Virtual Experiences - the next revolution in Travel.

I feel like 100 companies came up with this same idea at the end of March and each launched Virtual (online) Tours to the market within a space of about 2 weeks. Aside from a little bit of connecting with past customers, and maybe energizing staff and tour guides, I didn’t really see much point. Maybe a good activity for 60 days, and then return to business as usual.

I watch dozens of hours of YouTube travel videos each month (usually in the background, with my laptop in the foreground). I watch them for travel inspiration, pre-trip planning and just general entertainment. The supply is endless. Charging me to watch the same thing, with the only difference that they are operated by a tour company - not going to happen.

That’s as far as my thought process went when I dismissed the idea, but after watching a couple of webinars on the subject and talking to a few people, I’ve done a full 180. I’m now convinced it’s a new category, and it might / should be the next big thing ("next big thing" might be slightly dramatic).

Some companies are producing just the current YouTube content. I suppose that’s version 1.0 which is fine. Version 1.0 isn’t supposed to be very good. But once you get a few thousand people all over the world thinking about the same problem, and the possibilities, the ideas start to develop. This time in quarantine has been a constant layering of creative thinking and idea sharing, if you’ve been motivated to seek it out.

Here are some of the concepts that may have a future:

1. Online > Offline. Things like beer tasting. Shipping beer to peoples’ homes and creating an interactive beer tasting experience. Lots of similar concepts with food and cooking. Cooking pasta with Italian grandmother…. this seems to be the most common theme so far.
2. Pre-arrival content. Meet a local expert (tour guide?) ahead of your trip. Get an overview of the destination before you leave home. Just a modern version of a guidebook. Inspires ideas, potentially customized or themed. Possibly snippets of actual offline tours available once you get there - like a non-salesy infomercial. This is no different really to the old ‘breakfast briefings’ held by tour operators on the first morning of a package tour holiday. Instagram is proof that online travel inspiration drives actual travel patterns in destination. This is just an interactive version.
3. Meet the guests. Maybe more aligned with multi-day tours. Meet the participants before you leave. Forming relationships ahead of time surely makes for a more enjoyable trip. I assume some operators already do this in some form.
4. Family, school, university, wedding, vacation, sports….. reunions. What a great way to celebrate an occasion, when it's not practical to go in person. Maybe there’s a school reunion with a live walk-through of the actual school, or a visit to a childhood vacation spot with family.
5. Corporate team building. There has already been a lot of creativity applied here because of the potential high margin. Seems like a sector where the possibilities are endless. With the Twitters, Googles and Facebooks of the world already announcing lengthy extensions to WFH - these seem like a great way to replace some of that team building. People need a break from plain zoom calls one after another.
6. Fitness. I just booked my first online Airbnb experience. I was looking for something, just because I wanted to test it out. I’m not really a yoga person (truth is, I just don’t understand it - although I’m not against trying), so I bypassed lots of zen-ish yoga experiences in cool places like Japan and Nepal. I came across a biking experience with Alistair Brownlee (unheard of if you’re not British or into triathlon - he won the last two Olympic gold medals). Anyway, I’m going biking with him next week. Me and 9 other people. Each on bike trainers, in their house. It’s nothing to do with travel at all. You could lump this in with celebrity virtual tours, fitness experiences, or just general special interest - call it whatever you like.
7. Custom trip planning. Travel agents on steroids. Right now you have a travel agent with 0.5% of the knowledge across 200 locations. Isn’t it better to have one with 100% of the knowledge, but in the destination you’re going to? Maybe even more than that. You want REALLY specialized information about a specific niche. This sector should have been cracked a long time ago, using concierges that have been losing their jobs for the last 10 years - it should be on a platform. Tripadvisor forums probably got the closest, but it didn’t really develop into anything.
8. People unable to travel. Due to medical, financial or any other reason. Maybe a group of long-time friends are no longer able to fly across the world as they once did - might be interested in a monthly online experience (together) to explore a new (or old) destination. 
9. Lets combine 2,3 and 8 and call it the ultimate travel experience. You have now your pre-trip planning, meeting the locals, talking to other trip participants. Your actual experience for 2 weeks, and then for some time after, virtually reminiscing or catching up with the same group of people, and maybe planning another trip.

I could go on here. I get quite excited by all the possibilities. I’d love to hear more. Crucially, very few people were thinking about these things before March 2020. Right now, maybe 10’s of thousands of people are - and that’s what will drive further innovation. So it’s not my basic list of thoughts on this list that's important, it’s the next 100, with all kinds of cool technology, creative videography, novel interactivity, and who knows what else.

I can’t write a post without a little bit of economics, so here are some basics. Travel, as an industry - the in-destination part, is fundamentally different to almost all other industries because of issues of matching the supply with the demand.

Supply. The destination experience sector just can’t easily scale. It is, by definition, fragmented into millions of locations spread throughout every country in the world. That’s the reason it doesn’t consolidate (unlike flights and accommodation, which are often commoditized and can therefore be managed centrally from company HQs). It’s this fragmentation, and therefore unique experiences that become THE reason people travel in the first place - something different from their daily lives. According to Arival, there are almost a Million ‘experiences’ operators. That’s the supply.

Demand. Made up of every visitor to that location, whether they fly across the world, or take the local bus for 5 stops, they combine to make up the demand.

The problem is matching supply <> demand. In most industries, matching is easy. Amazon is the best example. Because, in this sector, matching requires an actual travel-event, it is almost unique. The matching currently only happens during a very limited time period - while the visitor is in-destination. It's the same reason these OTAs (or anybody else) haven’t made any real progress on this ‘connected trip’ stuff - it’s just really hard. Virtual removes that matching problem. The demand goes from a few thousand or tens of thousands of visitors in a destination at a specific time, to a few billion. That’s significant. All of a sudden, you have demand for specialized products that have been impossible up to now.

I actually don’t know anything about this product, but how many people want to take a tour with a comic book art historian on any given day (no offense meant whatsoever, I’m sure it’s excellent).  It’s probably difficult to make viable as ONLY an offline experience. Make it available virtually, reach the (millions?) of enthusiasts across the world, and you can probably sell quite a few, as well as drive a decent number to later take an in-destination tour. (Notice the price - don't expect prices to match offline. You could be a tour-guide in Angkor Wat and offer a 1 hour interactive experience for up to 10 people for $10 each, or a non-interactive one for 50 people at $2 - each is quite feasible)

It doesn’t mean that every trip needs to be some specialized theme or special interest. A small percentage of people can drive huge demand, or a large number of people who would like a specialized product SOME of the time, will have the same effect.

I’ve seen graphs of Google trends - with an initial spike in searches for Virtual Tours, and then a quick drop. That’s not a relevant factor here. This is a new category - the same argument as “nobody ever asked for (or searched for) an Iphone” before it was announced. These things create their own search demand as they develop. If Google could predict future products, they’d already own the world.

Most of these ideas could and should have happened pre-covid. Two factors are the catalyst. 

• Zoom, Google Meet etc. - undoubtedly one of the themes of this lock-down. Zoom alone has 200 million users / day. People all over the world have, in a very short space of time adopted and become very comfortable with the format. That’s not going to stop. 
• Many businesses (rightly or wrongly) don’t expect tourists for quite a while, and feel like they have no choice but to look elsewhere for revenue. Necessity is the mother of invention. It’s a very natural pivot for a tour company, utilizing skills of current staff. Many resources will be committed in the space - and from many angles. Some things will work and many won’t, but that’s what drives new categories.

In my view, current tour operators shouldn’t be suddenly pivoting their business to focus on virtual tourism. Actual tourism in North America, Europe, South East Asia and elsewhere will probably be far greater than the potential here in the short term. Unfortunately, some places, particularly in the developing world might fare a lot worse, and might have a longer period without significant tourism. If it’s a choice of NO business vs virtual business, then it might be a good option.

As an immediate supplement to offline products, it’s a great idea. There’s almost no barrier to entry. You probably already have the skilled people. You can go out and create great content immediately, put it out there and see what happens. I'm sure websites and maybe a platform or two will show up for distribution. The only real variable costs here are the time of a single person for some preparation and actual delivery of the experience. Worst case is that you now have that video content that you’ve been threatening to create for years - but never quite got around to. Let’s face it, everybody needs more great content. 

If anybody was expecting an argument to say that virtual tours can act as some kind of replacement for the real thing, I’m sorry. I think it’s a great supplement, but it will never replace. Increasingly though, it might actually be quite difficult to differentiate as virtual increasingly becomes intertwined with the real thing (as-in technology becoming part of the offline experience, not some weird metaphysical phenomenon)

I’d love to hear other ideas in this space. I’ll also add links to great products that already exist - please send them over.

Also send some arguments, especially if you think all this is nonsense and will be gone within 3 weeks.