Sightseeing passes provider, Go City, announced a few weeks ago that it had formed a partnership with Merlin Entertainments, a prominent player in branded entertainment destinations. This collaboration significantly adds to Go City’s popular London Pass, now celebrating its 25th year of operation, by adding access to seven popular attractions in London.
The newly included attractions are The Lastminute.com London Eye, Madame Tussauds London, Chessington World of Adventures Resort, Shrek’s Adventure! London, The London Dungeon, SEA LIFE London Aquarium, and LEGOLAND Windsor Resort.
These additions bring the total number of attractions available through Go City’s London passes to over 100.
With this being a significant partnership, we contacted Go City’s Chief Commercial Officer, Judy Gauthier, to get a better understanding of how these alliances are inked and how these strategies are influenced by growing market trends. Gauthier is responsible for the expansion of Go City’s pass products, while managing the company’s B2B sales arm, overseeing revenue growth for the global business development and reseller team. Gauthier also looks after the customer and partner satisfaction team and the future implementation of generative AI.
Q: What goes into signing a new partnership – like the one with Merlin Entertainments – and what’s a normal timeline before both parties come to an agreement?
The key element to any new partnership is understanding each other’s business objectives; developing trust and respect and determining how you can support one another’s goals. Once you’ve done that and have agreed to commercial terms, the timeline between signing an agreement and going live on our website and app can be as little as three weeks. Our partnership with Merlin for their London attractions took a little longer since we integrated with their ticketing platform. All in, it took about three months.
Q: What is the significance of this partnership and the overall London market to Go City as a platform?
The addition of these attractions ensures that we’re now able to feature all of London’s most popular paid attractions on the same pass. London is a world-class city and one of our most popular European markets. It’s satisfying that we can assure our customers that with a Go City London pass, you can truly “see it all.” The partnership has only been live for a few weeks, and we’ve already delivered tens of thousands of customers to these attractions.
Q: What interesting trends in tours and attractions will influence the Tours and Activities industry for the rest of the year?
We’ve seen an increase in customers searching for and visiting more immersive experiences, whether that’s in the truest ‘attractions’ sense such as Frameless in London or walking and cycling tours through the city. I don’t foresee this waning anytime soon, and we’ll continue to meet this demand through our product development efforts. Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to be a hot topic across industries, but we’ll start seeing the travel space adopt it to provide customers with support before, during and after their vacations. We’ll be dipping our toes into generative AI in the coming months and are looking forward to observing the response – stay tuned!
Q: What is the usual target demographic for these all-city passes?
Overall, our target audience is those who are looking to do and see more during their city breaks. Whether that is a solo traveller exploring a city for the first time or a family with kids looking to keep all tickets organised and affordable.
Q: What is a market that Go City would like to have a bigger presence in, and why?
We’d like to have a bigger presence in every market, but I believe Asia still offers the greatest potential for growth. There is simply so much volume to capture from the outbound FIT tourist, especially from China and South Korea. We’re also keen to expand our offerings in Eastern Europe, which is why we’re looking forward to adding a new city to our portfolio of destinations very soon.
Q: What’s a market that is underserved or overlooked by the tourism industry that Go City would like to tap into?
One of the areas that I’m personally passionate about is making travel accessible for everyone. Under-resourced communities are easy to overlook if they don’t have a positive impact on the balance sheet, but travel shouldn’t be reserved for only those with the financial means to do so. Go City works with thousands of attractions across the globe and is in a unique position to leverage this network to help more people have access to these inspiring experiences. Watch this space as we develop our efforts to have a deeper social impact within the industry.
