Pivots, a pandemic and platform-building: The 15-year evolution of TourRadar

Many startups don’t make it past the first chapter. For TourRadar, the story spans more than 15 years, multiple business model shifts, and a complete industry shutdown.

Founded by Australian brothers Travis and Shawn Pittman in 2010 and backed by Speedinvest in 2013, what began as a photo-sharing community for expats in London has grown into a global marketplace for multi-day adventure tours.

“We were one of the first social networks in travel… I always say we were 7 to 10 years too early for Instagram,” Travis said. 

Like many early-stage startups, being ahead of the curve meant waiting for the market to catch up. TourRadar’s initial product was spun out of a previous venture called bugbitten. It resembled a social media network, with tens of thousands of photos uploaded every day, around the same time Instagram started.

But a pattern began to emerge. Many of the images came from travelers on organized tours in far-flung places. The brothers saw an opportunity to connect the dots. Why not help people find, book, and manage multi-day tours online?

The Big Leap: Building the Booking Platform

TourRadar set out to digitize a highly fragmented corner of travel. Multi-day tours had typically been sold through physical travel agents or offline tour operators. Aggregating this industry into a single digital platform required not just technical ambition but also market education.

“It was a behemoth of an idea to try to do… especially back then, because people were not so comfortable transacting online,” Travis added.

The company expanded from a niche marketplace to a broader platform, experimenting with white-label distribution tools and SaaS-like products for tour operators. What started as a simple idea became a much bigger, more complicated bet on the future of travel booking.

Fifteen years on, TourRadar now offers more than 50,000 multi-day tours & adventures across 160 countries. But growth has never been a straight line. Much like the white water rafting trips available on the site, building the business has involved navigating rapids and unexpected turns.

“Too much money can be a bad thing.”

Bringing a big vision to life takes money. And getting money means selling that vision to investors, often before all the pieces are in place.

“In those early funding conversations, we sometimes had to tweak our business model to match what was investable at the time,” Travis said. “But we never lost the belief that online booking was the future of travel.”

At times, this meant raising capital before product-market fit was fully proven. “It was inefficient. We do things completely differently now,” he added.

TourRadar learned to adapt its story and offering to meet the demands of the moment. But the pursuit of scale came with trade-offs. “Money can help when you have product-market fit or a lever that’s working. But when you're still figuring things out, too much money can be a bad thing,” Travis said.

Board expectations added pressure. “They’d be saying, grow and spend, and I’d be thinking, I’m not sure we should. But you do it anyway. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

The experience left an impression. It’s often said that more startups die of indigestion than starvation. 

When the World Stopped Moving

By 2020, TourRadar had scaled into a significant global player, having raised funds from the former CEO of Expedia, Silicon Valley fund TCV, and, of course, Speedinvest. Then COVID-19 hit.

“The travel industry collapsed overnight,” Travis remembers. “We had just done a big funding round, and suddenly our entire market disappeared. Our bookings went to zero.”

The company found itself in uncharted territory. “We had tens of millions of euros in bookings out in the world that just got cancelled overnight. We had to refund customers, and then also return the commission on top of that. We literally had negative revenue.”

Survival meant leaning into resilience and trust. “We refunded or gave people credit for future travel, which was a huge company-wide initiative to roll out in record time to deal with the deluge of cancellation requests coming in. That hurt, but it was the right thing to do. And it paid off in customer trust later.”

Culture, Travis said, was critical. “People talk about company culture in the good times, but it’s the loyalty and trust in each other that really pulls you through the shit times.”

The leadership team rallied. The whole team rallied. Travis carved out time to clear his head in the Vienna woods, mountain biking and running to get perspective. “I had to be really careful with decision-making. Some choices would impact hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, and tour partners. So I focused on making one or two good decisions a day, sometimes it was about picking the best of a bad bunch.”

Even as bookings collapsed, the company kept building. “We put everything on the table. We questioned our business model, rethought the vision, and built out a whole new B2B part of the business.”

That rethink ultimately helped reposition TourRadar as a platform, not just a marketplace. The pandemic forced the team to rebuild with greater clarity, discipline, and purpose.

Fifteen Years In, Still Moving Fast

Today, TourRadar operates with renewed focus. After completing a category design process with Play Bigger, they've even created a new travel category, "Organized Adventures." The result? Partnerships with major distribution players, seamless booking for thousands of tours, and a truly category-defining business.

“People still want discovery, community, and experiences,” Travis said. “We’re just using better tools to deliver them now.”

Alongside the tech, the business is investing in sustainability and product innovation. The post-COVID version of TourRadar is leaner, smarter, and more scalable. 

The company has also just launched Moments – a new tool which allows users to upload authentic photos and videos from their adventures, helping to cut through the edited lens of social media posts. And because TourRadar has already built a rock-solid commerce platform, those genuine stories now link straight to bookable trips, putting them in prime position to own the fast-growing “social commerce” space.  With the rise of AI-generated content, authenticity is the new currency online, and TourRadar has come full circle on photo-sharing, this time with the checkout built in.

TourRadar’s story is not one of instant success. It is a journey marked by pivots, persistence, and belief in a long-term vision. From a photo-sharing site for expats to a global booking platform, the company has weathered industry shifts, investor pressures, and even a global shutdown.

Fifteen years in, it is still pushing forward. Still evolving. Still building.

For a startup in the travel sector, that might just be the greatest adventure of all.