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Dublin discusses the biggest change in sightseeing for 100 years

Dublin Travel Massive got together in September with special guests Alex Bainbridge and Keith McDonnell to discuss the future of the in-destination market in the next decade.

This event recap is written by Kevin O’Shaughnessy, Dublin Travel Massive leader. Kevin is the co-founder of CityHook — a multi-modal travel search for airport connections.

📷 Photos and video credit: Raphael Photography.

The seminar was hosted at HuckleTree Dublin — watch the short video recap below.

Thanks to our sponsors  Viasat, who announced partnerships with InflightFlix and GetYourGuide to transform the onboard experience; and TravelPort Digital, who recently picked up an award at Aviation Festival for their work on the EasyJet mobile application.

Our special guest — Alex Bainbridge

Over a decade ago, Alex Bainbridge founded TourCMS to try to make it easy for the “activities” sector to capture the emerging digital market, valued at $183B. Alex was so early in the space that he gave rise to what we now know as “Tours and Activities”.

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The digital space for reservations was still only emerging: his platform, along with Rezgo, were first considered “brochure-less travel” by some of the existing players in the market and by others as “Software as a service”.

While both technically true, the platform went on to transact over $250M in bookings annually, and remains one of the largest processors of bookings in the space, according to Alex.

🎙 Listen to Alex’s interview on the Travel Massive Podcast.

The future — autonomous vehicles in Tours & Activities

From Alex’s perspective, there is a seismic shift coming to sightseeing: the largest for over 100 years.

Instead of buses with 20 passengers each following a fixed, published itinerary, we can now start thinking about newer ways to create and follow personalised routes around the city thanks to autonomous vehicles.

This is the three-part play in his new Autoura venture — a software approach to building custom tours whether for e-scooters, existing autonomous car platforms and his own custom-built sightseeing vehicle.

Alex shared some thoughts about funding such a venture: he still holds the majority stake in Autoura (he sold TourCMS still holding 97% of the company).

He believes that it’s hard to enter travel technology, or technology itself, without a CTO co-founder (the only recent exceptions to this are AirBnB thanks to their heavy design and web background and Snapchat.)

The Dublin scene — Keith McDonnell

We were also joined by Keith McDonnell, an Irish tourism entrepreneur to help give the on-the-ground perspective. Keith himself was once an “IT guy” but started his adventure sports business to get out of the office.

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In the early days of promoting the business, he found himself wondering how to promote his new tours product while having a smoke on Dublin’s College Green tourism hotspot.

It came to him there: take over the old cigar shop on the corner and build a tourist office. From here he now runs a series of successful day-tours, excursions and other attractions.

Keith shared some great insights into how digital marketing and retail marketing works, how he chooses which digital channels to follow and more.

Keith owns his own coaches, and while he says that drivers are the key to customer service, he did say that the future for him is electric. He’d like to see e-buses running on the streets of Dublin to keep with our local “green image”, but also to run his own fleet on electric by 2026.

Today, the technology doesn’t exist for coaches to reach 800KM of range on a charge — it’s time for Elon Musk to stand up and deliver e-buses as part of his mission.


Update 21/11: 🎙 Listen to an excerpt from Keith’s interview on SoundCloud


Special thanks

Thanks to Ultan O’Brien from Viasat and Mark Lenahan, Head of Propositions – Air and Rail at Travelport who also shared their insights.

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Also, a big thank you also to our outgoing co-leader Pauline Kwasniak who is making a career move, we wish you all the best!

— Thanks for the event recap, Kevin!


Follow Kevin on Travel Massive and join Dublin Travel Massive to connect with the local community.


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