When I joined Alberto Gutiérrez to scale-up Civitatis more
than eight years ago, I initially questioned our limited offerings. Wouldn't
more options accelerate growth? However, I quickly discovered the opposite. Our
curated marketplace was one of our key differentiators against competitors
focused mainly on quantity.
Their approach, prioritizing supplier competition,
overlooked a critical factor: user experience. Unlike commodities like
transportation, comparing tour options is time-consuming, uneasy and often
overwhelming for customers. Travelers planning a visit to the Vatican in Rome
or the Alhambra in Spain shouldn't have to wade through dozens of options as it
happens in many online travel agencies.
As Barry Schwartz highlights in the book The Paradox of
Choice: Why More Is Less, “the fact that some choice is good doesn't
necessarily mean that more choice is better.” While increased options can lead
to objectively better results, it can also cause anxiety, indecision and
dissatisfaction. As Schwartz suggests, “choose less and feel better.”
That is why Civitatis has decided to curate its portfolio
since 2008, partnering directly with local operators to ensure the highest
quality and selecting the best tours based on price, millions of verified
reviews, availability and crucially, language options to cater our key markets:
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French. This provides a simple user
experience, allowing customers to book with ease and focus on simply enjoying
their trip.
A good example is Rome, a top destination for us, where we
provide 90 carefully chosen activities in contrast to other OTAs that offer a
much larger selection exceeding 500, many of them covering the same points of
interest. The reality is that when you go to Rome, your one big holiday for the
year, you don’t crave hundreds of Colosseum tour options. You seek the single
best provider, offering the tour in your native language and at the right
frequency, availability and price. This ensures you get the optimal experience
for your once-in-a-lifetime visit.
Choosing the right tour operators can be tough, but the
positive results show our approach is right. Fewer, carefully chosen options in
each destination, combined with diverse and efficient web traffic, drive a high
conversion rate, allowing us to serve 10 million travelers in 2023, a number
set to increase by 50% this year. This has resulted in true and sustainable
profitability since our inception 16 years ago.
Curation is a continuous process. It's dynamic, requiring
constant research, analysis and comparison of tours, operators and attractions
across our 4,000 destinations by our team of local experts, not bots or artificial intelligence,
ensuring relevance and meaningfulness.
Our supply partners understand that offering the best value
proposition is key to secure a listing on Civitatis, granting them access to a
massive and growing market, particularly within the leading Spanish-speaking
world. This vast market that we lead boasts over 650 million native speakers,
including 60 million in the United States alone, and encompasses thriving Latin
American economies experiencing a surge in outbound travel.
Most importantly, curation based on these standards drives
brand loyalty and satisfied customers who trust our selection and best-in-class
quality more and more frequently, not just for major trips but also for
discovering their surroundings with local experiences.
Finally, some might argue that curation restricts customer
freedom of choice, and others that AI will eventually curate travel directly.
However, both these viewpoints overlook the value of the human touch in
selecting the perfect experience. In today's world, we are constantly seeking
recommendations from friends, influencers, locals and other sources. Vacation
time is precious, and people rely on trusted sources for the best advice to
fill their trips with the really best memorable things to do. That is exactly
what we provide: offering fewer, but exceptional tours that focus on quality
over quantity.