Simplifying Booking Friction for Tour Operators on the Digitization Gap

25.08.2023 - 14:11 / skift.com / Selene Brophy

Tour operators need to make serious inroads into tech adoption to capitalize on the forced digital offshoots created by the pandemic. A Skift 2023 Megatrend forecasts that the global tours and activities software market is set to skyrocket, with a projected value of $1.2 billion by 2026. 

And while the figure seems staggering, it’s reflective of the hard truth that some 50 percent of operators don’t have a digital booking system and will need to move quickly to make the most of recovering markets. Hence, the friction, as traveler see saw between the old and the new. 

The estimated $1.6 trillion air, hotel and cruise markets are sold via connected, electronic systems that work seamlessly together.

The experience economy’s lack of digitization and fragmentation amplifies the pitfalls of high operational costs due to manual processes. On one end of the spectrum, the customer experience could be better with gate-readable tickets as an example. And at the other end, companies cannot manage yield effectively while facing a vast fraud risk.

Reduced booking friction is a pivotal place to stop consumers from yoyoing online to offline and everything else paper-based in between while allowing operators to grow and scale efficiently.

In a perfect world, tour operators (even those without a programing interface, so-called API, or digital presence) have access to a digital ticketing system that offers seamless connectivity to all third parties that resell tickets, with the added benefit of bookings and gate-readable barcodes, while allowing them to manage distribution through live rates and inventory.

Enter Redeam, A go-between system to connect offline tour operators with online resellers with it’s one-size-fits-almost-all approach. . 

According to Jon French, who oversees business development for Redeam, the company has completed over 250 integrations, including some of the world’s most iconic theme parks, as well as the “smaller two-kayak guy working from their garage and only using excel and a manual booking system.”

Redeam customer Captain Book is an in-destination business-to-business marketplace for travel experiences that recently raised €250,000 ($302,435) on SeedBlink. The company found Redeam to be the perfect software optimization solution.

Small operators are the company’s niche and they currently have a base of 300 customers selling 540 products. However, they also just acquired iOutdoor Adventures, one of the largest fishing tours in the U.S. 

Redeam lets them connect their operators to large online travel agencies like GetYourGuide, Project Expedition, Viator, and Civitatis, said founder Jerome Bajou.

Bajou, who oversaw the integration, said there was no value in building their own system.

“We