The Market That Fills Your Tuesday Is Not the One That Fills Your Saturday | Sarah Colgate

Education Marketing for Tourism Operators

TreeTop Challenge had been operating almost entirely consumer direct. Weekends were full. Tuesdays were not.

That is the brief I was given, and it is the most common brief in Australian tourism.

The problem is capacity, not demand

Arival's 2026 State of Experiences report says 41 per cent of ANZ operators name direct bookings as their top priority for 2026.

Direct bookings are worth chasing. But most operators are chasing them on days that are already full.

If your Saturday is at 90 per cent and your Tuesday is at 30 per cent, more direct marketing will not fix Tuesday. Your direct audience is leisure. Leisure travels on weekends and school holidays. You can spend $40,000 on Meta ads and shift almost none of it into midweek.

Empty capacity midweek is not a marketing problem. It is a market mix problem.

Why operators get stuck here

Most tourism businesses build one channel really well, then treat every other channel as a threat to it.

TreeTop Challenge did not want to change their consumer-direct model. They were right not to. It was working.

So we did not touch it. We built a separate midweek strategy underneath it. Agents. Inbound and wholesale. The education market.

Three channels that fill quiet days without competing with the weekend trade.

The education market is the one I want to talk about, because it is the one operators get wrong most often.

Schools do not book on price

Here is what operators do. They see quiet midweek days, think schools, and produce a discounted rate card. Twenty per cent off for groups of 20 or more. They send it to a few local schools and wait.

Nothing happens.

Price is not the barrier. Approval is.

A teacher who wants to bring 60 students has to justify the excursion to a head of department, then an administrator, then a principal. Somewhere in that chain, someone asks what curriculum outcome this delivers.

If the answer is a great day out, the excursion does not get approved. Not because the teacher does not want it. Because they cannot defend it.

Most excursions are a day out. That is the whole problem.

What we built instead

Eco-Adventures and Rainforest Futures launched in July at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary.

Four programs across Years 6 to 9, mapped code by code to the Australian Curriculum V9.0 in Science, Geography, Design and Technologies, and Health and Physical Education. Sustainability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures run across all four.

Every booking includes the complete Teacher Pack at no cost. Six lesson plans, a student workbook, a curriculum alignment statement and a facilitator training guide. Risk assessments, public liability insurance and the Child and Youth Risk Management Strategy are included.

The documentation matters more than the lesson plans. Schools run on approval processes, and approval processes run on paperwork.

How I delivered it

I started with the curriculum, not the product. I worked through which content descriptors a canopy course could genuinely deliver against. Code by code. A teacher can check that claim in 30 seconds. If it does not hold up you lose that school permanently.

I picked the year levels the product actually suits. Years 6 to 9. Trying to serve Prep to Year 12 means serving none of them properly.

I wrote for three audiences separately. Teachers need lesson plans for the classroom before and after the visit. Students need a workbook. Facilitators on site need training so they deliver learning outcomes, not just a safety briefing.

I had the whole thing reviewed by someone who is not me. Dr Gemma Dale is an experienced science teacher, education consultant and published textbook author who has written curriculum resources for multiple Australian states. She reviewed and approved all four programs.

I am a tourism strategist. I am not a teacher. That review is what lets the programs stand up in front of a head of department.

Then we made the Teacher Pack free with every booking. The temptation is to charge for it. Do not. The pack is what makes the booking happen.

TreeTop Challenge Currumbin received a $35,000 grant through the City of Gold Coast’s Nature-Based Tourism Program. It helped fund curriculum development, course signage, student resources and marketing to schools. It also supported educator visits and the launch.

The number that decides whether this is worth it

Before you go near the education market, work out your net profit per student.

Take your school rate. Subtract the volume discount you will end up offering. Subtract the extra staff you need for supervision ratios. Subtract the cost of building the resources, spread over the bookings you expect in the first two years.

If that number does not work, the education market is not your answer. Find another way to fill midweek.

For TreeTop Challenge it works, because the canopy course has capacity sitting idle midweek and the marginal cost of filling it is low. That is why we went after it.

One thing to do this week

Pull your last 12 months of bookings and sort them by day of week. Every session, every day.

Write down maximum capacity next to what you actually sold. Not revenue. Capacity.

If midweek is running under 40 per cent while weekends are full, you have found your gap. Now the question is which market fills that specific gap, and it will not be the same market that fills Saturday.

That takes about 30 minutes and it will tell you more than any marketing report.

Not sure which market could fill your quiet days? Book a Growth Gap Call with me. We’ll look at where your bookings are falling short and what to focus on next.