The tours and activities space has been watched closely in the last few years, tapped as a promising revenue generator for the travel industry. Phocuswright’s Tours & Activities Come of Age: The Global Travel Activities 2014-2020 Report had pegged the tours and activities marketplace to reach $183 billion by 2020.
A clear sign of the growing importance and impact of the segment is investors’ sentiments – Hong Kong-based Klook led the way, pulling in some $200 million in new capital for global expansion.
With more interest in this segment, more data and information such as which niches within tours are showing more prominence among travellers, has become available.
Walk Japan, “pioneers of off-the-beaten-path walking tours” in Japan, saw a growth 25% last year. For a company that has been around for 27 years, that size of growth is significant.
Walk Japan has also reported a rise in ethical and sustainable forms of travel. “Walk Japan’s Community Project has been increasingly of interest. The project, started in 2007 in Kunisaki, is centred on the revival of plantation forests; the re-establishment of mixed forests and natural environments; and the rehabilitation of long disused fields. Around this project, Walk Japan has created three tours where participants get to see the project in action.
TrekkSoft: we’ve seen the [tours & activities] industry generate more online bookings than ever before.
TrekkSoft, a solutions provider of booking and channel management software for tour and activity providers, recently published a travel trends report based on its own surveys and booking data.
Some top trends from the report:
- Walking tours are still one of the leading experiences for anyone visiting a new location.
- Ecological tours are the most popular tours. These are usually rare experiences that educate and share inside information on the area, and how to protect it for the future. Tours that use proceeds to fund ecological projects are chosen above alternatives without a cause.
- Bespoke, once-in-a-lifetime, experiences are becoming more common requests especially from millennials.
- Adrenaline pumping activities continue to grow. Destinations incuding Area 47 in Austria, Queenstown in New Zealand and Interlaken, Switzerland are some popular destinaitons for action packed activities.
- Monday is the most popular day for people to book trips while Saturdays are the least busy days for bookings.
- In 2018, the proportion of direct website bookings fell to 66.7% while marketplace bookings increased to 9.1%. Bookings made through agents, affiliates and local tourist offices increased from 17.5% to 24.3%.
- Mobile bookings increased from 51.5% to 56.7% between 2017 and 2018. In 2018, revenue from desktop bookings fell from 73.2% to 65.8%.
Featured photo credit: Walk Japan
