 Trying your hand at carpet weaving in an ancient Moroccan shop, taking a cop-away reclass in Rio, or a day spent fishing in a Canadian village, local experiences make your trip unforgettable, and your Instagram subscribers envious. But from a business perspective, well, travel experiences are one of the least digitized segments of the travel industry. With tours, attractions, and experiences, a $170 billion market, only 13% of those bookings happen online in real time. What's going on? This is Viator's website in 2002, a young travel agency back then that was the first to make tours and attractions available for booking online. It was a market leader from 2000 to the early 2010s, and during these years, something strange happened, or rather, didn't happen. Viator hadn't faced any formidable competition across the entire decade, a rare occurrence in the world of digital tech. Some investors were questioning us about whether there really was a marketplace, shared Rod Cuthbert, Viator founder. Leisure travelers visit their destinations for new experiences. That's the whole point of travel. But the competition on the digital booking side of tours and attractions wasn't nearly as intense as on the flight and hotels market, where Expedia, Booking.com, Travelocity, Priceline, and other travel tech pioneers were fighting for customers. While Viator was actively growing, it couldn't manage to reshape the structure of the industry. Most people kept booking tours offline, from their travel agents, at the physical booths at destinations, at museum kiosks, and tour operators used pen and paper to run their businesses. Some travel experts attribute the lack of digitization in tours and attractions to the fact that the industry is very fragmented. Here we're talking about very local fragmented companies all over the world and not digitalized at all. There are small local tour operators. There are destination management companies, large operators like TUI, and government managed museums that don't care about innovation as much. It's difficult to centralize such a diverse market. But there's an additional reason why travel experiences haven't massively gone online. It's grounded in travel behavior, in the way we book trips. If you're an ordinary traveler, you have to do some homework before clicking the reserve button. You research destinations, choose flights and dates, compare prices, explore accommodation options, subscribe to price drop alerts. By the time you book a flight and lodging, you'll make about 120 to 160 visits to travel websites. And this all gets exhausting. In professional jargon, it's called travel-planning fatigue. Will you have enough energy to research and book local tours on top of a flight and accommodations? Usually not. 85% of leisure travelers decide which experiences and activities to have only after arriving at their destinations, spontaneously. And Viator in 2000s just couldn't work with that 85%. They didn't have computers with them on their trips. Even though Viator managed to take the lead as a tour and attractions online platform, it was a bit ahead of its time. With the mobile era, things have changed. In 2011, Viator launched its first mobile apps on iPhones and iPads. But by then and going forward, they did have competitors. Get Your Guide, a Berlin-based startup aimed at connecting local amateur guides with tourists, launched in 2008. And two years after Viator, in 2013, they also rolled out apps for iOS and Android. In 2012, Peak, an American tour booking and planning startup, emerged and soon launched their app. Then finally, in 2014, Hong Kong-based tour startup, Kluk, launched its own mobile app that supported instant bookings. These startups defined the market share for years. Kluk dominates the Asian market. Get Your Guide is popular in Europe. Peak is the leader in the US. In a mere three years, the digital segment of the tours and attractions industry went mobile, catering to the need for instant booking. But up until 2012, the tours and attractions digital market remained on the outskirts of the travel industry, ruled by startups, invisible to most travelers, and of little interest to industry giants. In 2012, Expedia, today the second largest online travel agency, launched a small division called Local Expert. It was aimed at strengthening their already dominant suite of packaged travel options that include accommodation, flights and car rentals. This step towards capturing the untapped market was the first in the chain of initiatives and, more importantly, acquisitions that paved the way for the leading brands. In 2014, TripAdvisor acquired Viator. They started selling tours from Viator inventory through the TripAdvisor app. And since everybody was already there to get reviews, it was easy to upsell tours right from the same interface. This move made TripAdvisor the overall leader in the TNA market, even though many bookings still happened directly through Viator. In July 2016, Booking.com, the largest player in travel, launched its experience of service on mobile devices. And a few months later, Airbnb, a vacation rental service and accommodation market disruptor, did the same. From now on, the term experiences that invited travelers to dive into local culture and get authentic overtook the old tours and attractions designation. But there was a final obstacle that kept big players from grabbing the market. And it was the way the tour operators worked. Imagine you're selling a tour that caters to multiple travelers, like sightseeing by bus or a walking tour across a city center. Making your tour pay off requires that a substantial group of travelers sign up for it. Normally, you would contract some larger tour operator or a destination management company to secure a group large enough. With online last minute bookings, it gets harder to fill up the roster of tourists, especially if you work with a single online platform. That's why online tour-based operators use tour management software that allows them to ditch pen and paper, connecting instead to multiple tour platforms and selling the same tours simultaneously across different marketplaces. In 2018, Booking.com bought Fair Harbor, a technology company that helps tour operators manage their offers. Fair Harbor provides a tour booking engine, a management portal, and connections with the main tour booking platforms, including TripAdvisor, Expedia, Get Your Guide, Booking.com itself, and others. Basically, the application can work as a channel manager to be present on multiple platforms at once. A day after Booking.com bought Fair Harbor, TripAdvisor bought a similar company, Boken. These two acquisitions have heated the further market consolidation when large travel brands sweep the market from both the customers and supplier sides. The 20-year long race towards digitizing the experiences market surprisingly hasn't changed things much. Large players step in and everything is available in mobile to accommodate for spontaneous reservations. But most tour operators still use phone calls. There are salesmen walking across the beaches with printed one-pagers to suggest excursions and long lines crowd museum ticket offices. Booking Tours Online is still a geeky way of travel enjoyed by about 13% of all tourists. Eventually, tours and attractions brands aren't competing as much with each other as they do with offline. Will things change soon? It seems we're still waiting for a disruptor to enter the space to resolve fragmentation and make the online channel attractive both to travelers and operators, similar to what Booking.com did with hotels. Will Airbnb change things, selling tours lasting several days that they call adventures? We'll see.