As an industry pacemaker, Palisis pays close attention to consumer behaviour, especially when it comes to how tours and activities are booked. One significant change we have all witnessed in the last 20 years is how people consume films. Instead of planning out an evening to see a movie at the cinema, including dinner, consumers choose to stream a film at home on-demand, which is a major shift in spontaneity. The same shift to spontaneous behaviour has been seen in how people book and consume local experiences.
To explore on-demand experiences further, we had a conversation with Alex Bainbridge. Let’s set the stage; Palisis acquired TourCMS in 2015, which Alex Bainbridge founded. Like many entrepreneurs in the tours and activities sector, he was originally a tour operator; he started a UK based multi-day tour operation in 1999. This first-hand knowledge of the pain points with reservations and website content management motivated him to begin to build a technology solution that he then developed from 2003, following a short stint in the hotel industry. This solution, TourCMS, massively began to scale up from 2008 onwards.
This conversation was about how things are evolving within the tours and activities sector, or as Alex calls it, the sightseeing and experiences sector—a wider definition which incorporates leisure and hospitality and has less emphasis on tourists. He is known for being ahead of his time, which proved itself with the development of TourCMS and now Autoura, a digital experience platform that powers sightseeing and experiences via foot, bikes, electric scooters and autonomous vehicles.
Next, we spent time talking about digital tour operating, offering personalised experiences that are generated ad-hoc at the point of the traveller’s request. Which then led to summarising how mobile transformed everything. Prior to smartphones, availability didn’t matter as much because the reservation occurred weeks in advance, which naturally allowed things to sort themselves out by the operator adding more availability or making changes.
Evolution of booking experiences and correlated expectations
- Pre smartphone: days or weeks to respond to, and arrange the incoming bookings
- 2008—2010: expectation for experiencing the next day (e.g. book the night before)
- 2013—2015: discussion of options over breakfast for the same day (e.g. book same day)
- Current: travel to an attraction/ experience and book on your way
The introduction to mobile searching and purchasing created the insatiable desire for live availability across industries, and travel is no exception. This is what motivated online travel agents to connect to reservation system technology, creating the connected industry we have today.
We are now in a place where consumers expect to be able to book and go on-demand. To be able to start at any point in time or at any location without any preplanning is the mindset which a large population of travellers operate from.
Diving further into on-demand, we look at a few star examples.
Everyday on-demand experiences:
- Uber Ride, you specify location A and location B vs taking a certain bus route that you have no influence over. The product is defined at the point of retail from business rules in the Uber platform rather than pre-generated like tour itineraries are today
- Netflix, you think to yourself and/or partner, I’d like to start a movie at home about space travel vs looking up to see which movies are playing at certain times at the cinema.
Now, overlay travel experiences with these everyday experiences to get a glimpse of what the next generation will look like for our sector. Anyone will be able to start an experience from any location without timestamps or cutoffs. Think of an on-demand audio tour that you can join at any part of the experience or request an autonomous vehicle to take you to your next adventure. The common threads here require travellers to do less planning and have more spontaneity in-destination.
What’s next? It’s the process of reducing booking timelines to zero or the concept of going from booking to doing. And as a result, this generates spontaneous demand. Palisis is our industry’s pacemaker, ensuring travel technology keeps evolving as consumer behaviours continue to change. We are on this.
About Palisis
Palisis is the leading technology provider of comprehensive sales and operations solutions for tourism and transportation businesses around the world. Due to its rich experience, specific market knowledge, consumer centricity and process orientation, Palisis is the industry technology pacemaker. As a full-service provider, Palisis supports your business processes and operational procedures with the most efficient and reliable solution available. Today, Palisis solutions are successfully and effectively used by customers in over 100 countries around the globe.