Listings Were Never the Answer

In this fast-dawning age of AI answers as the default construct for what we are searching for, the traditional listings paradigm that has dominated online travel booking for decades is facing an existential crisis. We may be at an inflection point where the very nature of how we discover and book experiences is being fundamentally reimagined. The days of endless scrolling through similar listings may soon be behind us and here's why, I argue below.

This early shift is most evident in the tours and activities sector, what the industry now calls Experiences sector, where the limitations of list-based discovery are becoming increasingly apparent as AI-driven personalized recommendations seems to be the most obvious superior alternative.

The current listings-based approach, exemplified by these platforms like GetYourGuide, Viator, and Klook, suffers from several critical weaknesses. For example, when a traveler searches for "day trips from Casablanca," they're confronted with an overwhelming array of seemingly identical options, as I was in my recent extended stay in Morocco. Each listing, while potentially vetted by the platform, exists in a sort of contextual vacuum. The primary quality differentiator becomes user reviews – a metric that, while valuable, is increasingly insufficient as a standalone decision-making t