Video is the new battleground in the “Experiences” economy

It’s official! Video is the new battleground in tours and activities. 

Last week GetYourGuide CEO Johannes Reck posted on LinkedIn about their fall release day, Unlocked 2024. 

Among some new AI productivity hacks around listing creation and language, Reck spent a full paragraph explaining GYG’s ambitions around video.

“We believe videos are the best way to show travelers what their next trip will feel like, but they have to be authentic to work,” said Reck. “So we’ve teamed up with our 10,000-strong creator community to produce authentic, high-quality content at scale.” 

This follows an earlier announcement from GYG competitor Klook, who has teamed up with social media giant TikTok. According to a report on Social Discovery Insights, “This new feature makes it easier for both individual users and entire friend groups to book trips directly through TikTok, and is unlikely to be the only travel partnership that the platform makes in the near future.”

Klook claims double the amount of creators to GYG. “Klook’s “Kreator” influencer program, which has enlisted over 20,000 content creators, is central to this initiative.”

A cursory glance at the Klook app showed video headers for products already in place. Of the two I looked at, one had a professional supplier provided video of Puffing Billy and then next a seemingly UGC video of a koala in a tree as part of the Great Ocean Road tour.

Why the sudden rush to the video door? The answer is probably a combination of two things – conversion uplift and Airbnb.

A widely quoted report by EyeView states that by adding video to a product page you can increase conversion by up to a staggering 80%. Even if the result was only half of that, it is already enough to stop everything else and get video on those pages. And that seems to be what GYG are now madly rushing to catch up on.

The second is the ever looming shadow of Airbnb. On an earnings call in August this year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky foreshadowed the relaunch of their experiences platform for around May 2025. 

Pointedly Chesky stated; “Experiences should be sold video first.” and “Experiences need to be marketed with videos, not just photos. They need to be discoverable in the Airbnb app…”

We can definitely expect Airbnb to take video a step further than the others by making video part of discovery and possibly using AI to personalise with “intent based search” capabilities. This fits perfectly with Chesky’s 11 star experience vision. 

With its brand strength and marketing power, Airbnb has the ability to really put a dent in the “experiences” world. Chesky said he is only interested in building billion dollar verticals within his business. And experiences are first among those after short term accommodation rental. 

No doubt they’ll have their own creator program (30,000 strong! maybe). This should be an absolute boon for existing influencers and casual creators to make a bit of money whilst travelling around over the next few years.

Viator, the other major OTA in the space has no videos on product pages that we could find nor has made any announcements to change this. And that seems very strange. Except video has always been hard to execute and maybe it just sits in the too-hard-basket of their roadmap currently.

As usual, the suppliers in travel and some of the less sophisticated re-sellers could be left flatfooted in the video onslaught. But it doesn’t need to be that way. And actually, with the addition of Videreo, it doesn’t need to be.

Videreo is a new startup that is giving everyone in travel the opportunity of playing on the same ground as these larger players. And for SMB’s they can do it absolutely for free. 

“Any small business can upload their best 10 videos and use our platform absolutely free” said Videreo co-founder Adrian Villabruna. “Supporting small businesses is part of our values. The little guy or girl in travel often is left out of technological innovation. We don’t think that is right or fair, if we want travel to reach its potential of creating true value in the world.”

With Videreo, a travel business can display scrolling vertical videos just like in social media but here they sit alongside a map to give the user more context and functionality. The user can see on the map where an experience that takes their interest is located to know whether that is really practical for their trip or can search the map first for their area of interest and watch videos from there to make their choices.

Once the user finds the right experience for them, they simply click the link on the video straight to the experience product page to checkout.

“The whole thing can be up and running in 20 mins if you’ve already got the videos” said Villabruna. Most tour operators would have at least 10 videos of their products and business already created for Instagram and TikTiok.

We can expect the Airbnb experience to be closer to what Videreo offers than what is seen on GYG or Klook currently. 

For bigger players, Videreo has a lot more tech to offer including the ability to offer intent based search with video from leveraging deep AI tech and extensive video and product tagging. “We can take the next levels down from the major OTA’s from last position to first position in less than a day,” said Villabruna.

Disclosure: Tony Carne is the other co-founder of Videreo.