The Shifting Sands of Tourism: 15 Years of Watching an Industry Reinvent Itself

By Chethan Kumar N P, Founder & CEO, Bayard Vacations

I didn't plan to write this. But after 15 years of watching this industry shed its skin — one layer at a time, one vertical at a time — I felt like I owed it to everyone who's ever asked me, "Are tour operators still relevant?" to answer honestly. Not with a brochure. Not with a pitch. With what I've actually seen.

So here it is. The real story.

It Wasn't That Long Ago

Think back to 2010. Booking a holiday meant something completely different.

It meant walking into a travel office — usually a cramped one with stacked les, airline posters on the walls, and a landline that never stopped ringing. It meant someone handing you a printed itinerary and saying "trust me, this hotel is good." It meant paying an advance in cash and praying everything worked out the way they promised. And here's the thing — most of the time, it did. Because back then, the tour operator wasn't just a nice-to-have. They were the only way to make sense of travel.

Flights? You needed an agent to check availability and book on GDS terminals. Train tickets? You needed someone who knew the quota system and could get a Tatkal booking before you even knew the window opened. Bus bookings? That was physical counter territory. Hotels? They had no websites, no reviews worth trusting, no directbooking options. Activities at a destination? You asked your driver. Who asked someone else. Who knew a guy.

Everything ran through the tour operator. And for a while, that was genuinely useful — even essential.

The Great Unravelling: One Vertical at a Time

What happened over the next 15 years wasn't a sudden disruption. It was more like a slow, methodical unwinding — like someone pulling a thread from a sweater, one layer at a time.

Bus and Train: The first to go

The first thing travellers stopped needing operators for was the most basic one — a seat on a bus or a train.

RedBus didn't just build a booking platform. It built trust. And once Indian travellers trusted a screen enough to pay for a bus ticket, the psychological barrier was broken. By 2018, RedBus had 70% of the online bus ticketing market in India. IRCTC followed, slowly at rst and then completely. Today, OTAs account for 88% of all online bus bookings in India. The train booking segment has essentially left tour operator territory altogether. The tour operators who depended on bus and train booking fees felt this first. Some adjusted. Many didn't.

Flights: The revenue pillar that crumbled next

When I started in this industry, flights were serious business for tour operators. A family booking four tickets to Bangkok? You earned a 5- 7% airline commission plus a service fee. That was meaningful revenue. And more than the money — it was the reason the client called you.

Then MakeMyTrip, GoIbibo, and Cleartrip arrived. Then airlines started pushing direct booking hard, because every intermediary cost them distribution fees. IndiGo. SpiceJet. Air India. They made theirapps frictionless. They ran exclusive web fares. They ran flash sales that no agent could match.

Today, low-cost carriers globally achieve 85-95% direct bookings. MakeMyTrip and GoIbibo together dominate close to 80% of India's online flight booking market. The standalone flight ticket, for individual travellers, is gone from tour operator hands. What remains is group bookings and MICE — and even there, the pressure is constant.

Hotels: The partial shift

Hotels are where it gets interesting — and where the first sliver of hope for tour operators reappears. Yes, OTAs took over a huge chunk. Booking.com, Agoda, OYO, and the hotels' own direct booking engines changed the game. But here's what the data actually shows: OTAs have a "limited presence in the holiday packages segment, dominated by traditional tour operators". A traveller can book a hotel room online easily. But a complete 7- night Bali itinerary — with vetted hotels, guaranteed room types, private transfers, and a fixed total price? That's harder to pull o without an operator. About 30-35% of hotel bookings within packaged holidays still flow through tour operators. That number has held, and I believe it will continue to hold — for reasons I'll get to.

Activities and Transport: The last frontier, now under pressure

This is where we are right now. And it is the most interesting battleground. For years, local transportation and activities were completely operator territory. Your driver on Day 1 in Bali? Your sunset dinner booking in Santorini? Your safari briefing in Masai Mara? You got all of that through your operator, because there was no easy alternative. Then Klook launched in 2014. GetYourGuide scaled globally. Viator built a network of 300,000 bookable experiences across 250,000 destinations. KKday, Airbnb Experiences, and local cab aggregators followed. The $1 trillion tours and activities market — which was100% analogue not long ago — is now 30% digital and digitising fast.

We're not at the end of this shift yet. But the direction is clear.

So What's Actually Left?

Here's the honest answer: quite a lot. But only for operators who understand what they're really selling. The travellers who still come to tour operators today — and there are many — aren't coming because they can't gure out a booking app. They're coming for something apps genuinely cannot provide. Let me break that down.

The time-scarce professional. Executives and entrepreneurs in the 35-50 age bracket account for 42% of premium international travel spending in India. These people could plan a Japan trip themselves. The information is all out there. But between managing a business, raising kids, and trying to sleep — they don't have 20 hours to spend building a 12-day itinerary. They want to describe what they want once and receive a perfectly planned trip.

The first-time international traveller. India's outbound tourism market is projected to reach $55.4 billion by 2034, growing at 11.4% annually. A huge portion of that growth is first-timers heading to Southeast Asia or Europe who want the safety net of a fixed cost, a clear plan, and someone they can call if the visa process gets complicated. No OTA provides a phone number that answers.

Senior travellers and multi-generational families. A 70-year-old couple and their grandchildren touring Europe are not booking themselves through Klook. They want a tour manager who can arrange wheelchair assistance at the airport, ensure the restaurant has vegetarian options, and handle the hotel check-in in a language they don't speak.

Corporate and MICE travel. The MICE sector alone was valued at

$886 billion in 2024. A 60-person incentive trip to Bali, with chartered transfers, blocked hotel floors, team activities, and a gala dinner — that is not a problem that any app solves. It requires a tour operator with relationships, accountability, and the ability to project-manage across time zones.

The premium and luxury traveller. This is the fastest growing segment and the one I care about most. India's luxury travel market was valued at $72.9 billion in 2024 and is heading toward $102.8 billion by 2033. Luxury travel bookings from India grew 32% for 2025 alone. These travellers trust boutique travel companies for privacy, exclusivity, and someone who owns the experience end to end.

The Definition of "Elite" Has Changed — And This is the Most Important Thing I've Noticed

This is the part I've been thinking about the longest.

When I started in this industry, the word "elite" in travel meant one thing: money. Expensive hotel. Business class flight. Private transfers. If you had the budget, you had the elite experience. Money was the moat. That moat is gone. In 2025, a reasonably affluent traveller can book a five-star hotel at the Maldives on their phone in 10 minutes. They can get a business class fare on a price aggregator. They can hire a private driver on Klook. The money can buy the components — but the components alone are no longer what people are paying for. What premium travellers are craving now is entirely different. It's

flexibility, accountability, and availability — and a very specfic kind of human touch.

They want an itinerary built precisely around them — not a template with their name at the top. If the plan changes mid-trip because the weather shifts or a restaurant disappoints, they want someone who can pivot in real time and make it seamless. They want to know that someone who genuinely understands travel — not a call centre script— is reachable when it actually matters.Luxury today, as the industry itself has noted, is no longer about marble flooors and gold taps. It is about pace, privacy, and personalisation. It is about experiences anchored in local culture and depth that cannot be replicated. According to research, 65% of luxury customers now see personalization as a crucial part of their experience — and many are willing to pay 25% more for a genuinely tailored journey.

The traveller of 2025 doesn't want to be sold to. They want to be understood. And they use technology for safety and confidence — not to replace the human who can guide them where it genuinely matters.

Where Technology and the Human Expert Meet: What We Built at Bayard Vacations

This is where I'll talk about what we're doing — not as a sales pitch, but because the philosophy matters.

When I started building Bayard Vacations, I made a deliberate choice: I didn't want to be a full-service operator for everything. I wanted to be deeply, almost unreasonably expert in the things that still need a human — and ruthlessly use technology to handle everything that doesn't.

That's what led us to build Bayard Buddy, our AI travel assistant. The idea behind Bayard Buddy is simple: travellers have thousands of questions during the planning process, and many of them are genuinely answerable without a human being involved. "What's the best time to visit Japan?" "Do I need a visa for Vietnam?" "Is Ubud better than Seminyak for a honeymoon?" These are real questions, and people deserve fast, accurate answers without waiting for a sales call. Bayard Buddy handles that layer. Instantly, at any hour, across WhatsApp and our website. The traveller gets the answer. They don't feel like they're talking to a bot — because the answers are actually good. But here's what Bayard Buddy doesn't do: she doesn't replace the expert conversation. When a client needs to talk about a complex 15-day Europe trip with specific hotel preferences, specific dietary needs, a 7-year-old child and a 78-year-old grandmother — that conversation comes to a real person at Bayard who knows what they're talking about.

The technology handles scale. The human handles meaning.

That balance is what defines the new elite travel company. Not the logo on the boarding pass. Not the star rating of the hotel. The degree to which the experience was built around you — and the confidence that someone who knows what they're doing is quietly making sure everything works.

Hyper-personalisation, done right, isn't about AI generating an itinerary from a form you filled out. It is about using technology to understand a client deeply — their travel history, their pace, their preferences, the things they'd never think to mention but that make the difference between a good trip and an unforgettable one — and then deploying genuine expertise to build something around all of that.

This is the vision behind Bayard Vacations. Not tour operators in the old sense. Not a booking aggregator in the new sense. Something in between: a tech-enabled concierge that knows when to step back and when to step in.

The Clients Who've Taught Me the Most

I've had premium clients over the years who came to us speciffically because they'd tried doing it themselves — and something went wrong. A hotel that looked perfect on the website turned out to be half-constructed. A visa that "should have been ne" wasn't. A private tour that was simply a WhatsApp number that stopped responding on arrival. They didn't come back to tour operators because tour operators got cheaper. They came back because the risk of getting it wrong — emotionally, not just financially — was too high. I've also had clients who use every app imaginable, follow every travel influencer, and know more about Bali than most people who live there. And they still call us. Not because they need information. Because they trust the execution. That trust is earned slowly and lost fast. It doesn't come from a certificate on the wall. It comes from picking up the phone at 11 PM when someone's connection in Dubai is at risk and fixing it.

The Challenges We Can't Ignore

I'd be doing a disservice to anyone reading this if I ended here without being honest about the headwinds. Millennials and Gen Z are extremely comfortable planning their own trips. They've grown up booking everything themselves and they see no reason to change that for a Goa weekend or a Bali trip where everything is already on Google. The independent segment is real and growing.

The AI platforms being built by OTAs, by Google, by startups like Expedia's Romie — they are getting genuinely good at itinerary generation. They don't yet handle complexity well, and they still can't own accountability when something breaks. But they will get better. And the activities frontier — Klook, GetYourGuide, Viator — will continue to digitise what was once purely operator territory. The operators who don't have a clear answer to "why come to me instead of booking this on an app?" will lose ground here quickly.

The operators who survive — and thrive — will be those who've made peace with a smaller but higher-value role. Those who've invested in technology not to replace the human, but to make the human available exactly when and where they're needed.

What I Believe About the Future

After 15 years of watching this industry change, here's what I know for certain.Tour operators are not going to disappear. But the ones who look exactly like they did in 2010 — the ones still trying to earn from bus tickets and flight commissions, the ones who think information is still their advantage — those operators are already gone, they just haven't fully realised it yet.

The ones who will de ne the next decade of travel are building something different. They are curators, not clerks. They are advisors, not agents. They use technology to serve scale and humans to serve trust. And they know that in a world where anyone can book anything in under 10 minutes, the only irreplaceable thing they offer is expertise, accountability, and a relationship that goes beyond a single booking. The travellers who understand this — and there are more of them than you think — aren't going anywhere.And neither are we.

Chethan Kumar N P is the Founder and CEO of Bayard Vacations, a travel tech company building AI-powered travel experiences for discerning Indian travellers. He has been working in the tourism industry for over 15 years.