Experience Pure Plays Are Winning: Why OTAs Are Still Playing Catch-Up
Ask any major online travel agency about their strategic priorities and "experiences" will almost certainly appear near the top of the list. Expedia, Booking.com, Airbnb, and a host of hotel chains have all positioned tours, activities, and local experiences as central pillars of their growth strategies. And yet, despite this widespread corporate enthusiasm, the specialists — the so-called experience pure plays — continue to hold a commanding edge. Thirty years after the first experiences middlemen emerged, the sector remains a remarkably tough business, and the platforms built exclusively to serve it are still the ones doing it best.
What Are Experience Pure Plays?
Experience pure plays are platforms whose entire business model is built around the discovery, booking, and management of tours, activities, and attractions. Companies like Viator (owned by Tripadvisor), GetYourGuide, Klook, and Musement fall into this category. Unlike OTAs, which treat experiences as one product vertical among many — alongside flights, hotels, and car rentals — pure plays live and breathe this single, complex market.
That singular focus turns out to matter enormously. The experiences sector is not simply a digital shelf where you list products and wait for bookings to roll in. It demands deep supplier relationships, nuanced inventory management, real-time availability syncing, and a level of curatorial expertise that generalist platforms have consistently struggled to replicate at scale.
Why the Experiences Market Is Uniquely Difficult
The tours and activities space has long been described as the "last great untapped opportunity" in online travel — a phrase that has been repeated so often it has become something of an industry cliché. The reason it keeps getting described that way is that despite its enormous size, estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars globally, it remains stubbornly fragmented and difficult to digitize.
Several factors make this market genuinely hard to crack:
- Supplier fragmentation: The majority of experience operators are small, independent businesses — family-run boat tours, local cooking classes, regional hiking guides — that often lack the technology infrastructure to manage online distribution effectively. Onboarding and maintaining these suppliers at scale requires dedicated resources and expertise.
- Real-time availability complexity: Unlike a hotel room, which has a relatively predictable inventory structure, a walking tour or cooking class may run multiple times a day with varying group sizes, weather dependencies, and last-minute cancellations. Managing real-time availability across thousands of such products is a significant technical challenge.
- Low average order value: The typical experiences booking is considerably smaller in dollar terms than a flight or hotel stay, which means the economics of customer acquisition and conversion need to be extremely tight to generate meaningful margins.
- Discoverability challenges: Travelers frequently don't know what experiences are available at their destination until they arrive. Driving discovery at the right moment in the planning journey — before, during, or after a trip — requires sophisticated marketing and product capabilities.
Where OTAs Have Fallen Short
Given their enormous customer bases and marketing budgets, it might seem like OTAs should have an insurmountable advantage in the experiences space. In practice, however, scale has not translated into dominance. The core problem is one of organizational attention and structural fit.
For a company like Booking.com or Expedia, hotel and flight revenues dwarf what experiences currently contribute to the bottom line. This creates an inherent prioritization problem: when resources are allocated, when product teams set roadmaps, and when marketing budgets are carved up, experiences tend to come second. The internal incentives simply don't favor the deep, sustained investment that cracking this market requires.
There is also a product philosophy gap. Pure plays have spent years developing tools specifically designed for the quirks of the experiences market — flexible booking flows, operator-facing inventory management dashboards, smart upsell features that feel native to the category. OTAs have largely tried to adapt existing infrastructure built for accommodation or transport, and the fit is rarely seamless.
Why Pure Plays Retain Their Edge
The specialists win because they have no choice but to win in experiences — it is all they do. That existential focus drives better supplier partnerships, more sophisticated product development, and a deeper understanding of how travelers actually discover and book activities.
Platforms like GetYourGuide and Klook have invested heavily in content, curation, and supplier enablement in ways that OTAs have not matched. They have built trust with operators by demonstrating genuine commitment to the category rather than treating it as an ancillary revenue line. That trust translates into better inventory access, more competitive pricing, and exclusive product relationships that OTAs simply cannot replicate overnight.
There is also a consumer perception element at play. Travelers who are serious about finding the best local experiences are increasingly aware that specialist platforms offer greater depth and quality of inventory than a general OTA. Brand awareness among dedicated experience seekers continues to build in favor of the pure plays.
What the Future Looks Like
None of this means OTAs will abandon the experiences space. The market opportunity is too large and strategically important for them to walk away. Expect continued investment, further acquisitions, and incremental product improvements from the major players. Airbnb in particular has shown that a platform can build a credible experiences product from scratch when leadership commitment is genuine and sustained.
But the baseline reality of the sector is unlikely to shift dramatically in the near term. Experience pure plays have a structural, cultural, and technological head start that is genuinely difficult to close. Thirty years into the modern travel industry's engagement with this market, the specialists built specifically for it remain the ones doing it best — and that is a lesson worth paying attention to for anyone investing in, operating within, or traveling through the global experiences economy.