Scenic and sightseeing transportation, land

Steam excursions, tour buses, horse-drawn carriages. The pre-screen read this as low-capital and seasonal, and at the carriage end it is. What makes it interesting is that the operator sets its own price — rare anywhere in transportation. The cut is who delivers the passengers. The cleanest evidence is the White Pass & Yukon Route, a 110 km seasonal tourist railway from Skagway into British Columbia and Yukon, sold in 2018 together with the docks its passengers land on. Its Canadian owner sold the rail, port and merchandise operations — including three Skagway docks with four cruise berths — for US$290M to a joint venture of Carnival's Holland America Princess Alaska Tours and Survey Point Holdings, the Alaskan firm already running the terminal; Carnival took a minority position and Survey Point the majority [A]. The line that brings the passengers and the firm that works the dock bought the attraction between them. A land excursion's demand arrives in blocks — off a ship, out of a hotel, through a resort's activity desk — and whoever owns that block can sell the seat at a markup, steer guests to a rival, or, as here, buy into the attraction once it is proven. The size bands say the same thing: of 71 Canadian establishments only 24 have fewer than five employees while 11 employ fifty or more, an unusually top-heavy shape for a tourism code, which suggests the durable form is a scaled operator attached to a destination's traffic rather than an independent with a vehicle. An entrant can buy the bus. It cannot buy the dock. The booking platforms that intermediate the remaining independent demand are screened separately at 487, and they take their commission from the same seat.