Here’s a market for tours to put on your radar: Travel Weekly
TourRadar, a multi-day tour aggregator, is venturing further into the travel agency space.
Late last year, TourRadar formed a global partnership with Flight Center Travel Group, integrating TourRadar’s inventory and bookable content into Flight Centre’s agent platform.
Earlier this year, TourRadar launched a partner portal, allowing travel advisors to research and book multi-day adventures for their clients, with an average commission of around 8%. Registration is free.
CEO Travis Pittman hopes this is just the start of TourRadar’s broader relationship with the travel agency community.
There are about 2,000 agents registered with the partner portal, Pittman said, including about 1,000 in North America.
“We’re seeing great success where they’re not able to access that product that they don’t have contracts with those tour operators,” Pittman said. “Previously, they couldn’t earn commission on some of these products.”
TourRadar offers inventory from large providers, like G Adventures and Globus, but also smaller tour operators and DMCs around the world. In total, it offers 50,000 multi-day adventures around the world, more than half of which are instantly bookable.
And Pittman hopes to build relationships with more agency groups, including consortia.
How TourRadar started
Pittman founded TourRadar in 2010 with his brother, Shawn, after a trip the two took to Croatia. They booked a sailing trip and wired the supplier $5,000, only to find no one when they arrived. They eventually found the vendor, but the whole experience – not being able to reach customer support 24/7 and not knowing if their money was gone – prompted them to start developing the TourRadar market. .
It was originally designed as a site where people could share travel photos, but the rise of Facebook meant pivoting, Pittman said. It was then that the company began to consider digitizing the space for multi-day visits. Today, TourRadar offers fully bookable multi-day tours from 2,500 tour operators.
Pittman believes TourRadar’s inventory is the largest collection of products available over multiple days.