Viator, the tours-and-activities company purchased by TripAdvisor for $200 million last year, has launched an open-listing platform.
Before the acquisition, Viator CEO Barrie Seidenberg had already set in motion the development of this do-it-yourself extranet, called Marketplace.
The open platform lets tour, activity, and attraction suppliers self-load their products onto Viator. In a new move, suppliers can create and edit their product listings on their own. (There's still no upfront cost.)
The new extranet also makes it easier for multi-day tour suppliers to load their inventory, such as a 9-day tour of China. Until now, Viator had generally stuck with products of less than a day in length.
Since the start of the year, the 300-employee company has added 20 sales people to its staff to be ready to get the word out about the open marketplace.
CEO interview
Seidenberg talked with Tnooz about the company's latest efforts:
"We view this marketplace effort as complimentary to our curation strategy. We’re not turning away from curation. Consumers like it when we handpick some suppliers and do a lot of merchandising, such as inclusion in our Viator Top Picks.
Having said that, we know customers want to explore lots of long-tail activities and places we haven’t previously serviced. So the self-serve model makes it possible as a practical matter to scale up and offer more comprehensive selection faster than we could otherwise.
Today we're at more than 20,000 products, depending on how you count them -- there's a bit of a numbers game in the industry. We plan to scale that up dramatically. "
We noticed that Marketplace makes it much easier to upload multi-day tours. Can you talk about that?
"We've always offered a limited amount of multi-day tours, mainly for places you can't effectively visit in a daytrip and that have iconic attractions, such as Ayers Rock in Australia, which is too remote for a daytrip from Sydney.
We'll continue to add short-duration guided stays, which is a small and interesting category for us. But we don’t have plans at this point to go into 14-day safaris, etc."
Will the shift from curation to an open platform change the nature of the product on offer, as a whole?
"The biggest shift is expanding into new destinations beyond the 1,500 or so we have good overage in. In our beta period we've already seen a diverse range of new destinations being added onto the platform that we might not have pursued before, like Atlantic City, Halong Bay, and Windsor.
I'm not expecting a massive shift into new products or categories. We may see more niche products, unique and rare categories."
How to do quality control when you're not doing curation?
"Our account managers continue to review suppliers and retain control of what gets published. We’ll be looking at the quality of content and ensuring, for example, that a supplier has the appropriate business licenses.
If a company is also listed in TripAdvisor, even if we can’t vet their product specifically, we’ll see trip reviews, which will be another way we can qualify them."
How are your margins? TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer recently told investors that, in tours-and-activities as a category, "the margins are terrific."
"Our margins have been consistently improving over the ten years I have been at Viator. Margins vary, though. Different destinations and different product categories will have different margin profiles.
But as an overall category, I don’t see that the dynamics around margins will be changing in the short to medium terms.
Some players will be affected though. As suppliers worldwide start putting a full array of tours and activities products online, especially via mobile channels, that increases transparency.
For some intermediary channels, like say a hotel concierge, who have been charging a hefty margin as resellers, they will start seeing pressure on the margins thanks to us."
How has the integration with TripAdvisor been going?
"It's been going well. We've had fantastic growth this year. We have 10 million monthly visitors on desktop and mobile today, and we expect that to rise.
We haven’t seen any demographic change in the type of customer booking with us as a result of the TripAdvisor exposure.
But I will say that TripAdvisor is a very global company and that one thing I expect we’ll see more and more of is growth in non-English-speaking markets, thanks to TripAdvisor's vast geographic reach.
Another trend I see is lots of last-minute purchases, which is perfect. TripAdvisor's mobile presence is quite strong, with 190 million app downloads to date.
We’ve seen that as very beneficial for Viator, because it's no secret that a huge percentage of tours-and-activities purchases are made in-destination within days, if not hours.
Our new API helps with that with last minute with live inventory management and real-time bookings.
As we develop tools and educate suppliers on merchandising and pricing for that short time window, there's a huge opportunity. Developing mobile-scannable tickets is something we're very much working on."
Do suppliers ever complain about competiting for ownership of a booking with in-destination visitors using Viator or TripAdvisor's mobile offering?
"Pricing in this market is likely to evolve as consumers increasingly make bookings through mobile.
I will say we have not heard suppliers saying 'I don’t want you to sell in-destination because those customers are mine.'
You have to understand that not all suppliers can effectively market to in-destination potential customers, while they may get walk-in customers.
We offer a way for their product to be discovered, such as through our "What’s near me" tools and TripAdvisor's pages on, what are different ways to experience, say, Alcatraz or the Eiffel Tower.
For suppliers that don't have sophisticated Internet marketing, we help. It's even more complicated to do marketing in a mobile environment for customers coming from all of the world, so we offer a channel for them.
We also offer expanded opportunities with TripAdvisor like a new “Book Now” feature on dedicated attraction listings."
Viator's supplier marketplace, official site
Q&A with Barrie Seidenberg from November 2014
TripAdvisor’s Kaufer defends Instant Booking, teases an itinerary-builder tool