Booking Holdings Buys Activities Distribution Startup FareHarbor - Skift - 0 views
-
Booking Holdings Buys Activities Distribution Startup FareHarbor – Skift
-
rnobl005 on 22 May 18Module 3: Networking (Rebecca Noble) I came across this story a few weeks ago and thought it made sense to post about this week as it has to do with e-commerce. Booking Holdings' recently purchased a start up called FareHarbor in what is speculated to be a $300 million deal. FareHarbor is a reservation system designed for tour operators to distribute and sell their products online. Booking Holdings used to be known as the Priceline Group - the company now owns Booking.com, Priceline, KAYAK, OpenTable, and a few other tourism related brands. The idea is that customers buying a hotel room in Paris who know they want to take a tour of the Eiffel Tower can package those two purchases together. This deal is evidence that travel corporations are making a big push to be full service agencies and e-commerce plays a big part in the ability to do so. The article cites a few other similar deals, specifically Expedia.com partnering with a restaurant reservation platform called, Reserve (reserve.com/about). It also talks about Airbnb's own tour offerings, which they call Experiences. There are many other companies similar to FareHarbor that allow tour operators to sell their products online, many of which specialize in a specific geographic region. As such we may see large corporations like Booking Holdings buy these smaller companies so they have tours in popular destinations worldwide.
-
-
Booking Holdings said Thursday that it will acquire U.S.-based, experiences booking-software provider FareHarbor.
-
The FareHarbor acquisition will help provide content to expand Booking.com‘s upselling of consumers on tours after the consumers have already bought another product from the online travel giant.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
The price tag could be relatively “hefty” — as in more than $300 million — speculated one source who is knowledgeable about the tours and activities sector.
-
Both deals — FareHarbor and Reserve — accentuate an accelerated focus on in-destination activities, whether they are visiting a hot restaurant or tours and attractions.
-
Airbnb officials recently said that they plan on being in 1,000 cities with their Experiences product by the end of this year, and they project profitability in Experiences by 2019.
-
In addition to offering local places to stay, Airbnb now offers tours, or what they call "Experiences." I've heard mixed reviews about this service. They spin it as touring the city you are in with a local guide. But that guide could legitimately mean any person off the street. Guides that lead tours and excursions through legitimate tour operating companies have way more experience and depending on the city they are in have to pass some sort of certification examine to lead tours.
-
-
The purchase denies TripAdvisor’s Experiences unit a chance to enhance its relationship with suppliers and to make the end-to-end technology experience more seamless between suppliers and consumers.
-
Notable players in B2B tech include Bokun, Musement, Once There, Palisis, Redeam, Regiondo, Rezdy, Rezgo, Tiqets, TourRadar, TrekkSoft, Trip.me, and Veltra.
-
This are all companies similar to FareHarbor that support tour operators in various parts of the world. The majority of Rezdy's tour inventory, for example, is in the Asia Pacific region. With so many individual companies offering similar services I can see large companies making a move towards purchasing smaller companies to expand their reach geographically.
-
-
FareHarbor debuted a predictive pricing platform powered by artificial intelligence to help operators select optimal rates for activities.
-
Having worked for a tour operator I can see why this is a super lucrative tool. Tour pricing adjusts seasonally based on when the destination is in peak season. Having AI tell you when to adjust the price on your product is a vast improvement operationally because you don't have to dedicate the time to monitoring sometimes thousands of tours by hand.
-