Building online direct sales, part three of three
Somebody in Melbourne is currently asking an AI assistant what to do with two kids on a wet Tuesday in your region. An answer is being written right now, with three or four businesses named in it.
The question is whether you are one of them. For most operators, the honest answer is no, and the reason is fixable.
What has actually changed
Phocuswright reported that 58% of active United States travellers used AI for something in the second half of 2025, and 39% used it specifically for travel research and planning.
Australia is behind that, but moving. Compare the Market surveyed more than 1,000 Australian adults and found 28.8% had used AI tools to scout destinations, find activities or lock in deals. The generational split is sharp. Most Baby Boomers have never done it. Gen Z and Millennials are well ahead.
McKinsey published something more interesting in March. Of the travellers who have used generative AI for travel tasks, 84% said it improved their experience. Traffic arriving at travel sites from an AI source had a 45% lower bounce rate.
That last number is the one to sit with. People who arrive from an AI answer already trust you. Somebody vouched for you before they clicked.
Why operators are missing it
Arival found nearly three in four ANZ operators are now researching, experimenting with or actively using AI. Only about one in three report meaningful results.
The gap is not effort. The gap is what they are using it for.
Most operators are using AI to write their social captions and product descriptions. Almost nobody is doing the reverse, which is writing the content AI tools need in order to recommend them.
Agents are already winning this. They have structured inventory, live availability, thousands of reviews, and prices in machine-readable text. An AI tool naming a tour will name the version it can verify. If your price sits inside an image, or your times live in a PDF brochure, you are invisible to it.
There is a related frustration worth naming. You cannot stop agents bidding on your own business name in paid search. There is no geofence for that. Somebody types your name, sees an agent listing above yours, clicks it, and you pay commission on a guest who was already looking for you.
You will not win that fight by complaining about it. You win it by being the better, clearer, more complete answer everywhere else.
Write the answers, not the marketing
This is the highest return work in the whole series and it costs nothing but time.
Ask whoever answers your phone to write down the 20 questions they get asked most. They know better than you do.
Then turn each question into a heading on your website, worded the way a guest words it. "How long is the walk" beats "About the experience".
Answer it in the first two sentences. Do not build up to it. AI tools and impatient humans both take the first clear answer they find.
Use specific numbers. "The walk is 1.2 kilometres on a sealed path and takes about 25 minutes" is quotable. "An easy stroll" is not. A machine cannot repeat a vibe.
Put your prices, departure times, meeting point and accessibility information in plain text on the page. Not in an image. Not in a downloadable PDF. Not only inside your booking widget.
Then check your work. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google what a guest would ask about your region, and see who gets named. Do it once a month. It takes four minutes and it is the only ranking report you need.
Real people still beat production values
Word of mouth has always been the best advertising in this industry. Short form video is word of mouth at scale, and authenticity matters more now than it did five years ago.
Guest content outperforms your professionally shot brand film almost every time. It looks like a recommendation from a friend, because that is exactly what it is.
You do not need to sign an influencer. Start with the guests already filming on your tour. Ask permission on the day. Have a QR code that sends them somewhere to upload it. Reshare it with credit.
YouTube Shorts and TikTok are discovery tools, not booking tools. Do not put a call to action inside a 12 second video. Win the watch time, then sell in the caption and the pinned link.
If you are going to outsource anything, outsource paid discovery on those platforms. That is a specialist job and it changes monthly. Writing the answers on your own website is not a specialist job, and nobody can do it as well as you can.
What I would not do
I would not do any of this if the underlying business is not right.
Plenty of operators come to me convinced they need more marketing. We look at the real numbers and what they actually need is pricing fixed here, capacity fixed there, and the team structured differently. More visibility on a business with a margin problem just gives you more work at the same profit.
At Aquaduck the pricing came first. We moved from $36 to $50 across a multi-year strategy, after being told by the previous owners that $40 was the ceiling. Then direct bookings moved from 4% to 47%, and net profit per passenger went from one dollar to three.
That order was not an accident. Fix the profit per passenger, then go and find more passengers.
The 30 minutes
Open ChatGPT or Google, and type the question your ideal guest would type. Something like "best half day tour near Cairns with kids under five".
Read the answer properly. Write down which businesses were named, and why you think they were named.
Then open your own website and find three questions from that answer that your site does not clearly answer in plain text. Write those three headings into a document.
Next week, answer them. Two sentences each, with real numbers. That is the whole task.
Then go back and read part one. Because getting found is worth nothing if the booking path loses them at step six.
Want to know where your direct bookings are falling short? Book a Growth Gap Call with me. We’ll identify the biggest gap and what to work on first.
Sources
Arival, Global Operator Landscape 4th Edition: The State of Experiences in Australia and New Zealand, May 2026. Phocuswright, Travel Forward: Data, Insights and Trends for 2026. Compare the Market Australia AI travel survey, 2025. McKinsey, travel and generative AI analysis, March 2026.
Sarah Colgate | 0491 729 043 | exceptionalexperiences.com.au
