Potentially rather big news from ITB in Berlin last week in the tours and activities sector with the official launch of new metasearch service Pocketvillage.
In the intermediary layer of this sector, deals have been struck between those who own the consumer and generally a singe intermediary (eg. the recently announced deal between TripAdvisor and GetYourGuide).
No intermediaries have all the product, hence when these bigger deals are announced only a subset of end suppliers are involved (with the other suppliers in the same destination often locked out).
The reason for this is because intermediaries, historically at least, have contracted their product manually and only needed to work with a few suppliers in each destination to attain good global coverage.
The game has now moved to the next logical layer, with the launch of Pocketvillage. Formed by five young entrepreneurs from Germany, Pocketvillage is a metasearch for tours and activities.
The partner list reads like the who's who of the sector. Now a consumer can go to a single website and search all the silos that existed previously in one place.
Live on the site today are Intrepid Travel, GAP Adventures, responsibletravel.com, Urban Adventures, Tripbod, TourCMS (disclosure), GetYourGuide, Viator, AirBNB. Many more intermediary partners announced. Flights are provided by Kayak via a standard affiliate partnership.
Here is a clip of the launch at ITB:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaHJxdjVFOM
Linking up with all these websites has been a fair technical challenge. Here we talk to Jann Kleen (CTO) about OpenTravel standards in the sector:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiYF0eWS47I
The core question that Pocketvillage has to address is what is it going to do with all the ingredients it now has at its disposal.
Will it try to make a fruit salad (each ingredient retains its individual taste and can be recognized as separate by the consumer) or will it make a blended fruit smoothie?
Will be interesting to watch how they grapple with this core positioning decision.