Operators worry about their prices a lot more than their customers ever do.
Daniel Pino, founder of Aloja, breaks down when price actually changes booking behavior and when it only feels like it does. The gap between what an operator assumes will scare off a customer and what actually moves a booking decision comes down to two things: how substitutable the experience is, and how far in advance the customer is booking. Early bookers weigh price heavily; last-minute bookers weigh availability and flexibility instead. Daniel and Peter Syme walk through the testing discipline that finds an operator’s real price ceiling, why last-minute discounts rarely create new demand, and why the biggest single lever most operators are missing is simply overcharging less than they think they are.
Resources:
- Aloja’s price sensitivity test, referenced during the session — book a demo with Aloja to run it for your own tours
Key Takeaways
- Only 10 percent of customers say discounts influence their tour booking decision. 10:14 Description, photos, and reviews carry far more weight than price. Applying a discount is the default move for operators who feel stuck, but it is rarely the lever that actually changes a customer’s mind.
- How price sensitive a customer is depends on the booking window, not the customer. 13:08 Once a booking window passes 16 days out, price becomes a much bigger factor. Early bookers (more than 30 days out) weigh price heavily, about a third cite it as their main deciding factor. Last-minute bookers care far more about flexibility and availability, and only about 15 percent weigh price at all.
- Five questions place an experience on the commodity-to-niche spectrum, and that spectrum decides how much pricing actually matters. 11:05 Does it sell out. Can customers easily find an alternative. Is the brand recognizable or generic to the customer. How many competitors have copied it. Are customers noticing the experience itself or commenting on price. The more commodity-like the answers point, the more aggressively price needs to move to make a difference.
- Discounting your last few open spots rarely creates new demand — it mostly gives a discount to people who would have booked anyway. 18:24 Last-minute bookers are not the most price-sensitive segment. Discounts aimed at early bookers, who are shown to weigh price more heavily, have a much better chance of actually shifting behavior rather than just cutting into revenue on bookings that were already coming.
- Pricing can influence demand at the right moment, but it cannot generate demand that was never there. 19:24 A one-euro tour will not convert someone who was never going to buy the experience in the first place. The job of pricing is to move people who are on the fence, not to manufacture interest from people who are not.
- Every operator has a price ceiling, and almost none of them know what it is. 27:51 The only way to find it is deliberate testing during the busy season, not the slow season, because it takes real booking volume to produce a reliable signal. Every time this test has been run with operators, the real ceiling came in meaningfully higher than what the operator assumed going in.
- A price ceiling moves over time and differs between operators in the same niche. 28:14 It is not a fixed number, it shifts as costs, demand, and market conditions change, and two operators running the same type of tour in the same vertical will not share the same ceiling. Finding it requires ongoing testing, not a one-time calculation.
- Test pricing changes against a control, the same way you would test any other marketing variable. 30:45 Run one Friday with a discount or price increase and a comparable Friday without one, then compare the actual results instead of just feeling good when bookings come in. Most operators who discount never check whether the discount was the reason bookings happened.
- Reviews are the honest feedback loop on whether a price is out of sync with the value delivered. 51:59 A negative review tied to price is signal, not something to fear avoiding. Operators who wait for enough of a business history will get a negative review eventually regardless of price, and that feedback is more reliable than guessing.
- Failing to test and adjust pricing has a real opportunity cost that compounds every year a business operates. 52:11 The margin left on the table by underpricing, multiplied across years in business, is described as an unbelievable amount of money, one that far outweighs the risk of occasionally testing a price too high and losing a handful of bookings while finding the ceiling.
- Your real competition is rarely the other operator running a similar tour down the street. 56:17 One example from the session: weekend booking dips that seemed to have no cause turned out to correlate exactly with international rugby matches drawing the same target customer elsewhere. Anything competing for a customer’s time and attention counts as competition, not just other listings on the same OTA page.
- A sudden drop in bookings is not automatically a pricing problem. 49:14 One operator in Southeast Asia reverted a successful price increase after a booking dip, assuming the new price had failed. The real cause was a regional flight disruption cutting off travel into her destination entirely. The lesson: rule out the wider environment before blaming a price change that was otherwise working.
- Pricing should be designed into the experience itself, not bolted on afterward as cost-plus-margin. Most underpricing comes from operators calculating cost, checking a competitor’s rate, and adding a standard margin, rather than pricing to the value the experience actually delivers. Undercharging is far more common than overcharging, because the value case was never built into the design of the tour in the first place.