The Experiences Industry, From Where I Sit

Ihave spent many years inside the experiences industry, building products, running companies, watching it change from up close. In recent months I have moved into a role with more room to think than to operate, and it has given me time to do something I have been meaning to do for a while: set down, in public, how I have come to see this industry and where I think it is going.

The timing is not incidental. The industry is entering a structural transition that will shape how discovery, distribution and booking work over the next decade.

This is the first of what I expect to be a longer body of writing. I am not announcing a programme, and I am not leading up to anything. I am writing because I have a point of view, and because after enough time inside a market, one develops an obligation to share what one sees, especially when the market is changing as quickly, and as unevenly, as this one is. These essays are pointed by design, but they are not casual opinion. Each essay is grounded in industry data, public sources, academic work where useful, and my own professional experience.

So let me put down three things I have come to believe. Each of them is a long argument in compressed form; I expect to spend some of my future writing taking them apart properly.

One. This is the most fragmented industry in travel, on both sides.

Almost everyone who works in travel experiences can name the supply side fragmentation. Some six hundred thousand operators worldwide, the majority of them small, roughly a third meaningfully digitised, the rest running on email, spreadsheets, paper diaries, and phone calls. Phocuswright described the market as “fantastically fragmented” in 2011. Fifteen years on, the underlying shape has barely changed.

What is less often named is that the sales side is also fragmented, in ways that distinguish experiences from every other travel vertical. Hotels have two online travel agencies that, between them, account for the majority of online distribution. Flights consolidate through three global distribution systems. Cars through a handful. Experiences have none of that. The visible top of the market is a long list: Viator, GetYourGuide, Klook, Expedia, Headout, Civitatis, Fever, KKday, Trip.com, TUI Musement, Groupon, the more recent entrants Booking.com and Airbnb, and countless regional players. Beneath them sits an enormous and largely invisible layer of hotel concierges, tour desks, destination marketing organisations, reseller networks, cruise shore-ex teams, bus-tour brokers and local agents who still sell much of the product that moves through any given destination. No single online travel agent commands a clearly dominant share of the industry’s bookings; even the top ten combined do not approach the concentration that hotels and flights show.

This matters more than it is usually made to matter. When both sides of a market are fragmented, no part of the system has the gravity to pull the rest into shape. Supply does not organise around a dominant distributor, because no distributor is dominant enough to force organisation. That is the condition this industry has been in for a long time, and it is worth understanding why it has persisted.

Two. The connectivity layer has been the most consistently underestimated layer of this industry.

One answer to why fragmentation has held its shape is that the layer that would make it navigable at industry-wide scale never matured. Connectivity does not end fragmentation. It makes a fragmented market machine-legible, distributable and bookable. That is a different kind of solution from consolidation, and in this industry it may be the more important one. In practical terms, this is the plumbing that moves availability, pricing, bookings and content between operators, resellers, distributors and channels. When I look at why this industry does not consolidate in the ways adjacent markets have, I keep ending up in the same place. Not at the level of the operator, and not at the level of the marketplace, but at the layer between them, which, in this industry, does not exist in any mature form.

This is unglamorous ground. Nobody pitches connectivity as a headline. But the industries that have been transformed over the last half-century (airlines in the 1970s, hotels through the 1990s, retail in the 2000s, banking now) were transformed from the plumbing up, not from the shop window down. I think experiences will follow the same path, and I think the participants who are paying serious attention to the plumbing will be the ones best placed when it does.

Three. The rules of discovery, distribution, and booking are about to be rewritten faster than most participants realise.

Discovery is moving into generative interfaces. A new layer is forming between the traveller and the operator: not an app, not a website, but a conversational agent that answers travel questions and, increasingly, executes on them. Booking pathways are being rebuilt around those agents. The review-layer economics that have carried marketplaces for more than a decade are beginning to shift under their feet.

The argument does not depend on agents becoming the majority booking path immediately. It depends on them becoming commercially material enough that supply which is incoherent, incomplete or unreachable to machines becomes structurally disadvantaged. AI does not remove the infrastructure problem this industry has been carrying. It exposes it. None of this is yet visible in the headline numbers, which is precisely why it is worth writing about now, while there is still time to think clearly about what it means rather than react to what it has already done.

I do not know exactly how this plays out. I do know that the industry is not yet looking at it with the seriousness it deserves.

Those three observations are where I plan to start. Each deserves its own essay, and will have one. I will write when I have something considered to say rather than on a fixed cadence. I will write often enough to be worth following if this is your industry too. I will not be promoting a company. I will not be selling a product.

This book does not argue that any existing company, including mine, already holds the answer. It argues that the question itself is becoming unavoidable, and that the industry should ask it directly rather than have it answered by default.

I will be trying to think clearly in public about a market I care about, and inviting the people who work in it to think alongside me.

A closing thought, to set the tone for what follows. Almost every participant in this industry can describe the problem. Almost none can describe the shape of the solution. That gap is what I want to write about.