Practical guides for tour operators.
How to reduce OTA commissions, win more direct bookings, fill empty seats, and reach the customer who scanned your poster yesterday. Written for people who run real tours, not for algorithms.
OTA strategy
- 12 min
How to Reduce OTA Commissions: A Practical Guide for Tour Operators
OTAs are now one of the largest distribution channels in tours and activities. This guide walks through the practical steps small operators take to grow direct bookings alongside their OTA listings — without disappearing from the platforms.
- 10 min
Choosing Your OTA Mix: A Tour Operator's Guide to Viator, GetYourGuide and Direct
Each booking channel has a role. OTAs reach travellers you cannot reach alone. Direct keeps the relationship. This is a clear-headed look at when each channel is the right one to lean on.
Direct booking
- 14 min
How to Get More Direct Bookings as a Small Tour Operator
A practical guide for solo guides, small boat operators, and one-van day-trip companies. Twelve tactics that move bookings off OTAs and onto your own checkout, ranked by effort vs. payback.
- 10 min
How to Win Back Customers After an OTA Booking
When a customer books through an OTA, the OTA owns them. But the moment they arrive at your tour, the relationship is yours again. Here is the legal, ethical, OTA-policy-safe way to convert an OTA guest into a direct repeat customer.
Wallet & QR
- 11 min
Apple Wallet and Google Wallet for Tour Operators: A Beginner's Guide
Boarding-pass-style cards aren't just for airlines. Here is how small tour operators use Apple Wallet and Google Wallet to keep their offer on a tourist's lock screen for a full week, with no app and no email.
- 9 min
QR Codes on Tour Posters: A Practical Guide to High-Converting Designs
A QR code on a poster is one of the cheapest customer touchpoints a tour operator has. Placement, contrast, and what happens after the scan decide whether that touchpoint pays for itself. Here is what we have learned designing posters that convert.
Pricing & yield
- 12 min
Yield Management for Tour Operators: How to Fill Empty Seats Tonight
Yield management is not airline pricing science. It is a small set of moves you make in the last 48 hours before departure. Eight of them, with the numbers, the pitfalls, and the channels that actually deliver.
- 9 min
Last-Minute Discounts That Don't Hurt Your Brand: A Tour Operator's Guide
Recurring public discounts quietly teach your market to wait. Done with care, last-minute pricing recovers margin from seats that would otherwise sail empty. A discounting framework that protects how your full price is perceived.
Marketing
- 10 min
Multilingual Marketing for Tour Operators: A Practical Playbook
If you sell tours to international tourists, English is rarely enough. The languages that actually move the needle, the pages worth translating, and a low-cost workflow that does not require a translation agency on retainer.
- 14 min
The Tour Operator's First-Year Marketing Playbook (2026)
Most new operators try to do everything in year one, run out of cash, and conclude marketing doesn't work. This is the realistic 12-month plan, in order, with what to skip until year two.