Here's a tours marketplace to put on your radar: Travel Weekly

Posted on : 07/11/2022
Here's a tours marketplace to put on your radar: Travel Weekly
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Jamie Biesiada

TourRadar, an aggregator of multiday tours, is venturing further into the travel agency space.

Late last year, TourRadar formed a global partnership with Flight Centre Travel Group, integrating TourRadar’s inventory and bookable content into Flight Centre’s agent platform.

Earlier this year, TourRadar launched a Partner Portal, enabling travel advisors to search and book multiday adventures for their clients, with an average commission of around 8%. It’s free to sign up.

CEO Travis Pittman hopes it’s just the beginning of TourRadar’s larger relationship with the travel agency community.

There are around 2,000 agents signed up for the Partner Portal, Pittman said, with about 1,000 in North America.

“We’re seeing great success where they’re not able to access this product that they don’t have contracts with these tour operators,” Pittman said. “They previously couldn’t earn commission on some of these products.”

TourRadar offers inventory from large providers, like G Adventures and Globus, but also from smaller tour operators and DMCs around the world. In total, it offers 50,000 multiday adventures around the world, more than half of which are instantly bookable.

And Pittman hopes to form relationships with more agency groups, including consortia.

How TourRadar got its start

Pittman founded TourRadar in 2010 with his brother, Shawn, after a trip the two took to Croatia. They booked a sailing trip and wired $5,000 to the supplier, only to find no one there when they arrived. They eventually did find the supplier, but the whole experience — not being able to reach 24/7 customer support and not knowing if their money was just gone — spurred them to start to build out TourRadar’s marketplace.

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 the company began looking at digitizing the multiday tour space. Today, TourRadar offers fully bookable, multiday tours from 2,500 tour operators.

Pittman believes TourRadar’s inventory is the largest collection of multiday product available.

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