The most expensive thing a large OTA does is acquire a traveller. The moment that booking confirms, GetYourGuide is already working to convert the same person into an experience booking. The OTA paid for the customer. GetYourGuide is coming for the revenue.
At a 1M-trip OTA running a 5% experiences attach rate (used throughout this piece as a minimum assumption, not a target), that handoff means 50,000 experience bookings a year. At £180 per booking (the industry standard AOV for tours and activities¹), that is £9M in annual Gross Booking Value (GBV) the OTA built the distribution for, paid to acquire the customer for, and then chose not to collect.
The cause is not a product gap. It is not an engineering constraint. It is a surface that contains nothing: the post-booking confirmation.
Experiences OTAs (GetYourGuide, Viator) have built businesses on exactly this gap. GetYourGuide crossed €1 billion in annual revenue in 2025, becoming EBITDA profitable for the first time.² Viator reported $1.3 billion in gross bookings in Q2 2025 alone. Both businesses invest heavily in paid search and direct acquisition to reach leisure travellers with existing flight and hotel bookings. OTAs already have those customers. The question is whether they use that position first.
A traveller books a flight. GetYourGuide sees a confirmed destination, confirmed travel dates, and a confirmed traveller. It begins targeting that person with experience offers for that exact destination. The airline or hotel that sold the flight does not.
Most post-booking confirmation emails sent by OTAs today carry a booking reference, a flight or hotel summary, and a link to manage the booking. The absence of an experience offer is not a deliberate product decision. It is a decision that was never made, because the experiences category has never sat clearly on anyone's P&L.
Ask an OTA product team about experiences, and you get one of two answers: “we have talked about it” or “engineering says it is a six-month integration.”
Both answers come from the same structural problem. The flights team owns the flight P&L. The hotels team owns the hotel P&L. The ancillary team, if one exists, typically owns car hire and insurance. Experiences sit in no bucket, so no team is measured against losing them. The revenue disappears without anyone noticing, because no one is watching for it.
The six-month integration estimate might be accurate for a native checkout integration. That is not the right entry point.
The entry point is in the post-booking engagement layer: the surfaces that already exist between booking confirmation and travel day. The confirmation email, the web confirmation page, the pre-trip push notification. None of them require a change to the booking engine or the purchase flow.
One of our Tier 1 OTA partners went live in eleven days from contract signature. Not after a procurement cycle. Eleven days.
The moment you raise experiences with a product team, the instinct goes to the checkout.Could we add an upsell step? Could we surface experiences during the booking flow? Those conversations reach engineering, engineering says six months, and nothing moves.
Experiences do not belong in the checkout. They belong in the surfaces that follow the booking.
Seventy per cent of travellers book tour and activity experiences within seven days of their travel date, and 40% book within three days.³ The highest-intent window is not at the moment a customer buys a flight or hotel. It is in the post-booking confirmation email, the web confirmation page, the pre-trip push notification, the in-app destination guide, and the messaging channelsOTAs use to service travellers in the days before and during a trip. Every OTA already owns these surfaces. None of them require a change to the checkout or the purchase flow.
A snippet in the confirmation email template, a JavaScript block on the confirmation page, a destination-matched push three days before departure: none of these are six-month engineering projects. The Storefront, a fully branded experiences section of the OTA’s own platform, is the destination. The post-booking surfaces are the starting point, and they are already there.
At 5% attach on 1M trips, the OTA generates 50,000 experience bookings a year. At £180 per booking (the industry standard AOV for tours and activities), the annual GBV is £9M. The actual margin the OTA captures depends on its take rate with suppliers, but the opportunity sits entirely off the OTA’s P&L today.
No up front licence, no integration cost, no customer acquisition cost. The passengers are already in your system. We earn when they generate revenue for you. Not before.
The reason this conversation does not happen more often is not that the economics are unclear once you see them. It is that no one is in the room to ask the question. The product team is watching checkout conversion. The commercial team is watching hotel and flight take rates. The post-booking period is a revenue line nobody is measuring, so nobody is asking why it is empty.
OTAs hold the most valuable position in the experience booking journey: confirmed traveller, confirmed destination, confirmed travel window. Experiences OTAs (GetYourGuide, Viator)have built businesses worth billions in revenue on the travellers OTAs produce. The corrective move is a product decision to treat the post-booking period as a revenue surface rather than a confirmation receipt.
Holibob’s recommendation engine uses contextual trip data to surface the right product, at the right time, for each confirmed traveller, matching destination, travel window, and traveller profile.That is what drives conversion across post-booking surfaces, and it is what separates a confirmation email with a relevant experience offer from one with a generic banner nobody clicks.
The model is a small fee, earned only when you earn. The GBV gap is £9M per year fora 1M-trip OTA at a minimum 5% attach rate. The integration takes a fortnight. The only question is which quarter this gets prioritised, and whether your competitors fund another year of that growth before it does.
If you want to see what a 60-day pilot looks like at your scale, one market, one agreed success metric, no checkout change, book fifteen minutes with the team.
References
1. Tripadvisor Q2 2025 earnings release, Experiences & Dining segment. Viator reported approximately $1.3B in gross bookings across approximately 6.2M transactions in the quarter, implying an average booking value of approximately $210. Reported via PhocusWire, August 2025.
2. GetYourGuide press release, October 2025. The company reported revenue approaching €1 billion and confirmedEBITDA profitability for the first time.
3. Arrival 2025 U.S. Experiences Traveler Outlook. Survey of U.S. travellers: 70% booked their most recent tour or activity within seven days of their travel date; 40% booked within three days.
For a couple of years now, there’s been talk but - until the start of this year - not much action on the phasing out of third-party cookies. You know - those things responsible for you getting streams of targeted ads for similar products after you spend time on e-commerce sites. Well, the time is finally here for the phase-out.
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Holibob are pleased to announce that we will be partnering with Travelwings, the Dubai-based bespoke online tourism brand that excels in delivering unique travel experiences, to provide access to our tours & experiences technology.