the path of discovery by finding experiences through social media, and specifically short-form video.
Short-form video has exploded in popularity with the likes of TikTok, Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts. Travelers — particularly Gen-Z and Millennials — are increasingly using this to discover and book in-destination experiences.
While working with short-form content creators offers a new channel for savvy operators to reach the video-oriented younger traveler directly, development of the sector could also pave the way for a new kind of OTA for Gen-Z.
Even as the pandemic subsides in most regions, the labor shortage persists in tourism worldwide, and many experience operators are still struggling to recruit and retain tour guides. In Southern Europe alone, tour operators — along with hotels and restaurants — faced more than 400,000 vacancies in 2022 as travelers returned to the region. Tourism spending is projected to outpace employment levels for several years to come.
Although there are certainly things operators can do to find and keep quality guides , the problem reaches beyond guides to all levels of tourism organizations, as many have left the industry entirely. As 2023 progresses, organizations are using various strategies to win back workers after the tourism brain drain . Some skilled workers are starting to return, and new workers as well are entering the industry. Onward and upward!
Arival advances the business of creating amazing in-destination experiences. We provide events, insights, and community for creators and sellers of tours, activities, attractions and experiences. Join us at one of our upcoming events in Orlando (Oct. 9-12, 2023) or Berlin (Mar. 3-5, 2024) to learn more and make connections with peers and leaders in the Best Part of Travel. EXP
Anchor has quickly become a major player in the business operations and reservation technology space. The company was born out of the Hornblower Group, which is synonymous with iconic sightseeing cruises. We sat down with Nasi Peretz, president and chief technology officer, to get a better understanding how Anchor came to be and its vision for the future of rez tech.
Destination EXP: Most people in the travel business know of Hornblower but would be surprised to learn of your different businesses. Walk us through the company’s portfolio.
Nasi Peretz: So, the Hornblower group is a very diverse group of businesses. We’ll start with the concessions, which are federal contracts that we have and that’s the Statue of Liberty, Alcatraz Island and Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. All three of those are concessions that are top attractions in the U.S. and in Canada, with attendance in the millions. Then we have the sightseeing cruise business across 22 ports in the U.S. and with a fleet of over 254 vessels. And last but not least, is transportation which includes places like ferry transportation in New York which is over 6.5 million passengers across 38 vessels, ferries in Puerto Rico, plus we do some military transport.
The American Queen division of the organization offers overnight excursions on vessels that take you up to Alaska or up and down the Mississippi. Those are beautiful voyages ranging from 7 to 14 days.
We have a business in Australia called Journey Beyond, which we acquired during the COVID time frame. They are focused on bringing Australia’s unique and iconic experiences to life. That’s experiential tourism with helicopters and one of the most interesting trains that crosses Australia. Journey Beyond has done an incredible job at showing what hospitality it should really look like in the post-pandemic pickup.
Finally, during COVID, we found that it would be very opportunistic to pick up a couple of great acquisitions in the walking tour and food tour space, so we acquired Walks and Devour tours as a means to complement our other attractions.
DEX: You and a team came from Ticketmaster. How does that background influence how the company operates today?
NP: We came from Ticketmaster together to see if we could unify Hornblower’s initiative around ticketing to not be 12 disparate systems, but one single platform so that we’re really well-educated on our guests. Now we know that you went to the Statue of Liberty, but you also visited Alcatraz, have your anniversary on the 5th of May and celebrate it typically on the water. Interestingly enough, our business accelerated during COVID because we had the luxury of having the Statue of Liberty shut down federally, and Alcatraz was shut down by the state of California. We took advantage of those time frames and pulled the plug on the old platforms and inserted the Anchor platform.
DEX: Why did you decide against using your existing technology?
NP: We started from scratch mostly because we didn’t see any of the existing ticketing platforms
that we were using at the time across the business units satisfied 100% of their requirements. They all got there about the 90 percentile and that last 10% is really hard to close that gap.
So, we said let’s go here from the OPS folks on the ground from the call center, let’s go here from the salespeople and learn what the travel industry really needs around ticketing and then build it. There was an exploration phase that was about six months before we actually kicked off.
DEX: What do you think is the key differentiation between Anchor and other systems?
NP: The biggest change for us is that this is an OPS tool built by operators. The biggest differentiator feature wise is our superb reporting. We found that to be one of the biggest pain points across businesses that were looking for dashboarding and ad hoc reporting and then customized reporting. Previously, they had to hire people to do it; hire an engineer and have a fulltime data analyst running reports for them. We figured there shouldn’t be a need for that if you build the system properly.
We have over 700 toggles today on the platform that allow you to customize the system. Do you want an express checkout, do you want to ask
The biggest differentiator featurewise is our superb reporting. We found that to be one of the biggest pain points across businesses that were looking for dashboarding and ad hoc reporting.
for round trip? All these things are toggles in our platform. Competitors in the space that have over 20 years of hard coding or legacy code that’s been building up and it gets uglier and uglier over time.
DEX: Since every tour & activity business is unique, how do you accommodate for that?
NP: We wrap it into industry specific toggles, say the helicopter industry likes this, the maritime industry likes these 40 toggles and the walking tour industry needs these 30 toggles, then we’re not hard coding anymore, but instead we’re building a flexible platform.
DEX: When the platform rolled out there was initially some fear with operators who felt that their business competes against a Hornblower product in their destination. What do you say to them?
NP: We heard that concern upon launching at Arival in San Diego and we heard it loud and clear. Our data was already siloed, meaning anytime we onboarded a new client, it’s truly isolated and verified by ISO 27,001 compliance.
As of this year, Anchor is no longer just within Hornblower. It’s its own company, its own PNL, its own bank. That separation was made so that people know that not only are you contractually separated or obligated to respect the data, but also in terms of business, in terms of compliance or completely isolating clients and never at any point competing with Hornblower.
For example, Blue and Gold is probably one of the biggest competitors for Hornblower. The anecdote that people used to say that Blue & Gold executives used to tell their employees, If you see a Hornblower employee walking down the street, you cross the street and walk on the other side. Lo and behold, they’re now using the Anchor platform too.
DEX: In the early days of concert ticketing there were a number of different options and eventually through acquisition and the strength of the platform, Ticketmaster became the de facto choice if you were going to go see Taylor Swift. Is that inevitable for the technology sector for tours and experiences?
NP: I think we’ll find that the leaders will bubble up. And they fit in one hand and we can name those companies, but we know that these five companies who are doing well by operators and are serving guests well will be the last ones to be standing.
The complexities you mentioned - some need to have OTA plugs, they need to make sure that they’re connected to all the payment gateways. You need to be integrated with every payment gateway.
Businesses need to have on-site technology like turnstiles and hardware and box office integrations. Not many companies can sustain that diverse of technology integrations. I think it’ll boil down to who has the scale to support the enterprise customers.
DEX: Many small operators didn’t get into this business because they love technology or they enjoy going over Excel spreadsheets. What three things should operators be looking for in a system?
NP: Number one, make sure that your brand is front and center. If you use a commerce tool, make sure it’s not sending them away to a different site and that that e-mail confirmation you received is your brand everywhere around it and not someone else’s.
Number two, make sure that this company distributes your ticket inventory across the board, not to two providers like Viator and Get Your Guide and that’s it. Niche or regional providers might have quite a bit of volume that move inventory for you.
Third is dynamic pricing. I think we all know now that your pricing strategy is the way to survive and to not base it all on static pricing. That’s certainly how airlines and hotels have come out of COVID and become profitable. If it’s a beautiful sunny day, there’s no reason your price for that kayak tour should stay the same. EXP
“Not many companies can sustain that diverse of technology integrations. I think it’ll boil down to who has the scale to support the enterprise customers.”Nasi Peretz is a tech entrepreneur and business trailblazer with vast experience in the ticketing and travel industry. Nasi is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering.
