Travel, tours and experiences
I connect campaigns, availability, product pages, reviews and sales data to see which tours can grow, which ones absorb budget without margin and where the booking journey loses people.
Sector experience
A tour operator doesn’t sell a room that frees up every night: it sells seats on a departure, in a time slot, often with a guide and a maximum number of participants. That changes everything: budget shouldn’t follow high demand, it should follow capacity that can still be sold with margin.
I read performance by product, destination, language and market. The same tour can be profitable in English and lose money in another language, or sell out before increasing spend makes any sense.
Recurring problems
These recur across tour operators, attractions and guided-visit businesses.
The same ROAS goal applied to tours with completely different margins, guide costs and capacity.
Spend keeps flowing to departures that are already full while the ones that need filling stay quiet.
The value sent to the platforms ignores cancellations, refunds and distribution commissions.
The user looks for a specific experience and lands on a page listing everything, stretching the journey.
A sold-out date means leaving the site: no alternative date, no similar product suggested.
The intermediated channel brings volume, but its real cost against direct is never compared.
Purchase journey
The decision builds up before departure and continues afterwards: each step has its own metric.
Last-minute demand follows its own rules: the same experience shows different price elasticity and behaviour in the 48 hours before departure.
Purchase journey
The user is looking for things to do, not yet for an operator.
Marketplaces, OTAs, Things to do and the direct site are judged together, on price and reviews.
Duration, meeting point, guide language, inclusions and cancellation policy decide trust.
Real availability, time slots and participant count: a lot of qualified demand is lost here.
Currency, participant details and upsell influence the final booking value.
Reminders, instructions and weather changes reduce no-shows and refund requests.
Reviews, cross-sell on other products and repeat purchase feed future demand.
Areas of work
The activities differ between a city operator and a seasonal one, but this is the perimeter.
Systems and data
Advertising data alone doesn’t say which product was sold, to whom and at what margin.
KPIs
In this sector the account average almost always hides very different products.
A healthy average ROAS can coexist with loss-making tours: until you look at margin per product, budget keeps funding the wrong experiences.
Frequent mistakes
Method applied
The phases are the ones I use on every project, applied to product and capacity constraints.
Catalogue, margin per product, capacity, seasonality and markets served.
Product, value and currency tracking, with cancellations returned into the system.
Where it breaks: demand, product page, date selection or availability.
Fixes on spend and tracking, structural work on journey and integrations.
Hands-on campaign and measurement work, coordination of development and content.
Verification on margin per product and occupancy, not only on account ROAS.
Related
The technical competencies applied to a product catalogue, from value tracking to automation.
Google Ads, measurement and MarTech — Open the pageA close sector with different rules: rooms, hotel distribution and revenue management.
Hospitality — Open the pageHow metrics and constraints change across the other business models I work with.
All industries — Open the pageDirect answers
By working on three fronts at once: visibility on the demand that today goes to OTAs, product page clarity and a simple date and participant selection. The comparison has to be made on the real cost of the direct channel against the intermediary commission.
CRO and the booking journeyBy segmenting by destination, product, language and market instead of running one campaign. Bids should connect to product margin and remaining capacity, otherwise spend pushes departures that are already full.
Google Ads and paid mediaMargin per tour, cost per booking by product, profit ROAS, direct sales share, cancellation rate, booking lead time and departure occupancy. Average account ROAS says little about a heterogeneous catalogue.
How I define KPIsFirst by measuring what the direct channel really costs against the commission, then by working on consistent pricing, product content, reviews and booking conversion. Direct share grows when the site holds up in comparison, not when budget alone increases.
Diagnosis and prioritiesBy bringing inventory data into the investment logic: reducing pressure on nearly full departures and concentrating budget where sellable capacity with margin remains. It needs a reliable feed or integration between booking system and platforms.
MarTech and integrationsIt surfaces bookable experiences tied to an attraction or point of interest, comparing resellers and the official site. It only works with up-to-date prices and availability: incomplete data reduces visibility exactly at the comparison moment.
Acquisition and feedsBy attaching the purchased product, actual price, currency, direct delivery costs and channel commissions to the booking. Without the product inside the conversion data, margin stays an estimate.
Measurement and trackingNearby alternative dates, the same experience in another language or time slot, and similar products in the same destination. It’s one of the points where already-paid-for demand can be recovered instead of lost.
Journey analysisTell me what you sell, in which markets, how much weight OTAs carry and what data you have on products and cancellations. The first conversation is there to find where the result is lost.