Tours, as a category in travel, have been around since the beginning of well, travel, Laurent Kuenzle, CEO of destination management company Asian Trails, subtly reminded delegates attending Arival last week in Bangkok, “We’ve been doing tours since the beginning, tours are our DNA, experiences are our DNA.”

What’s changed of course is that technology has enabled travellers to find these tours more easily – and add to that, the slew of things to do associated with in-destination such as activities, food, attractions and now, there’s one word to rule them all, experiences.

It was George Orwell who said, words form our world and we have to come up with new terms to visualize whatever new world we are living in at the time and today, two words “digital” and “experiences” rule the in-sector space which, as co-founder of Arival Douglas Quinby said, is the fourth largest sector in travel. On average, he said, people take seven activities per trip, and 80% book between two and four weeks of arriving in destination.

Laurent Kuenzle: “We’ve been doing tours since the beginning, tours are our DNA, experiences are our DNA.” (Image credit: Asian Trails)

Companies like Asian Trails and executives like Laurent Kuenzle, who started his career in destination management as a young executive working for Kuoni in Tokyo, have had to adapt to the changing times.

The biggest decrease has been in the group series business which used to form the bread and butter of DMCs and as customer tastes change, and move towards more independent and tailormade travel, DMCs are also having to design new tours and packages that fit the new customer.

“We’ve been designing experiences from the start, that’s why we have so many product managers scouting for new tours and activities that we can bring to our customers via our own as well as other distribution channels,” said Kuenzle, who started an e-commerce division a few years ago to respond to this trend.

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