One of the first things operators tell me when bookings are slow is that they need more marketing.
Sometimes they do. But if people are already reaching your website, looking at your experiences and clicking through to book, I would not spend more money getting more people there until I knew what was happening to the ones I already had.
Because getting someone to your website and getting them to actually book are two different jobs.
When we took over Aquaduck Gold Coast, direct sales were around 4% of turnover. Over time, online direct sales grew to 47%.
That did not come from one campaign or suddenly becoming brilliant at social media. We worked on the whole sales path. Where people found us, what information they had when they got there, how easy the product was to understand and how simple it was to actually buy.
That last bit gets missed a lot.
Book your own experience
The first thing I would do is take out your phone and try to book your own experience.
Not from the office computer where you know exactly where everything is. Do it from your phone as if you have never seen the business before.
Start on the homepage. Find the product you want. Choose a date. Choose the number of people. Get all the way through to the point where you would enter your card details.
Then pay attention to where you stop.
Maybe you cannot work out whether your 13-year-old is an adult or a child. Maybe the booking calendar opens and the product name is different from the one you were just looking at. Maybe an extra fee suddenly appears. Maybe you need to go backwards to find the cancellation policy and lose the date you had selected.
None of these things sounds particularly dramatic on its own.
But this is how bookings disappear.
Imagine a family sitting in a Gold Coast hotel at 8.30 at night trying to work out what they are going to do tomorrow. They probably have several options open on their phones. Your experience can be better than the others and still lose the booking because somebody else made it easier to buy.
That is the part operators sometimes struggle with. We think the customer is comparing products.
Often they are comparing effort.
Make it obvious how to buy
I see websites where the operator has spent a lot of time making the experience look fantastic, but the customer still has to hunt around for the booking button.
Or the button says something like "Discover More" when the person has already discovered enough and wants to know whether they can come at 10am on Tuesday.
I do not think you need Book Now buttons flashing all over the page. But if somebody has reached the point where they are ready to buy, do not make them work for it.
The booking action should sit naturally beside the information that helps them make the decision.
That also means thinking about what happens around the button, not just the button itself.
Put the reassurance where the decision happens
Most tourism businesses have plenty of reasons for people to trust them. Years in business. Great reviews. Accreditations. Cancellation policies. Safety processes. Experienced staff.
Then we hide all of that somewhere else on the website.
At the point where someone is about to hand over $300 or $400, that is when they need reassurance most.
A family booking an unfamiliar experience is thinking about things like whether it is suitable for the kids, what happens if it rains, whether they can cancel, where they need to meet and whether they are going to receive confirmation straight away.
You know the answers because you deal with them every day.
They do not.
If the same question comes through your phone or inbox every week, I would ask why the website is not answering it at the point where the customer needs to know.
That is particularly important around cancellation terms, age restrictions, meeting points, accessibility and what happens in bad weather.
People do not necessarily need more information.
They need the right information at the right time.
Your mobile booking experience matters
This is another one I would check properly.
A website can look beautiful on a desktop computer and be awful to book through on a phone.
The image is too large. The booking button drops below the screen. A pop-up covers half the page. The calendar is difficult to use. The text becomes tiny or the booking system takes the customer to a completely different-looking screen.
Meanwhile, the person buying from you is sitting beside a hotel pool or in the passenger seat of a hire car trying to make a decision before the kids change their minds.
They are not admiring your website design.
They are trying to book.
I would test your highest-selling products on a phone regularly, particularly if you have changed the website or the reservation system has changed its booking interface.
Do not assume that because the booking system technically works, the booking experience works.
They are not the same thing.
Check what happens after they press Book Now
This is where I see another disconnect.
The website might call an experience Sunset Wildlife Experience.
The customer presses Book Now and the reservation system suddenly calls it Product 4B, 5.00pm Departure.
You know it is the same product. The customer does not.
Or the website shows one hero image, one set of inclusions and one cancellation message, then the booking system looks completely different.
That change creates doubt at exactly the wrong moment.
Your reservation system is part of your website sales process even if another company owns the software. I would check the product names, photos, descriptions, questions, fees and confirmation process just as carefully as I would check the website itself.
Also look at how many fields you are asking people to complete.
Do you genuinely need all of that information before they pay?
If you do, fine. If you do not, take it out.
Every extra decision you ask the customer to make is another point where they can decide to come back later.
And later often means never.
Do not spend more money sending people into a leak
This is why I would not automatically answer a booking problem with more marketing.
If your website is already getting traffic and people are showing enough interest to start the booking process, there is value sitting right in front of you.
You have already done the hard part. You got their attention.
Before you pay to find another thousand people, make it easier for the people you already have to buy.
That might mean moving the booking button. It might mean rewriting an age restriction so it actually makes sense. It might mean fixing the mobile calendar or putting your cancellation policy beside the booking action instead of three pages away.
None of those changes is particularly exciting.
That is fine.
The best commercial fixes often are not.
What I would do this week
Pick the experience page on your website that gets the most traffic and book it yourself from your phone.
Take it all the way from landing on the page to payment.
Every time you hesitate, have to search for something or think, "That is a bit annoying", write it down.
Then fix the biggest one first.
Do not redesign the whole website because you found three problems. Fix the point that is making the customer work hardest and see what changes.
The numbers will tell you whether it worked.
If people are already finding you, you may not need more traffic.
You may simply need to stop losing the people you already have.
If you want to work out where people are dropping out between finding you and booking you.
