Bet on local digital visibility
Before thinking about advertising, you need to think about presence. Local visibility is your digital showcase: the one that appears when a traveler types “guided tour in Bordeaux” or “cruise in Paris.”
Google Business Profile: your ground anchor
This is the first step, often overlooked. Your Google listing is your living business card: photos, hours, booking link, reviews, directions. Keep it updated, enrich it, and treat it as a full-fledged sales channel. Operators who take care of their listings see a conversion rate up to 30% higher than those who neglect them.
Google Things To Do: the new showcase for tourism
Since 2024, Google has directly integrated tourist offers into its search results and on Maps. A major evolution: your products can now appear alongside OTAs, without commission, via the Google Things To Do features.
This is a powerful way to be visible where travelers decide — often in a matter of seconds — whether to book or not.
Local SEO: playing the content card
Creating targeted pages (“Visit old Lyon”, “Boat trip on the Seine”) helps Google identify you as a reference player in your area. Add recent reviews, geolocated photos, and mention local points of interest. This is a simple, organic, and free way to position yourself on high-intent searches.
Capitalize on OTAs… without becoming dependent
OTAs — GetYourGuide, Viator, Headout, Funbooker — have become the major showcases of global tourism. They offer instant visibility, immediate credibility, and access to millions of travelers.
But behind this apparent ease lies a well-known trap: dependency.
🚀 OTAs as a springboard, not as a crutch
For an operator, OTAs can play an accelerator role: they allow you to get known quickly and test your market.
But they should not become the foundation of your business.
- A change in the algorithm, and your sales can collapse overnight.
- A rise in commission, and your margin shrinks without you being able to do much about it.
- A poorly optimized listing, and you disappear from the results.
OTAs are an acquisition tool, not a business model. The goal should always be the same: capture the customer on the platform, but retain them on your direct channels.
Our channel manager guide explains how to build this bridge between acquisition and independence.
⚙️ Centralize to maintain control
Multiply the channels, and you also multiply the risks:
- overbookings,
- price discrepancies,
- availability errors,
- confusion in customer confirmations.
The solution is centralization.
With a channel manager software, every booking made on an OTA instantly synchronizes with your other channels — website, ticketing, phone.
Your stocks, prices, and slots are updated automatically. Result:
- a global view of all your sales.
- zero double booking,
- price consistency,
Rebalance the scale towards direct
OTAs are acquisition partners, not competitors. Their marketing power brings you customers; your mission is to make them want to return directly.
To do this:
- add an exclusive offer for customers who book from your site,
- use OTA data to understand demand,
- personalize your post-stay communications.
Once they know you, travelers often prefer to book directly with you: it’s simpler, more human, and often more economical.
To go further, discover our complete guide to OTAs — a clear breakdown of opportunities, pitfalls, and the best strategies to maintain control.
Create content that naturally attracts
Tourism marketing often has a brochure tone. Superlatives, vague promises, “unique experiences” that all sound the same. Today’s travelers no longer want to be spoken to as customers: they want to be spoken to as people. They want to feel that behind an activity, there is a story, a personality, a sincerity.
Creating content is not about repeating what everyone else says; it’s about telling what you are. Sometimes it involves an imperfect but true photo: a guide joking with a group, a boat preparing in the morning light, a team setting up a garland on the deck before a special evening. It’s these moments, disarmingly simple, that bring a brand to life.
Good tourism content does not seek immediate conversion. It establishes a presence, a credibility. It makes a place and those who bring it to life exist. The operators who succeed best online are not necessarily those who publish the most, but those who consistently tell stories — a recognizable tone, a sincere emotion, a coherence between their site, their networks, and their listings on OTAs.
The secret is to accept slowness. A well-written article on “the secrets of the Seine at sunset”, a mini-guide on “the most beautiful panoramas of Lisbon”, a series of hand-shot videos — all of this builds an invisible but lasting capital: trust. And in tourism, trust is worth more than any advertisement.
Useful, honest, and embodied content does not sell: it attracts. It does not promise: it inspires. It does not seek to convince, but to give the desire to know more, to meet, to experience. In a world saturated with calibrated images and formatted campaigns, this authenticity becomes your most powerful weapon.
Because in the end, a traveler does not book an activity: they book an emotion. And this emotion is triggered by your content even before the first minute of the experience.
Loyalty and turning your customers into ambassadors
In tourism, conquest occupies all conversations. Loyalty, on the other hand, remains the blind spot of marketing — even though it is often the most profitable engine.
A satisfied customer is not just a past sale. It’s a future recommendation, a positive review, sometimes even a story they will tell others. And it all starts where many stop: after the experience.
✉️ Maintain the link after departure
A thank you message, a souvenir photo, a personalized note… These simple gestures prolong the emotion experienced and humanize the relationship. It’s not the quantity that matters, but the sincerity.
Some concrete ideas:
- Send a thank you email 24 hours after the visit.
- Attach a photo or an anecdote from the moment experienced.
- Slip a link to your Tripadvisor or Google listing to encourage a review.
- Offer a promo code or an invitation to discover another activity.
These are not cold automatons: they are signs of attention, natural extensions of the experience.
🔁 Transform a customer into a community
Travelers like to feel recognized. The best operators do not see their customers as “files”, but as a living tribe.
They create long-term bonds:
- photo contests “Your best memory on board”,
- highlighting a customer in a story or newsletter,
- a discreet but effective referral program.
Little by little, loyalty becomes a continuous conversation — and not a commercial follow-up.
📈 Loyalty as a virtuous circle
Every customer who talks about you attracts new travelers. Every new review reassures the next ones.
It’s a virtuous circle where satisfaction feeds notoriety, and notoriety in turn feeds satisfaction.
“Loyalty, in tourism, is not just another step. It’s the beginning of a lasting human relationship.”
And it’s precisely this emotional continuity — this ability to remain in the customer’s memory long after the experience — that elevates a tourism brand from recognized to unforgettable.
Finding customers through Tourbiz
The challenge for tourism operators is not just to sell well — it’s to sell everywhere, without getting lost in complexity. That’s where Tourbiz becomes more than just software: a commercial hub designed to centralize everything, synchronize everything, amplify everything.
Be visible without scattering
Tourbiz automatically connects your offers to all major tourism channels:
- your website,
- OTAs (GetYourGuide, Viator, Funbooker…),
- Google Things To Do,
- your physical ticketing.
Result: you are visible where travelers search — on Google, on platforms, on maps — without ever losing control of your stocks or risking double booking.
The system acts as a silent conductor: it manages distribution while you manage the experience.
Integrated marketing tools
Finding new customers is also about engaging those you already have. Tourbiz integrates several powerful levers to maintain this dynamic:
- automated email sending to thank, follow up, or retain,
- managing promotions and special offers in just a few clicks,
- creating personalized gift vouchers, perfect for smoothing out seasonality,
- clear statistics on your sales, your occupancy rates, and your most effective channels.
From WhatsApp to cart: turning every contact into a customer
Many travelers still prefer to communicate via message before booking. With Tourbiz, you can generate an order link and send it via email, SMS, or WhatsApp.
The customer pays online, the booking is automatically added to your calendar, and you maintain complete traceability.
This is what we detail in our file: managing your tourism reservations via Whatsapp.
An example that summarizes everything
A Parisian cruise company previously used five different tools: a paper agenda, a contact form, two OTAs, and an Excel spreadsheet. Since switching to Tourbiz, its sales have become clearer, its margins more stable, and its team lighter.
- +32% direct bookings in six months,
- -80% time lost managing manual confirmations,
- a Google Things To Do channel now automated,
- and above all: a unified strategy.
👉 Tourbiz does not create customers by magic. It creates conditions to attract, manage, and retain them without friction.
It’s the difference between a business that chases bookings… and one that drives them.
