Viator, GetYourGuide and Klook Push for Day-tour Dominance

27.12.2023 - 14:13 / skift.com / Matt Goldberg

How will the largest of the tours-and-activities marketplaces — Viator, GetYourGuide, and Klook — grow and compete in 2024? 

U.S.-headquartered Viator, Germany-based GetYourGuide, and Asia’s Klook all made significant moves over the past year. Their biggest competitor was offline bookings, given that only 30% of the $1 trillion tours and activities market is sold online, according to Skift Research.

As these companies’ valuations and bookings soar, Skift notes their 2023 milestones below and also spotlight key developments we’re eyeing for 2024.

Tripadvisor has said its experiences brand, Viator, will hit full-year profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis in 2024. 

Viator’s growth in experience sales and Tripadvisor’s AI-based experiences and dining planner have helped. CEO Matt Goldberg said Viator saw a 41% increase in revenue between June and September, accounting for nearly half of Tripadvisor’s quarterly revenue.

Tripadvisor’s AI-based trip planner Trips, launched in July, also led to higher customer engagement and revenue. Goldberg said that users who create “Trips itineraries” generate three times more revenue than those who don’t. 

Tripadvisor and Viator offer 300,000 bookable experiences in 250,000 destinations between the two brands. Most of these experiences come from Viator. Ongoing investments in marketing to acquire new customers had weighed on profits – adjusted EBITDA was negative $15 million across the first three quarters of 2023.

Viator’s listings-management program, Accelerate, boosted Tripadvisor’s third-quarter results. The company expects to see more of this in 2024 partly because it has since upgraded the Accelerate tool, with changes made widespread in November 2023.

Sarah Dines, Viator’s chief commercial officer, said the Accelerate program has “played a critical role” in the record-breaking growth seen in the third quarter and the $3 billion in gross bookings generated on the platform this year.

One of the main differences between the new Accelerate and its first version is a change from a visibility score — which some operators called confusing — to an advertising impressions metric. 

If an operator pays a 26% commission, it might generate 60 ad impressions a month. But if it paid a 31% commission, it might generate 180 ad impressions a month.  

Dines said that enlisted operators had found the updated Accelerate interface more helpful. “This reimagined version delivers what operators asked us for: a clearer view of what you get for what you give,” said Dines. “We’ll show you the ad impressions you can expect to receive for the commission you’re offering. And how that compares to competitors.”

“The majority of [revenue] has gone back to operators,” she said, “with the