Skift Take
Google’s Things To Do tool has been met with both trepidation and excitement. In the tours and activities space, unlike other travel verticals, we expect that Google will benefit the online intermediaries, giving prominence to online travel agencies.
In September 2021, Google launched an advertising product called Google Things To Do, which lists not only the top attractions in a city but also options to book tickets via direct sites or online travel agencies. As we show in the screenshot below, though Google displays paid sponsored listings near the top of the site, its main organic booking list prioritizes the direct website over the sites of aggregators such as Viator, GetYourGuide and Musement, to name a few.
As an exercise to test how often the direct site does appear top of the list, and also to understand which online travel agencies are listing on Google’s Things To Do tool, we ran a web scraping analysis across 40 cities in each global region, looking at the top 10 booking options listed for the top 20 attractions in each city.
As we show in