What I heard at Arival Berlin and Daily Tours, Activities and Attractions News – March 5, 2019

What is the Tourpreneur Daily Briefing.

Shane sifts through global industry websites, newspapers, magazines, and a variety of other resources to find the “must read” articles for each day, identify relevant job opportunities, and highlight new trends to watch.

He scours the news and curates the best material so you never miss out on the major news in our industry.

OTA/Global/Tech

Tour & Activity sector veterans launch content management solution called Magpie.  The new company founded by veteran San Francisco based Tourpreneur Christian Watts is backed by Viator founder Rod Cuthbert is a content management system for the experiences sector.

Watts said Magpie brings the key elements of Product Information Management (PIM) – manage content, enrich it, distribute it efficiently – to the experiences sector.

“Our industry’s distribution channel is facing a content crunch: resellers are racing to load tens of thousands of new products, while operators are struggling to meet the specific needs of each new distribution partner. 

We will be interviewing Christian and Rod tomorrow for the podcast to find out more.

It has been a busy news day for Trip.com (Ctrip.)

First up – they announce a partnership with TUI.  Under the deal, Ctrip’s 200 million monthly users will have direct access to the tours and activities offered by TUI’s subsidiary Musement, the Milan-based technology start-up recently acquired by TUI.
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Plus they also announced a new partnership with Rezdy, a SaaS company based in Australia. Trip.com facilitates travel for APAC region customers and such partnership will allow Chinese travelers to gain access to around 80,000 new travel products across the world. 

 
Wow. Palisis launch an online booking solution for free. ‘Clients will not only receive a free tool to manage their operations, but we also want to connect them to one of the worlds most extensive distribution networks to create more revenue for their business.​’ they announced on Linkedin. More on this soon.

Hope to bring you more on this soon!

What I heard at the first day of Arival Berlin.

The biggest cheer of the day from the crowd came when an audience member told the OTAs on the stage that tourpreneurs want their brand to be shown on their listings.
 
Some eyes were raised when Tiqets chief Luuc Elzinga playfully told the audience that ‘if you can do without an OTA then don’t work with one.’ I hope to interview Luuc this week for the podcast and will invite him to enlarge on this.
 
Andrew Aley of Tripadvisor Experiences revealed that he has more conversations with tourpreneurs about how to increase their bookings than the level of their commission rates.  He also went on to say that nobody can buy their way to the top of the rankings, positions are earned by the quality of reviews in their natural search results.
 
In the Fareharbor demo lab, we were told that Fareharbor is not sharing any data with their new owners Booking.com.
 
Over 700 attendees at Arival – from 58 countries. 70% are tourpreneurs, 24% are tech and 6% media/marketing.  Impressive for their inaugural event.
 
More than 50 distributions companies are attending Arival.
 
Sadly I can’t bring you the really juicy stuff as I am not going to the Arival late night party, early to bed for me as I host a panel in front of 700 travel professionals tomorrow. 

People News and Career Opportunities

Career Opportunities – Jobs in Tours

Send us your tour and activities related jobs and we will publish them in the daily brief.

R

Devour Food Tours are hiring for the following roles:
– Lisbon Food Tour Operations Manager & Guide
– Paris Food Tour Operations Manager & Guide
– Rome Food Tour Operations Manager & Guide
 
Rezdy is looking for a Growth Marketing Specialist in their Sydney location.
 
Walks are seeking a Director of Tour Operations– US based in Austin, TX.

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