The original “newcomer” has replenished the number of sellers on the tourist market – the largest online seller of consumer goods, the Wildberries service, has begun selling tours to Russians. Now on the website of the online store you can buy a tour in Russia or abroad. True, as ATOR experts emphasized, it is premature to call the service a full-fledged tour operator, and in fact it is not even an online aggregator.
According to Wildberries, in the online store “offers tours from tour operators and aggregators. ATOR made sure that in the assortment you can find tours of all the largest tour operators, including Anex Tour, Pegas Touristik, TEZ Tour, FUN & SUN, etc. At the same time, as tour operators noted for the association, online the seller does not have direct integration with them. “Tours are simply “pulled up” from other partner sites – existing online tour aggregators,” ATOR explained, in particular, we can talk about the Travelata.ru service. It is also expected that Wildberries is not included in the register of tour operators.
In general, tour operators are more likely to find it positive that their product has appeared on such a popular online showcase. The risk of increased competition can only be if the aggregators acquire a status that gives them the right to form a tourism product – and it is not at all the fact that they are striving for this. In the meantime, the entry of such giants as Wildberries on the tourist market is considered a useful incentive for the development of online sales and an increase in the popularity of organized travel. Moreover, the online seller is far from the first platform to enter this market. The same hotel booking is built into the websites of almost all air carriers – for example, S7 and Pobedy, flights and ready-made tours on their platforms offer to buy banks, retailers and mobile operators. For example, Yandex and Tutu, as well as other major representatives of the Russian online market, run their own large companies in tourism.
In general, according to experts, Wildberries are more “probing” the audience. If the demand justifies itself, we can expect promotions that will attract additional tourists – booking bonuses, cashback and discounts.
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