Tour operators test countless avenues to sell their experiences and promote their business to new potential customers. Oftentimes, they’ll design engaging tour listings for their website and enable direct bookings. (Simply giving customers the ability to book online helps drive new business.)
However, to grow their reach, they often:
- Work with wholesalers like destination management organisations (DMOs) and tourism boards to sell tours in travel packages.
- Partner with travel agents and other businesses in the tourism industry, such as hotels, resorts, rental providers, airlines, and even other tour operators (so that partners can resell tours and experiences to their customers).
- Promote tours on online travel agencies (OTAs) like Viator and GetYourGuide.
Partnerships and online distribution channels can help you reach hundreds of millions of travellers worldwide.
We’re a Tripadvisor brand and Viator partner, so we created this guide to explain more about the various travel distribution channels and how to leverage them in your distribution strategy.
Our tour operator software, Bókun, is designed to centralise and organise bookings as you explore sales channels and grow your distribution network. It includes channel management plus everything you need to create tour listings, sell tours online, and manage back-office operations. Start your 14-day free trial — no credit card required.
Direct vs. Indirect Distribution
Direct Bookings: Website & Offline Bookings
Direct means you sell directly to your customer base. Direct bookings may include walk-up or in-person (offline) bookings or online bookings from your own website.
Many tour operators aim to increase direct bookings because they don’t have to pay commissions to a third party for these reservations.
Plus, selling tours on your site means you’re in total control of listings and can promote experiences in a way that best suits your brand. (For example, you could post about your experiences on social media and link back to your website for customers to book.)
Relying solely on direct bookings and digital marketing limits you to those who already know about your brand. That’s why many tour operators use indirect distribution channels to expand their customer base.
Indirect Bookings via Wholesalers, OTAs & Resellers
Indirect distribution channels are any third party that promotes tours and earns bookings for you, such as wholesalers, resellers, and OTAs.
These channels serve as intermediaries between you and potential new customers. For example, travellers can find your tours on OTAs or through resellers and book with you on those sites. They don’t have to navigate to your website or submit a reservation request form; they can book with you instantly, where they find you.
The most notable downside to working with travel distributors is you have to pay commissions or booking fees for each reservation they earn on your behalf. However, gaining new customers is worth the tradeoff in the long run.
Wholesalers
As mentioned above, travel wholesalers include DMOs and tourism boards but can also include government organisations like national parks or information centres for local landmarks.
Wholesalers sell travel packages (B2B or B2C) to cover different aspects of customers’ travel needs. They often use global distribution systems to build packages with travel products from their partners. Packages might include flights, hotels, and travel experiences (like your tours!).
Resellers
Resellers include partners like travel agents and other tourism businesses (e.g., hotels, airlines, rental providers, and other tour operators) who promote your tours to their customers. They could promote your tours as standalone experiences or upsell your products with their tours.
You can also work with resellers to create tour or travel packages and offer more unique experiences to your customers. Travel agents could help you build more diverse packages while partnering with hotels or other tour operators allows you to create convenient combo deals.
Read more: Three steps & best practices to create tour packages
Online Travel Agents (OTAs)
OTAs are arguably the most invaluable tourism distribution channels because they promote your experiences to customers actively researching destinations, planning travel, and booking with trusted providers.
We emphasise this because these are the potential customers who are most likely interested in booking with you now or in the very near future. They aren’t on Viator, GetYourGuide, or Expedia just for fun — they’re doing research for upcoming travel plans. There is some intent to book travel experiences and fill their vacation itineraries.
The conversion potential is much higher here than with traditional marketing efforts, like posting about experiences on social media and trying to reach the right target audiences. (You can also use your marketing budget to promote listings on OTAs instead of boosting social media posts, which typically yields a faster ROI.)
That’s not to say social media marketing or brand awareness strategies aren’t worth the time — they just take more time. Organically building a customer base could take years if you don’t invest (some) resources in these tourism distribution channels.
Plus, these sites see millions of monthly website visitors and reach travellers across all countries. Viator alone receives ~30 million monthly website visitors.
Listing your name and tours on these sites is the best way to fill your booking calendar and earn customers — then you can use customer retention and retargeting strategies to earn repeat bookings and loyal clients.
In addition, listing your business on online travel directories like Tripadvisor can be valuable, as those audiences have similar interests and intent.
Note: As part of the Tripadvisor brand, Bókun customers can seamlessly display their Tripadvisor reviews on their own websites.
You can learn more about starting a tour guide business and strategies to earn customers in our guide here: Starting a Tour Guide Business in 8 Achievable Stages
In the following sections, we’ll discuss how to partner with wholesalers and resellers and list the most popular OTAs to reach ready-to-book travellers.
Partner with Wholesalers & Resellers to Earn New Customers
Tour operators use a few strategies to make connections and establish partnerships. You can:
- Attend trade shows, travel expos, or local events to connect with others in the tourism industry. This could be the most practical way to connect with wholesalers.
- Research local tourism businesses and contact them by phone, email, or social media to express interest. Then, others in your area can promote your experiences, or you can join forces to create packages for customers and sell them on your respective sites.
- Reach out to popular travel agents (in your area or other regions) to see if they accept partners. This can benefit both parties, as travel agents have high-quality experiences to provide for their clients, and you can fill out your booking calendar.
However, many tour operator software systems include native B2B marketplaces for connecting tourism businesses and creating partnerships.
Bókun’s Marketplace includes 27K+ partners worldwide, including DMOs, hotel and resort chains, property managers, travel agents, rental providers, attractions like universities and theme parks, and more.
You’re automatically added to this network when you start a paid plan, making it easy to partner with other Bókun tour operators!
With these marketplaces at your fingertips, you can find complementary businesses in the travel industry, negotiate terms and conditions of partnerships, share contracts, and store all documents for easy reference.
We’ve briefly explained this earlier, but to clarify, tour operators leverage partnerships in three key ways:
- Partners can resell your experiences, generating bookings for you.
- You can create travel packages with partners by combining tours and other tourism products.
- You can resell others’ tours and experiences to earn commissions.
This last one is useful for teams that have filled their booking calendar and need methods to increase revenue without overextending resources, as the commissions from selling tours for others can serve as passive income.
See how Venice Tours achieved a 400% revenue increase through the Bókun Marketplace.
Most Popular Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) to Boost Reach
Below is a list of the major OTAs to research and join. These sites are the most commonly known and used, so you can easily broaden your reach by joining just a couple of them.
But before we go into that, we want to warn against overwhelming yourself with too many sales channels at once.
Yes, it might seem like the more opportunities, the better — but you don’t need to join every single major OTA to fill your calendar (remember, Viator sees 30 million monthly website visitors). There can be fees associated with enrolling in OTAs and listing products, so joining handfuls of sites can add up quickly.
We suggest starting with a few (one to three) major names — ideally ones without costly enrolment or startup fees — and monitoring their performance. Then, track bookings by channel and see which sites drive the most business. Say you notice sales from one site but not another; you may want to test a different channel at that point.
In addition to the major names below, there are numerous niche-specific OTAs where tour operators can list tours on sites promoting those exact experience types — for example, a wine tour guide in Italy could list their experiences on a site for Italian wine tours.
The conversion potential is even higher on these OTAs because you can confidently reach your target market; anyone visiting an Italian wine tour travel site is very likely interested in booking that type of experience.
The Major OTAs:
Though not technically an OTA, Google’s Things to do is another sales channel to consider.
Google’s Things to do program allows Google to promote tours and activities to searchers right on the search engine results page.
They work with trusted tour and activity operators to source experiences and create online listings. Those listings appear in the Activities & Tours snippet when people search relevant terms, like “bike tours Rome.”
You can enrol in this program (for free) through Google. Alternatively, many booking management platforms — like Bókun — allow you to connect with Google Things to do and verify your business through the booking system.
As a Viator partner, we’ve also written guides on how the site works and how to leverage Viator to increase bookings. You can check those out below:
- How does Viator work (for tour operators, agents & travellers)
- How to sell tours on Viator & drive bookings | Bókun Partners
Resources to Boost Tour Reservations & Fill Your Calendar
In addition to the few resources we’ve linked within, we’ve also written separate guides on how to market tour guide businesses and drive new bookings:
Managing Your Travel Distribution Channels & Tour Bookings
Before you start into online growth strategies, partnering up with other travel businesses, or listing your name across various OTAs — you want to ensure you’re equipped to manage business once bookings are flowing.
You can manage each sales channel and partner separately: check each day for new bookings, add them to a central calendar, and then update availability across all sites.
However, this process is time-consuming and error-prone. Plus, there’s no convenient way to update availability on partner sites — you’d need some method of communicating this so they can update your listings on their sites.
Imagine doing this daily with dozens or even hundreds of bookings and various partners.
This is why tour operators use booking software once they start selling on different online channels. (Many also invest in this software to access the available booking engine and enable direct website bookings.)
Booking software — like Bókun’s tour operator software — centralises bookings from various sales channels and updates availability across sites in real-time as new reservations come in.
They also include booking widgets, inventory management, staff scheduling, customer communications tools, and many other features to support your day-to-day operations.
We won’t go into all of those details in this guide, but you can learn more about channel management for tour operators here.
Get started with a 14-day free trial of Bókun today!
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