New research from 569 operators reveals a widening performance gap and the factors that determine which side of it you’re on.
Global bookings are up. Operators are broadly optimistic. And on the surface, the multi-day tour sector looks like a success story.
But Arival’s State of Multi-Day 2026 report tells a more complicated story. One that every mid-market operator should read carefully, because the divide it describes is already underway, and it is widening faster than most people realise.
The recovery is real. The growth is not.
The headline number is encouraging: global multi-day tour bookings are up 8% versus pre-pandemic 2019 levels. For a sector that was essentially shut down for two years, that is a genuine achievement.
But look underneath that number and the picture shifts. Less than half of operators reported year-on-year growth in 2025. APAC and the Middle East & Africa are outperforming strongly, while North America has slowed, with US operators reporting flat results driven in part by weaker inbound tourism. Europe continues to expand but faces growing pressure from overtourism concerns in key destinations.
Recovery and growth, it turns out, are not the same thing. And for a significant proportion of operators, the tailwind of post-pandemic demand is no longer doing the work for them.
A divide is opening
The most important finding in the Arival research is not about bookings or revenue. It is about the structural gap that is emerging between two types of operator.
On one side:
Operators who have built system-enabled, commercially sophisticated businesses. They have the technology infrastructure to manage complex itineraries, multi-channel distribution and supplier relationships without drowning in manual processes. They have visibility into their own data. They can make decisions quickly and execute at scale.
On the other side:
Operators running largely on email, spreadsheets and institutional knowledge. Not because they lack ambition, but because the operational transformation required to change that is genuinely hard to execute without disrupting the business you have already built.
The Arival data makes this divide visible in several specific ways.
1 in 3 operators are dissatisfied with their current booking technology and plan to change it in 2026.
More strikingly, 1 in 5 operators have no booking system at all, managing reservations through email, spreadsheets and messaging apps like WhatsApp. Even among growing businesses.
64% of operators say their biggest challenge is not budget. It is education, execution and systems.
The constraint is not financial, it is operational and capability-based.
Only 1 in 4 operators rate their marketing as very effective, despite two thirds spending less than 10% of revenue on it. The issue is not investment. It is the tools, knowledge and processes to make that investment work.
44% of operators globally now cite increased competition as their top near-term risk.
That risk is particularly acute for operators who have not built the operational foundations to compete efficiently at scale.
Taken together, these findings describe a sector that is quietly bifurcating. The Arival report frames it clearly: a divide is emerging between system-enabled operators and those constrained by manual processes and narrow distribution channels. The next wave of the multi-day market will not lift all boats equally.
What high-performing operators are doing differently
The research also points, indirectly, to what separates the operators pulling ahead. It is not a single decision or a single technology investment. It is a series of interconnected choices about how to structure operations for scale.
They have moved from manual to systematic
The operators growing fastest have reduced their dependence on individual knowledge and manual processes by building systems that handle the operational complexity of multi-day touring (itinerary management, supplier coordination, pricing, availability and distribution) in a structured, repeatable way. This is not about replacing people. It is about removing the friction that prevents people from doing their best work.
They treat distribution as a strategic question, not a logistical one
The Arival research shows that multi-day distribution is fragmented and largely manual, most operators still manage OTA relationships through extranets and email. The operators gaining ground are those who have thought carefully about which channels align with their product and customer, built the connectivity to reach those channels efficiently, and resisted the pressure to distribute everywhere at the cost of margin and product differentiation.
They have focus, not just breadth
One of the more counterintuitive findings in the report is that operators with a more focused product mix are more profitable than those with the widest catalogue. Two-thirds of operators offer three or more tour types, but those offering one or two are significantly more likely to report margins above 10%. Scale supports stability. Focus drives margin.
They are building owned audiences
Word of mouth remains the single most effective driver of direct bookings, followed by organic search and email to an owned customer database. The operators compounding fastest are those who have invested consistently in these channels, not because they are cheap, but because they build durable, independent demand that is not dependent on OTA commissions or paid media costs.
The strategic question for 2026
The Arival data presents a challenge that is worth sitting with: if competition is rising, growth is becoming harder to achieve, and the performance gap between operators is widening, what does your business need to look like to be on the right side of that divide?
The honest answer is that operational maturity is no longer a back-office concern. It is a commercial one. The operators with the infrastructure to manage complexity efficiently are the ones with the margin to invest in growth. The operators running on manual processes are the ones whose capacity for growth is constrained by how much their team can physically handle.
That does not mean every operator needs to transform overnight. The Arival research is clear that a meaningful proportion of operators are deliberately lifestyle-focused or in maintenance mode, and that is a legitimate choice. But for operators with genuine growth ambitions, the data suggests that the window for incremental improvement is narrowing. The divide is not coming. It is already here.
Join our Virtual Panel – 7th May @ 4pm BST | 5pm CEST
On 7th May, Lemax is hosting a free virtual panel, ‘The Great Divide: Why the Multi-Day Market Is Splitting in Two’ with speakers from Arival, ETOA and TourAxis. The panel will explore the findings discussed in this article in depth, with frank discussion from operators and industry leaders who are living this transformation firsthand.
