There are some who will inevitably disagree, but 2018 was certainly the breakout year for tours and activities.

It was a year that saw the reservation system landscape suddenly become of huge interest to some of the biggest players in the online travel world that, until then, had either been in the early stages of their efforts with attractions or had not really started at all.

The acquisitions of Bokun by TripAdvisor and FareHarbor by Booking Holdings captured the headlines for many reasons.

They were, amongst some other factors, a perfect illustration that the sector was living up to its mostly self-proclaimed billing as probably being the hottest one in the industry.

But whenever something - especially when it's business-related - gets hot there is always going to be a cooling down period.

That is probably where tours and activities finds itself as we enter the last few months of 2019.

This is not, by any means, to say that the sector is as unimportant or no less fascinating as was previously suggested - on the contrary, in fact.

It's just that this year has, for many, been one of capitalizing on what came the year before and a sharpening of strategies.

Important moves

Suppliers often like to say that they have the (or some) power - but inevitably the main players in the ecosystem that connects operators with the end users have become the distributors.

And these distributors, in their various shapes and sizes, are dominating the way the sector is evolving, even its somewhat lukewarm state this year (to continue the temperature metaphor).

The sector's biggest moments so far this year have involved funding rounds (with some hefty ones still to come) and consolidation of product.

Berlin-based GetYourGuide said it wanted to add new markets and broaden its inventory thanks to a huge new - and record-breaking for the sector - funding round of $484 million, announced in May.

The Series E round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund.

The funding "allows us to take a much longer-term view on the travel experiences space. ... Now we can have a 10- to 20-year time horizon,” GetYourGuide co-founder and CEO Johannes Reck said at the time.

It perhaps also gives GetYourGuide some additional steam to compete with the likes of Booking.com and TripAdvisor, as well as its nearest activity-only rival Klook, which added a further $225 million to its Series D round, bringing the total raised in this round to $425 million.

The D+ funding was led by - you guessed it - SoftBank Vision Fund.

One of last year's other significant new developments in the sector came in the guise of Google, which launched what was essentially a test bed for tours and activities with Touring Bird.

An illustration of the success of that product (it had grown to 200 markets within a year) and the importance of tours and activities to the bigger Google Travel ecosystem came just this week: Google closed the Touring Bird app as the search giant explores how it can do more in the activities space. 

The sector evolves and grows - and the major players in tours and activities are still making important (if not groundbreaking) moves from both financial and strategic perspectives.

The important element is that they now do so from a position of acceptability from the wider industry. Tours and activities is part of the mainstream and no longer the outlier.

* Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the Touring Bird app is part of Google Maps and search.