Less is much more: The power of real curation in tours and activities

When I joined Alberto Gutiérrez to scale-up Civitatis more than eight years ago, I initially questioned our limited offerings. Wouldn't more options accelerate growth? However, I quickly discovered the opposite. Our curated marketplace was one of our key differentiators against competitors focused mainly on quantity.

Their approach, prioritizing supplier competition, overlooked a critical factor: user experience. Unlike commodities like transportation, comparing tour options is time-consuming, uneasy and often overwhelming for customers. Travelers planning a visit to the Vatican in Rome or the Alhambra in Spain shouldn't have to wade through dozens of options as it happens in many online travel agencies. 

As Barry Schwartz highlights in the book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, “the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.” While increased options can lead to objectively better results, it can also cause anxiety, indecision and dissatisfaction. As Schwartz suggests, “choose less and feel better.”

That is why Civitatis has decided to curate its portfolio since 2008, partnering directly with local operators to ensure the highest quality and selecting the best tours based on price, millions of verified reviews, availability and crucially, language options to cater our key markets: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French. This provides a simple user experience, allowing customers to book with ease and focus on simply enjoying their trip.  

A good example is Rome, a top destination for us, where we provide 90 carefully chosen activities in contrast to other OTAs that offer a much larger selection exceeding 500, many of them covering the same points of interest. The reality is that when you go to Rome, your one big holiday for the year, you don’t crave hundreds of Colosseum tour options. You seek the single best provider, offering the tour in your native language and at the right frequency, availability and price. This ensures you get the optimal experience for your once-in-a-lifetime visit. 

Choosing the right tour operators can be tough, but the positive results show our approach is right. Fewer, carefully chosen options in each destination, combined with diverse and efficient web traffic, drive a high conversion rate, allowing us to serve 10 million travelers in 2023, a number set to increase by 50% this year. This has resulted in true and sustainable profitability since our inception 16 years ago. 

Curation is a continuous process. It's dynamic, requiring constant research, analysis and comparison of tours, operators and attractions across our 4,000 destinations by our team of local experts, not bots or artificial intelligence, ensuring relevance and meaningfulness.  

Our supply partners understand that offering the best value proposition is key to secure a listing on Civitatis, granting them access to a massive and growing market, particularly within the leading Spanish-speaking world. This vast market that we lead boasts over 650 million native speakers, including 60 million in the United States alone, and encompasses thriving Latin American economies experiencing a surge in outbound travel. 

Most importantly, curation based on these standards drives brand loyalty and satisfied customers who trust our selection and best-in-class quality more and more frequently, not just for major trips but also for discovering their surroundings with local experiences. 

Finally, some might argue that curation restricts customer freedom of choice, and others that AI will eventually curate travel directly. However, both these viewpoints overlook the value of the human touch in selecting the perfect experience. In today's world, we are constantly seeking recommendations from friends, influencers, locals and other sources. Vacation time is precious, and people rely on trusted sources for the best advice to fill their trips with the really best memorable things to do. That is exactly what we provide: offering fewer, but exceptional tours that focus on quality over quantity.