Visibility - Why nobody's finding your tourism business and it's not a marketing problem | Sarah Colgate
If you had asked me in 2018, when we took over Aquaduck Gold Coast, what I needed to grow the business, I would have given you the same answer nine out of ten tourism operators give me now. More marketing.
More Facebook. More Instagram. More posts. More reach. More money to Google. More stuff shouted into the world.
And I would have been wrong.
When we started, direct sales at Aquaduck were 4% of turnover. Four percent. The other 96% was agents and the OTAs. The product was good. The location was great. There was a boat on wheels driving down Cavill Avenue every day, which is basically a rolling billboard. And still, 4%.
So I did what most operators do. I looked at that number and thought, right, we need to be seen. We need more marketing.
Three years later, online direct sales were 47% of turnover. Same product. Same boat. Same street.
I have to be honest about this one. I did not fix that number with more marketing. I fixed it with visibility. And I want to draw a line between those two things, because most tourism operators use them as if they mean the same thing. They do not.
Marketing shouts. Visibility gets found.
Marketing is you, in the room, shouting. A boosted post. A campaign. A Reel. A newsletter. All valid, all useful, and all coming out of your pocket in either time or money.
Visibility is different. Visibility is your product sitting on the right shelf, at the moment a buyer is already looking for something like you, being pointed at by someone the buyer already trusts.
Same building. Different work.
Example: at iVenture Card I sat on the other side of that table for eight years and seven months. I was the wholesaler. I built product that packaged attractions together, and I sold most of it through concierges, OTAs and inbound wholesalers. Not my Facebook page. Somebody else's shopfront, every single time. I watched from that seat how quickly a well-placed listing would out-produce a well-boosted ad, and I never forgot it.
When we bought Aquaduck, I knew the answer was not to work our Facebook page harder. It was to be the obvious choice on every shelf a Gold Coast day-tour buyer was already standing in front of. The website. Google. Viator. TripAdvisor. The concierges at the big hotels. The apartment managers on the beachfront who told their guests what to do on a Tuesday afternoon.
That is visibility. It compounds. Marketing does not.
Why the wrong diagnosis is expensive
Here is the trap as I see it. When you tell yourself you need more marketing, you keep spending on the same channel that has not been paying for itself. You throw more into ads. You post more often. You get busier. You do not necessarily get booked.
I suggest you look at your last three months of numbers. What percentage of your bookings came through your website directly, versus the OTAs, versus phone, versus walk-in? If your direct number is under 45%, more marketing is not going to fix it. You have a visibility problem.
Direct bookings above 45% is the target for a healthy tourism business. Not because OTAs are bad. I am not anti-OTA and never will be. OTAs are a bloody good channel when they are one channel in a healthy mix. The problem is when they are the only mix.
The market mix is the thing
Let's say you are running a tour that costs $120. You are paying an OTA 20 to 25 percent to sell it. That is roughly $25 per booking, gone before you have paid the fuel, the staff or yourself. If 80% of your bookings come through that channel, you are handing over somewhere between $80,000 and $200,000 a year in commission without blinking. I have said this on stage and I will say it here. That is not an expense. That is a redirect.
The redirect is happening because you are visible on one shelf and invisible everywhere else. The OTA is doing the visibility work you have not done for yourself. So they get paid for it.
You need a market mix. You need to be found by the guest who is already going to visit your region and does not know yet who to book with. You need to be the first name a concierge mentions. You need to show up on Google Maps when someone types "things to do near me." You need a booking button that does not lose them at checkout.
None of that is more marketing. All of it is visibility.
What to do this week
I am not asking you to overhaul the business. I am asking you to look at one number honestly.
Open your booking system, whichever one holds the truth for you.
Pull the last three months of bookings by channel. Direct, OTA, phone, walk-in, referral.
Work out your direct percentage.
Write it down. Look at it.
If it is under 45%, you have your answer. Not more marketing. Better visibility, in the places that pay.
In Part 2 I am going to walk you through the six places tourism operators actually get found in 2026, in the order they pay you back. Not the order that sounds impressive. The order that puts money in the bank first.
For me, the whole point of this work is that you get to stop being invisible on the shelves where your guests are already shopping. Get found. Get booked. Get on with running the business you actually wanted.
If you want to sit down and work out where your visibility is leaking, book a Growth Gap Call with me. No pitch, just a proper conversation about where you're stuck and whether I'm the right fit.
