You Have Already Paid For These Guests Once. Stop Letting Them Walk | Sarah Colgate

Building online direct sales, part two of three

Every guest who steps off your boat this morning cost you money to acquire. If they came through an agent, that cost was 20% to 30% of the ticket, paid as commission on the net rate.

Most operators will never speak to that person again. That is the most expensive habit in tourism.

The number nobody puts on a page

Work out what you spent on commission last financial year. One number, all agents, twelve months. Most operators at $1M to $3M turnover land somewhere between $80,000 and $200,000.

Now work out how many of last year's guests you could email tomorrow morning. Not how many are in a booking system somewhere. How many you have permission and an address for.

For most operators the honest answer is under 20%. Some cannot email a single one.

You paid full price for every one of those people and then handed the relationship back.

Why it happens

The data sits in three places and none of them talk. Your booking system has some of it. Your waiver has more of it. The agents have the rest, and they are never giving it to you.

Arival found ANZ operators are running an average of five different systems, usually held together with manual processes. Nearly half named automation as their top technology priority, and integration was second.

That is the structural cause. It is not that you do not care about your guests. It is that the information about them is scattered across five systems and one clipboard, and nobody in the business owns the job of pulling it together.

There is a second reason. Everybody knows they should do post-visit marketing. Almost nobody has written down what happens, when, and who presses send. Without that, it never happens on a busy week, and every week is a busy week.

The lifecycle you should be able to draw

Sit down and draw the full life of one guest. Not a funnel. A life.

Before. They find you, they ask a question, they book, they get a confirmation. Somewhere in there they give you a name and an email.

At check-in. This is the biggest miss in the whole industry. You already make every guest sign a waiver. That waiver collects a legal signature and throws away a marketing asset.

Add three fields. Email, mobile, and postcode. Add one tick box with plain wording about hearing from you again. That is it. You now own a relationship the agent thought they owned.

During. Somebody takes a photograph. Every operator has that moment already.

Immediately after. A thank you within 24 hours, with the photos attached or linked. Photo delivery platforms like Fotoflo will push these out automatically off the back of your booking system.

I heard operators at Arival reporting open rates around 50% on emails carrying guest photos. 

That is roughly double a normal tourism newsletter, and the reason is obvious. Nobody deletes a photo of themselves laughing.

Day three. The review ask. One link, one platform, nothing else in the email.

Month eleven. The come-back offer, timed just before the anniversary of their visit.

Year two, year three. Send the photo again. Same photo, no offer, one line. "Three years ago today you were on the water with us." That email costs nothing and it is the warmest thing in your marketing.

Word of mouth is still the best advertising you will ever buy

Word of mouth has been the strongest channel in tourism for as long as tourism has existed. What has changed is that almost nobody runs it as a system.

Referrals happen by accident in most businesses. The guest has to remember, unprompted, weeks later. That is not a strategy, it is luck.

I suggest you make it deliberate. Ask at the moment of highest goodwill, which is the moment they step off, not three weeks later. Tell your crew that asking is part of the job, the same way the safety briefing is part of the job.

Then track it. Put one field on your booking form asking how they heard about you, and make it a required field. Tag the bookings that came from a referral.

If you do not measure it, you will keep guessing about which part of your marketing works. Guessing is expensive.

The discipline behind the numbers

At Aquaduck I tracked maximum capacity for every single day and every single tour across the year. I watched cashflow. I catalogued every market discount we had ever given. I reviewed the distribution channel mix against direct sales every month.

That is not glamorous work. It is an hour with a spreadsheet.

But it is why direct bookings moved from 4% to 47%, and why net profit per passenger went from one dollar to three. You cannot improve a relationship you are not measuring.

Australian travellers who book direct told SiteMinder they do it for control, service and price, in that order. Every one of those three is something you deliver in person, on the day, better than any agent can. You are already earning the loyalty. You are just not collecting it.

The 30 minutes that starts this

Print your current waiver. Sit down with a pen.

Add the three fields. Email, mobile, postcode. Add the consent tick box, worded plainly, in language a person understands.

Then write down the four emails you are not currently sending, with the day each one goes out. Thank you and photos on day one. Review ask on day three. Come-back offer at month eleven. Photo memory at year two.

Do not build them yet. Just write the four lines. Then book two hours in your diary next week to actually set them up, and treat that booking the way you would treat a departure time.

Part three covers how people find you in the first place, including what AI search has changed and what it has not.

Want to see where your direct channel is strong and where the commission is quietly taking your margin?