Tour Radar – Innovation in Business
Tour marketplaces are big business. Very lucrative but challenging to make successful.
In this post, you’ll discover one firm which was spawned in the booming travel sector, innovated and grown, learned from their mistakes, upgraded their sales channels, and adapted their business model to fit the actual, real, not imagined marketplace.
The company is TourRadar. They enjoy many lead channels, however their organic channel which produces only 2500 visitors a day is key to its overall success. Their website produces very strong revenues and keeps top of mind awareness with tour buyers. In business for 14 years, it’s accumulated everything from brand power to travel connections to more than a million backlinks to its website.
A closer look at Tour Radar can be very insightful as you research and plan your own tour marketplace startup or tour operator business. The risks, gaps, customer responses, revenue sources in their journey may help you decide on how should build your business model and establish an inimitable brand.
Each of the top global tour operators and tour marketplaces have their own brand, UVP, marketplace product selection, business strategy and marketing strategy. Before receiving massive financing, Tour Radar proved it had a successful business model. We’ll explore that here in this post.
Many posts on this company are difficult to understand so I hope you’ll find this post easier to comprehend and enjoy.
Its a Crowed Competitive Tour Experience Marketplace
Tour marketplaces unique value propositions can be expressed many different ways from practical and straightforward to awesome and overpowering. Tour Radar may be focusing on UX, large multiday tour variety and volume, transparency, spiritual/ideological benefits, and a complete tour management shopping and management platform with efficient, safe booking process with value added services. With a high Trustpilot rating, it’s obviously considered trustworthy and satisfactory.
Is Tour Radar the most sexy, inspiring, and value producing marketplace? Well, it’s rated in the top 7.
The founders of these tour companies worked hard on their digital tour catalogs but may have neglected areas of marketing that are creative or which have changed and require new adjustments. This all signals opportunities for you.
Thoughts: Can powerful, sophisticated advertising and promotion strategy catapult tour companies to market leader status? Is product development the priority? Or could brand positioning, and smart organic content marketing power up a big piece of the market? Or is building the future’s most in-demand product where everyone is headed be the wisest choice? My bet is on dominant marketing — with strong content and SEO.
Who is Tour Radar?
TourRadar is an online tour marketplace based in Vienna Austria, which is focused on drawing from a goldmine of 50,000 multi-day tour experiences from 2500 tour operators and DMCs in 100+ countries.
Tour Radar is known as a tour marketplace similar to Gadventures, Toursbylocals, Affordable Tours, Tour Scanner, Viator, and others. The experience, guarantees and customer service of each tour marketplace is unique.
For the last 14 years, Tour Radar, headquartered in Vienna, Austria (with offices in Toronto and Brisbane), was founded in 2010 by Australian brothers Travis and Shawn Pittman. They built a form of travel management software where travelers are able to search, compare, and book multi-day tours from 2500 tour operators across the world.
The multiday tour market lends itself to high tour prices, upselling opportunities, and relationships with travel partners such as travel agencies, hotels, bus companies, restaurants, and event bookings. The company was a B2C startup but has been focusing more on the B2B segment via arrangement with travel consultants and travel agencies. It’s reported to have connected with 5000 travel agencies.
Although the company doesn’t offer flights, it’s expanding in B2B channels.
It received $52.5 million in series C venture capital and employs several hundred people.
How Does TourRadar Work?
“Our platform helps travellers find, book and rate multi-day travel experiences from all over the world. As a marketplace, we have over 40,000 different tours to choose from and you can narrow down your selection based on location, travel style, tour reviews, and several other factors. Once you book through our platform, we give you everything you need to know about your upcoming trip and we keep your money secure throughout the process. The tour operator doesn’t get paid until you’re on your trip. — quoted from EU Startups article.
Here’s Travis Pittman speaking casually at the Marketplace Conference in 2018 about his company and the market.
What About Their Marketing?
They’ve built marketing power with relationships with tour operators and travel agencies, and some traffic via ads and Google search.
The marketing and sales challenge, is highlighted in Travis Pittman’s own diagrams shows what he calls the “time decay” between awareness and booking. It’s a high involvement purchase and people may take 2+ months to decide.
This is the same awareness and buying impulse decay problem all travel sites have, which is why staying top of mind via email or Google or Facebook is so important. Companies show they’re cutting back on ppc ad spending, which makes organic search visibility so important. What I’ve always called “omnipresence” is key. One of my friends named his business on the omnipresence theme because it’s vital to be always visible, whether on Google alone or via multiple travel channels.
If you’re not top of the rankings, then your customer can be swiped away by a high ranking competitor.
SEO: The Key to Market Leader Status
You can’t buy most respected and trusted status. It’s earned organically via content and customer experiences and promotion to partners.
Tour Radar has done well with their SEO efforts with quite a profile built over 14 years. Their site ranks in the top ten for many great high volume keyword phrases. Nice work! And that’s traffic in many different languages too.
Most of these rankings are driven via the site’s ranking power and trust factor. Just in the last month, they’ve grown their backlinks by more than 100,000 to a new total of 1,437,000! Their authority score is only 59, so this is the area they need to shore up on.
Great But Want to Be Better!
And SEO is on the minds of Tour Radar right now as they’re hiring an Austrian-based head of SEO. CEO Travis Pittman believes SEO is critically important to his business. They’re looking for talent who will bring energy to the organization with an innovation mindset, not necessarily degrees/certifications. That’s wisdom. This tells us how important content and Google organic search traffic is, as it supplies the lion’s share of traffic and brand awareness for most tour marketplaces.
The tour catalog can deliver traffic, yet Google is less interested in these pages which are often not fresh, in depth, or contextually relevant enough. Times have changed and fresh, creative content is king.
The company relies on employee and freelance travel writers for content which is good quality. However, high performing content is wired together sophisticatedly for topic relevance, semantics, authoritativeness, shareability, engagement, authenticity, and PageRank shaping. Advanced SEO focuses everything to make it unbeatable.
Achieving this with a staff of travel writers is no easy task and requires impressive communication skills to get the team to buy into a market leading SEO framework.
If Tour Radar puts big money into SEO and content quality improvement in this way, it will grow inbound traffic significantly and reach more brand ambassadors and influencers online. Many benefits to winning the ranking wars. See more on how I doubled a major hotel’s organic traffic.
What is their Business and Revenue Model?
It’s multifaceted and not easy to describe, incorporating:
- ecommerce
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
- direct booking system
- payment gateway service
- SaaS subscription service
- online marketplace portal
- B2B value added marketing services
- digital products and services
So many ways to earn revenue. Of all, the SaaS user subscription model holds the most promise for top of mind awareness, branded experiences, self-managed tour experiences, and bridging the time decay problem.
Source of Traffic and Leads
Vendor and partner relations, offline travel partners, digital PR, blogger and influencer outreach, and industry engagement are vital to capturing mentions, connections and backlinks to support a trusted, authoritative status.
The demand for sophisticated content that solves many marketing objectives puts the challenge over the top for most content creators Just publishing high quality, helpful and entertaining content isn’t enough. What companies learn is that content must designed to fulfill the complete strategy, not just traditional goals of informing, inspiring or entertaining.
What most learn is that advanced SEO and organic search traffic isn’t free.
Tour Radar’s organic traffic has to be considered disappointing when compared to other major travel and tour portals.
As you’ll discover in the travel sector, there are 3 priorities: organic traffic, travel management software, and funding. Read up on the best tour marketplaces and what drives their success.
Advice for Travel Startup Entrepreneurs
CEO Travis advises tour startup entrepreneurs to be creative and nimble with their limited resources and not to be afraid to pivot, try new things, build your brand, and do your best to keep your audience engaged [which is content marketing]. In the video interview he speaks of the value of perseverance. I would add that research, planning and strategy are vital to ease the need for perseverance and marketing hacking.
What’s captivated me about the company was its simple, straightforward approach, focused on tours only, which appeals to retail travelers who need clarity, simple interfaces, safety, confidence, and lots of tour options.
What TourRadar Does
Tour Marketplace: Offers 50,000+ multi-day tours from hundreds of tour operators including Gadventures within range of tour experience categories such as adventure, cultural, luxury, and budget tours.
Search and Comparison Shopping: The platform allows users to search for tours based on various criteria such as destination, duration, price, and type of experience. Users can compare different tours side by side to find the one that best suits their needs.
Tour Business Marketing: A key area they’re developing that responds to the diminishing visibility of small tour companies, to provide direct access to a targeted range of tour consumers on their marketplace.
Tour Booking Portal: Once travelers find a tour they like, they can book it directly through Tour Radar’s travel management software platform. The company handles the booking process to deliver a seamless shopping experience.
Tour Reviews: Tour Radar features reviews and ratings from tour goers helping users make informed decisions. They also offer customer support to assist with any questions or issues that may arise before, during, or after the trip.
Additional Services: The platform offers additional services via travel insurance partners, flexible payment plans, and assistance with e-visas or other travel documentation.
Reasons for Tour Radar’s Success
- Perseverance and Adaptation: determination to overcome challenges, learn from mistakes and use their data more intelligently (because their investors forced them to).
- Passionate Management: Ambitious management team with a love for travel and the determination to grow.
- Solid Funding: a series of large venture capitalist funding infusions gives them the freedom to grow and manage as needed.
- Massive Tour Selection: TourRadar.com provides a one-stop-shop for travelers looking for multi-day tours that positions them to different tour buyer profiles and budgets.
- User-Friendly Website and Booking Platform: The website and multidevice apps are a travel management software platform designed to enable fast search, tour comparison, and bookings.
- Trust: User reviews and ratings are easily visible (via Trustpilot), as a form of credibility, transparency and social proof.
- Global Reach: As a global tour marketplace, they tap into a growing worldwide network of tours and marketplaces to maximize sales throughout the year.
- Partnering with Tour Operators: Partnerships with a built selection of hundreds of tour operators, they expand their tour portfolio, and ensure competition among providers to provide competitive pricing and exclusive deals for their users.
- Tour Customer Support: Providing excellent customer support is very important given the lack of control over tour company’s activities and customer commitment.
- Payment Gateway & Security: Flexible booking options and cancellation policies, along with a secure payment gateway provides the confidence international travelers demand before booking with unknown tour operators.
Key Questions: Why is a Company Successful?
Tour Radar’s success might be attributed to its ability to meet the many needs of modern travelers through a comprehensive, transparent, and user-friendly platform, combined with strong business partnerships and an effective use of technology and marketing.
Managing the Downside Threats
A downside to Tour Radar’s approach is that the company sells a lot of tours (50,000 in 100+ countries) from a wide variety of operators which it might not be able to control. When something goes wrong on these tours or the product is not good, Tour Radar often gets blamed, even though it’s just a marketplace that resells the tours.
Being a company with considerable financial resources and influence, it can help protect customers from negative events and fraud which undermine the tour industry.
Tour Radar has an excellent set of reviews on Trustpilot, worth showcasing on their homepage showing how important trust, reputation and shopper security is.
The bad experience report is an issue with all tour marketplace portals. And they need to vet operators and guides carefully.
The Competition in Tour Marketplaces
Which is why the best tour marketplaces build exclusive relationships with the best tour operators. For tour operators and guides, it’s best to build relations with the tour marketplaces with the most steady traffic and leads, and who will offer the lowest commission and value added marketing, insurance and travel visa services.
A one stop shop for tour goers isn’t a bad business model.
One Critical Challenge to Bridge
The tour companies also lose customers who find tours or who book later through other companies directly perhaps for a lower price. So customer loyalty is a big challenge. And tour guides are likely not very loyal either and will work with marketplaces who give them the highest revenues. So exclusivity appears to be fix for this recurrent revenue draining problem.
Additionally as Travis Pittman mentioned at the Marketplace Conference in 2018, repeatable business from tourgoers is a problem, given people might only every one or two years at best. However, as touring matures, customers might see it as the best travel experience and prefer it (with help from Google and marketing).
And selling tours this way often generates brand damage as complaints and negative reviews can eat away the company brand reputation, sales, and even Google rankings as Google’s ranking algorithm is sensitive to negative signals online.
Tour Radars disclaimer is telling: The Travel Adventures are independently created, offered and carried out by the Operators at their own discretion and responsibility. TourRadar is solely acting as a commercial agent for the Operators. TourRadar is not an Operator, nor a provider of Travel Adventures, nor a representative or proxy of an Operator nor an insurer. TourRadar does not own, sell, resell, furnish, provide, manage or control any transportation, tour or travel services and does not act as an agent to the Travelers. TourRadar has no control over the behavior of Operators, Travelers and other users of the platform.
That’s a brief anatomy of a company that finds solutions for problems.
Their commitment to content and SEO strategy was weak, but they seem to have changed their tune. With the major tour/travel portals capturing several million visitors per month organically, they see it as a big growth opportunity.
Competing with the major players is a David & Goliath situation so they’ll need a mastermind content strategist to ramp up Google and other organic marketing channels. Hopefully, they won’t succumb to cheap tactics such as generative AI content publishing for volume approaches.
Google’s AI detection system will give generative AI publishing a big shock going forward.
As for any travel business that wants to succeed online as Tour Radar has, a marketing first business model provides the traffic, reach, brand visibility and sales analytics insights that venture capitalists insist on.
Good luck with your tour startup project. If you’re needing help with the SEO/Content strategy element, I’d be happy to speak with you about how I might help. Reach me at 4416 998 6246.
Read more on how to promote your travel site, create excellent travel content, build trust of customers, and find a good Travel Marketing Specialist with travel marketing services.