What we observed

The underlying data for this signal is minimal.

What we can observe, then, is narrow: a single claim, sourced once, stating that activity and experience platforms — specifically named as Viator and GetYourGuide — continue to function as dominant intermediaries in travel bookings, even as direct booking is reportedly growing for flights and accommodation. Beyond that, however, there is no way to verify tone, methodology, or scope of the original source, since it is not available for review.

What is changing

The behavioural claim embedded in this signal is a divergence, not a single trend. For years, the travel industry narrative around disintermediation has largely been framed as directional and industry-wide: airlines and hotel chains investing in direct-booking apps, loyalty programs, and lower-friction checkout to reduce dependency on and commission payments to intermediaries. That narrative implicitly assumed a broad substitution effect — travelers moving away from search-and-compare marketplaces toward supplier-owned channels across the travel stack.

This signal complicates that picture. It suggests that whatever progress direct booking has made in flights and accommodation has not been replicated in tours, activities, and local experiences, where named aggregator platforms like Viator and GetYourGuide are described as retaining dominance. In other words, the emerging behaviour is not "travelers booking direct" as a monolithic trend, but travelers booking direct for some categories of travel spend while continuing to book indirectly, through marketplaces, for others. Previous behaviour, by implication, was broadly intermediary-dependent across the whole trip — flights, hotels, and activities alike routed through OTAs, metasearch, and marketplace platforms. The emerging behaviour described here is a bifurcation of that pattern along category lines.

Why this matters

If this divergence is real and durable, it has meaningful implications for how value is captured across the travel ecosystem. Airlines and hotel operators investing heavily in direct-channel infrastructure are, in effect, competing for a smaller and smaller share of bookings that still rely on intermediaries — a rational strategy if intermediary dependency is genuinely eroding in their categories. But if activity and experience intermediaries are structurally more durable, then platforms like Viator and GetYourGuide may be sitting on a more defensible position than the broader "OTA disruption" narrative would suggest, with commission-based revenue models that are harder for suppliers to bypass.

The most plausible explanation, reasoned from the material rather than confirmed by it, is structural asymmetry between categories. Flights and accommodation are supplied by a relatively concentrated set of large, well-capitalized operators (airlines, hotel chains) with the scale to build and market direct-booking apps and loyalty incentives. Activities and experiences, by contrast, are typically supplied by a long tail of small, local, often single-location operators — walking tour guides, boat trip operators, cooking class hosts — who lack the resources to build discovery, trust, and payment infrastructure on their own. For these suppliers, an aggregator that handles discovery, review aggregation, multilingual support, and secure payment is not simply a distribution channel but a piece of infrastructure they could not economically replicate. This asymmetry, if accurate, would help explain why direct-booking momentum in one part of the travel stack does not automatically transfer to another.

There is also a traveler-journey explanation worth considering: flights and lodging are typically the first and largest purchase decisions in a trip, often made well in advance and increasingly influenced by loyalty program lock-in; activities, by contrast, are frequently researched and booked closer to the travel date, often after arrival, when the traveler's priority is fast, trustworthy discovery of options in an unfamiliar destination — a use case marketplaces are well suited to serve.

How strong is the evidence

The evidence supporting this specific signal is thin by any standard. This is an important limitation to state plainly: nothing here should be read as validated by a diverse or convergent body of evidence.

What we're watching next

Particularly useful would be data on the market share or revenue growth of Viator, GetYourGuide, and comparable platforms relative to any direct-booking tools built by tour and activity operators themselves, as well as commentary from these platforms' own disclosures (where public) about take-rate trends and supplier concentration.

It would also be worth monitoring whether any contradictory evidence emerges — for instance, growth in operator-owned booking apps, embedded-widget booking technology, or bundling of activities into airline/hotel loyalty ecosystems — any of which would suggest the intermediary advantage in the activities segment is beginning to erode in the same way it reportedly has for flights and hotels. Geographic and demographic variation is another open question: this signal, as captured, makes no distinction between markets or traveler segments, and it is plausible that intermediary dominance in activities is stronger in some regions (where local supply fragmentation is more extreme) than in others.