There's been an entire shift in our playbook now.
Quote from Jen O'Twomney, vice president of Expedia Local Expert, in an article on PhocusWire this week.
Expedia gets super-serious about activities, plots five-fold booking jump
That a company the size of Expedia Group admits that it has to rethink how it targets and assists consumers, shows the scale of change that has come about since the introduction of mobile technology.
The arrival of smartphones into the consumer market around a decade ago (the first iPhone was launched in 2007) ignited the early stages of a wholesale change in how travel brands think about how they interact with their customers.
Executives couldn't miss "Year Of The Mobile"-type sessions at conferences (rather amusingly, year after year until at least 2012), giving them the chance to reconsider almost every aspect of their digital strategy.
Most brands launched some kind of smartphone app to at least illustrate that they were aware of the fact that travelers were keen to access information, their bookings, or booking tools, on-the-go.
Yet perhaps it is only as data roaming fees have finally come tumbling down around the world (ironically, as travelers have further buried their heads more in their devices, rather than looking around them at the very places they're visiting) that strategy is being married to a genuine customer need and opportunity.
Expedia's opportunity with its in-destination services is the same for everyone else - create an environment whereby the brand that is hosting the traveler (hotel), or got the traveler there (airline) can be the friend on-the-ground.
Tours and activities is the obvious product area where such interaction can shine.
But airlines and hotels, plus the brands that do it all, online travel agencies, are still seemingly slow to want to be that helping hand in a destination, despite having the mechanism to do it.
Travel brands are now at an important part in their history - do they want to remain as solely the provider of a bed or a aircraft seat, or just facilitating the booking, or do they want to become brands that think about the entire "trip" on behalf of their customers.
This is both a mindset and strategic issue, something that requires a rewriting of the "playbook".
No easy task (any change can be difficult), but it is perhaps a vital one for travel brands to not just consider but implement.