Insights from Arival’s 569-operator survey and our recent virtual panel with ETOA, TourAxis, and Lemax.
Going into 2026, 78% of multi-day tour operators told Arival they were optimistic. Though, fewer than half delivered growth in 2025. About one in four saw performance dip. And the operators pulling away from the pack are doing three things the others aren’t.
That’s the through-line from The Great Divide, the live panel we hosted with Arival, built on the second edition of Arival’s State of Multi-Day Tours research — 569 operator survey responses worldwide and nearly 50 executive interviews across the sector. Douglas Quinby, Co-Founder of Arival, walked the data with three speakers who live this every day: Mate Kostovski, CEO of Lemax; Jay Munro-Michell, Head of Buyer Network at ETOA; and Niel Koekemoer, CTO of TourAxis.
Here’s the version that matters for operators running the business.
The first divide: focused portfolios outperform broad ones
Around 73% of operators told Arival they were profitable, with most clustered in a margin band of 6%–20%. The headline looks healthy. The data inside it tells a sharper story.
Operators offering one or two product types were far more likely to clear a 10% margin: 58% did, compared with 39% for operators offering five or six. More products, more profit is intuitive. It’s also wrong.
“More products, much more complex to operate, much more difficult to scale — and that affects profitability,” Mate Kostovski said on the panel. He pointed to the deeper problem too: most operators carry a broad portfolio not because of strategy but because of history, and they can’t see P&L per product type clearly enough to know what to keep.
Niel Koekemoer ran the same play at TourAxis when they expanded into river cruises and rail. “We structured our product tiers specifically to create clear commercial separation, so each tier has its own margin profile and doesn’t cannibalise the others. Diversification only works with a clear margin case, plus the operational infrastructure to support it. Otherwise you’re growing the top line and shrinking the bottom line.”
Fixed-departure groups, for the record, were the more profitable line for both Lemax’s customer base and TourAxis. Different operators will land in different places. The point is knowing where you actually land.
The second divide: distribution is still overwhelmingly manual
Bookings come from everywhere in this sector. No single channel dominates. Third-party resellers (29%), direct website (20%), OTAs (19%), phone and email (18%), and website enquiry forms (14%) all carry meaningful share.
That isn’t the surprising part. What’s surprising is how operators connect with the resellers and OTAs driving nearly half their volume: by email, mostly. Even at large-operator scale, email remains the dominant integration method with travel trade partners. That breaks expectation, because larger operators should have more API-driven connectivity, not less.
“The product is not standardised,” Mate said. “Other industries have a central standard. Multi-day doesn’t. So every integration ends up as different formats, different everything.”
Jay Munro-Michell from ETOA added: multi-day is a high-consideration purchase, and human-assisted channels aren’t going anywhere. “People love that they can look things up, they can research, AI offers all kinds of opportunities to plan and idealise things. But when it comes to spending hard-earned cash on a trip, that’s not something they want to leave to chance.” During the recent geopolitical volatility, the panel saw bookings shift back toward traditional channels, not away from them.
The picture isn’t “automate everything.” It’s: automate the parts that should never have been manual, and design the human channels to win the moments that matter.
The third divide: AI as organisational capability, not individual productivity
63% of operators told Arival they’re actively using or experimenting with AI. The headline number masks where the actual divide is forming.
Most of that usage sits at the most basic tier: someone has a ChatGPT tab open, drafting product descriptions or social posts. That’s individual productivity. It isn’t organisational capability, and it isn’t where the value compounds.
“AI is going to create even greater divides. The best operators have systems that are AI-ready and can put AI on top of their connected data – products, suppliers, customers, bookings, prices, margins. The impact then isn’t a 20-30% lift. It’s structural.” – Mate Kostovski, CEO, Lemax
Niel Koekemoer mapped the path as three tiers. Content generation first. Operational AI second, connected to your data warehouse, task management, email, and booking data. Customer-facing applications last. “Most operators get stuck at Tier 1… The mistake is skipping from ‘someone uses ChatGPT’ to ‘let’s build a fully integrated customer chatbot.’ You haven’t earned that yet. Get AI working in your operations first.”
What defines the top of the market
Arival’s research distilled five characteristics of operators outperforming their peers:
- Systemised and tech-enabled — integrated booking, CRM, and operations, not manual stitching across email and spreadsheets.
- Focused product strategy — a disciplined portfolio built around what drives margin, not what has accumulated over the years.
- Diversified distribution — a balanced mix of direct, OTAs, and travel-trade partners. No single-channel dependency.
- Commercial and data-driven — active management of pricing, channel performance, and product economics.
- Built to scale with AI — AI embedded across the operation, delivering customisation at margin-efficient scale.
What unifies them is straightforward to describe and hard to execute: a single source of truth across the business, run with operational discipline, with leadership commitment to the system that supports it. Where that foundation exists, AI compounds it. Where it doesn’t, AI is a browser tab.
What this means for mid-market operators
If you’re running a 30–100-employee operator, the practical takeaways from the panel are clear.
Know your margin per product type at the point of quote, not at year-end. If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it. Decide which products earn their place on cost-to-serve, not on history. Standardise the customer touches that should be standardised, and resist standardising the ones that win the booking. And before adding another AI tool, ask whether it’s connecting to your data or just sitting next to it.
The macro environment isn’t going to do anyone any favours over the next six months. The operators who come out of this period ahead are the ones treating it as the moment to make the operational decisions they’ve been postponing.
If today’s data raised questions about your operation, let’s have a conversation.
Book a personal consultation with the Lemax team to talk through where the divides hit your business, and what closing the gap looks like for a multi-day operator built like yours.
