From Insight to Action: What Global Research Means for Operators in Tours & Activities
Summary
This 34-minute interactive panel at ITB Berlin brought together Charlotte Lamp Davies (moderator), Travis Pittman (co-founder & CEO, TourRadar), Nikki Hellyer (SVP Marketing & Growth, Tours by Locals), and Roisin O'Sullivan (Global MD, Walks & Devour) to examine what Amadeus's latest global research means for operators in tours and activities. The panel surfaced a fascinating push-pull dynamic: while direct-booking customers are seeking increasingly premium, special-access experiences with rising spend, OTAs are simultaneously pushing operators toward shorter, cheaper, more price-competitive products. Roisin noted Vatican pre-open tours sell out January for the entire year, illustrating the acute scarcity of elite supply in Europe where demand grows but ticket supply is finite.
Nikki reported Tours by Locals average booking value is up 15% year-on-year, driven by travelers upgrading from half-day to full-day and multi-day immersive formats. Travis highlighted that TourRadar's typical booking is an 8-day adventure at roughly €3,000, with US lead times extending to 115 days (up from 94 days two years ago) and Australian lead times growing 14% to 145 days — contradicting the widely-cited trend of shortening booking windows. On AI, TourRadar's chatbot now deflects 85% of customer inquiries (up from 50% with their prior HubSpot integration), trained on 15 years of conversation history.
Travis revealed TourRadar launched what he called an 'industry first' ChatGPT app the previous week, using an MCP server to expose live inventory, pricing, and user-generated content to LLMs. Both TourRadar and Tours by Locals reported LLM referral traffic plateaued in the four to five months prior to the panel, though conversion from LLM traffic is three to four times higher than from Google due to stronger purchase intent. Roisin raised reputation management as an underappreciated AI-era priority, pointing out that LLMs weight Trust Pilot and other review platforms equally regardless of review volume — ten reviews on Trust Pilot count the same as 10,000 on TripAdvisor.
On influencer marketing, both operators endorsed micro-influencers (2,000–20,000 followers) over macro-influencers, citing hunger to collaborate, large content output, and low cost. Seasonality data from Tours by Locals showed a clear shift from a single summer peak (pre-2019 pattern) to a double-hump curve with peaks in May–June and again in September–October, with November 2024 hitting unprecedented highs. The panel closed on three 'most underestimated' trends: the 55-plus solo female traveler (Travis, citing fastest-growing segment and a partnership with Journeywoman Canada), AI integration finding the right human-tech balance (Nikki), and pre-trip cancellations driven by book-now-pay-later and 24-hour cancellation policies (Roisin, framing it as the biggest untapped sales opportunity).
Key Takeaways
- •Booking windows are lengthening for premium multi-day products, not shortening: TourRadar's US customers now book 115 days in advance (up from 94 days two years ago) and Australian customers book 145 days out (up 14% in two years), directly contradicting the Amadeus research trend of shortened booking horizons. The distinction is that multi-day tours are the reason for the trip, so travelers lock in the tour first and buy flights after.
- •A supply-demand tension is fracturing the tours market into two distinct segments: direct-channel luxury customers who book Vatican pre-open tours selling out an entire year in January, versus OTA-driven customers being pushed toward shorter (2-hour vs. 3-hour) and cheaper tours. Operators must choose a lane rather than staying 'in the middle of the road' as Roisin put it.
- •Tours by Locals average booking value is up 15% year-on-year, explained by travelers extending from half-day to full-day or multi-day formats rather than pure price inflation. More than 50% of Tours by Locals customers book 60 or more days in advance, further contradicting the last-minute booking narrative.
- •TourRadar's AI chatbot deflects 85% of inbound customer inquiries, up from 50% with the previous HubSpot integration, after training the model on 15 years of conversation data, FAQs, and reviews. Travis called this one of the clearest efficiency wins from AI adoption.
- •TourRadar launched what Travis described as an industry first — a ChatGPT app published the prior week that uses an MCP server to connect LLMs directly to TourRadar's live inventory, pricing, and user-generated content, enabling travelers to query and browse tours in natural language inside ChatGPT.
- •LLM referral traffic to both TourRadar and Tours by Locals plateaued over the four to five months before the panel, with both platforms seeing Gemini traffic rise as ChatGPT traffic stagnated. However, conversion rates from LLM traffic are three to four times higher than from Google, indicating much stronger purchase intent from AI-assisted discovery.
- •Roisin flagged that LLMs currently treat review platform volume as irrelevant — ten Trust Pilot reviews carry the same weight as 10,000 TripAdvisor reviews in LLM training data. Walks & Devour addressed COVID-era negative reviews on Trust Pilot specifically because of this, making reputation management platform-agnostic a strategic priority.
Transcript
I hope you are sitting comfortably and I'm looking forward very much to moderate this next session. Um it's titled From Insight to Action: What Global Research Means for Operators in the Tours and Activities Space. And this is indeed our first of uh four panels today. And uh I'm very excited to have this specific group with me where we're going to go over some of the findings from the Amadeus research, but we're also going to dive into these people's businesses and talk a little bit about how th...
