Ray Bretzloff built a tourism referral platform that takes no commission, handles no bookings, and is free for every operator to join.
Ray Bretzloff of BugMe.travel, the company behind Don’t Bug Me I’m On Vacation, joined host Pete Syme to lay out an alternative to the way tour businesses get discovered. The current model has operators renting visibility: buying ads, paying OTA commissions, and hoping enough bookings come back to cover the spend. Ray calls this a zero-sum game, where one operator rises only when another falls. His counter is a non-gatekeeping discovery map paired with a $99 “road trip pass” that gives travelers 20% off participating local businesses. The platform never touches the booking. It refers the traveler straight to the operator and keeps the commercial relationship between them.
The session works through how a collaborative model holds together without relying on goodwill. Ray walks through five design pieces: a shared map with no pay-to-rank, intent-based discovery powered by AI, continuity from pre-trip planning into the destination, incentives that pay everyone who refers, and circulation that keeps the traveler’s 20% in the local economy. He explains the affiliate mechanics in plain terms, including why an affiliate buyer pays $79 instead of the $99 retail price, and why one operator is paid a referral fee to bring competitors onto the same map. Operators leave with a concrete picture of where a layer like this sits alongside Direct, OTAs, and DMO relationships, and a way to judge whether their own market could support a version of it.
Resource offered to attendees: Operators can read through the model and get on the map at bugme.travel, which has separate tabs for vacationers, businesses, and affiliates.
Takeaways
- Your success can be engineered to depend on other operators succeeding, not failing. (00:52 to 03:00) Ray spent roughly ten years building a community think tank called Activate Us and a socioeconomic model called The Bridge, both centered on incentivized collaboration. The core premise is that each participant succeeds as a result of others succeeding, which he calls an upward spiral of benefit. BugMe is the working case study for putting that theory into a real tour-economy product.
- The current discovery model charges you twice: once in ad spend and again in the work you did not start your business to do. (03:00 to 05:00) Beyond marketing budgets and OTA commissions, Ray names the personal cost of renting visibility. Someone starts a hiking business and ends up spending their days chasing SEO instead of hiking. Selling through third-party sites also hands the customer relationship to the platform, leaving the operator with platform dependency rather than a guest they own.
- Tourism already runs on collaboration, but the arrangements are one-to-one and do not scale. (05:00 to 07:00) Regions build packages, operators recommend each other, hotels strike deals with individual tour businesses. The problem is that a minimum-wage front-desk worker cannot remember 20 separate arrangements on top of their own systems. The value exists; it is just not being captured in an organized way.
- Rerouting ad money into a shared network turns a zero-sum fight into a positive-sum one. (07:00 to 08:30) Instead of spending to rent visibility and hoping for return, an operator redirects that focus into a decentralized network. In a ranked system someone has to be last; in a network everyone can be first at once. A kayak company that wants to run seven days a week and a family business that wants two days a week can both win simultaneously.
- The highest-value moment in tourism is the guest asking what else there is to do, and almost nobody captures it. (08:30 to 11:00) A tour ends and the guest asks for a recommendation. A local’s in-person suggestion carries a level of trust no review site matches. The catch is that these recommendations are hard to manage and do not scale, so they deliver large human benefit and almost no business benefit.
- Intent-based search aligns the guest with the right business better than keyword search ever did. (12:30 to 14:00) Keyword search forces the human to understand the algorithm to get what they want, which Ray calls a misalignment. AI lets a traveler describe what they want to feel, then finds the match. This shifts discovery from the industry’s perspective to the traveler’s.
- Planning does not stop when the trip starts, so the system has to follow the guest into the destination. (14:00 to 15:30) Itinerary makers and route planners focus on pre-trip planning. Once a traveler arrives, plans change: it rains, a booking falls through, dinner was never arranged. A model that carries from pre-trip into in-destination planning, and into the next trip, keeps capturing decisions the pre-trip tools miss.
- The traveler’s 20% discount is designed to recirculate through the local economy. (17:00 to 19:00) A traveler buys the road trip pass and unlocks 20% off participating businesses, which Ray frames as roughly $60 staying in the traveler’s pocket. That money tends to get spent in the same community rather than saved into a retirement fund. He calls this circulation, and it is the closed loop that produces the ecosystem effect.
- Every local business effectively becomes an affiliate for the map, and the map travels with the visitor to the next region. (19:00 to 20:10) BugMe embeds its map on a region’s or DMO’s website, so a business posting a QR code is promoting shared discovery for the whole area. Because the map is non-gatekeeping, a traveler who used it in one region uses the same map in the next. That continuity is what turns single recommendations into a recurring loop.
- Refusing to handle the booking is a deliberate choice to avoid becoming a gatekeeper. (20:23 to 21:35) BugMe refers the traveler and lets the booking happen directly with the operator. Ray does not want to manage bookings, and more pointedly does not want to decide who gets visibility based on commission. Keeping the booking direct leaves the operator with a real relationship they can build on later.
- Taking no commission forces the platform to sell its own product instead of riding on operator sales. (21:35 to 23:35) Operators join free and pay no sales fees, which Ray admits is an unusual platform-supplier setup. It means BugMe has to actually sell road trip passes, the same way an operator sells tours. That puts the platform on the level of a peer selling a different product, not a middleman skimming a percentage.
- A flat 20% discount across every business removes the friction of comparing offers. (23:35 to 25:12) Activity-sector discounts range from about 10% to 30%, so Ray set 20% in the middle. A standard rate lets a traveler instantly judge whether a $99 pass pays off, instead of decoding 5% here and 7% there. The discount applies to the core activity, so a rafting company gives 20% off rafting, not off t-shirts.
- Affiliate marketing is just rerouting ad budget into a reward for the people already recommending you. (25:12 to 28:08) Ray uses the binoculars-on-YouTube example: a creator shares a code, the buyer saves 20%, and the seller spends nothing on ads. BugMe applies this both ways. Online affiliates send travelers a $79 promo price against the $99 retail price, and an in-destination guide or cafe that posts a QR code earns a commission when a pass sells.
- Pay one operator a referral fee to recruit their competitors, and the old “why help rivals” objection disappears. (28:08 to 30:31) A single business on the map benefits more when the cluster around it fills in, because travelers are likelier to visit a region with enough matching options. BugMe ties a referral fee to its affiliate system, so the raft company is paid to introduce nearby businesses. The incentive flips the instinct to hoard customers into an incentive to grow the local pool.
- The model works in a major city as readily as a rural region, as long as the business sells an activity. (30:31 to 32:06) Ray started in 2014, originally aiming to move city dwellers out to the countryside, using a physical key tag and a folded paper map. City beer, wine, and food tours fit the same structure. The platform covers activities now, with accommodations and eateries planned later.
- Keeping the full value of a sale inside the destination is the structural advantage over OTAs. (32:06 to 34:28) OTAs are the fastest-growing booking channel and extract a percentage that leaves the destination. With the road trip pass, the 20% comes off the business but stays in the local community. The same map geolocates from one town to the next, so a traveler moving from Bobsville to Jimsville keeps booking direct and spending locally.
- A non-gatekeeping map lets the authentic small operator surface next to the marketing-heavy one. (34:28 to 36:46) Strong operators win on marketing, not always on product, while a better product can sit hidden behind weaker marketing. Intent matching lets a ma-and-pa business rise to the same level when it fits what the traveler asked for. Ray points to a world-champion dog sledder an hour from Ottawa who could not take a reservation, whose authenticity came from sledding, not from time spent marketing.
- Treat the 20% as a marketing line, not a discount, and even high-ticket multi-day operators come out ahead. (36:46 to 38:34) The model depends less on price point than on how unique the offering is; a biplane operator with no real competition does not need to discount. For high-ticket trips the 20% is a larger absolute number, but 20% is often less than what the business already spends on marketing. Each operator has to decide where their money works hardest.
- DMOs are the natural route to market, with one funding objection that has a simple answer. (38:34 to 40:37) Destination management organizations already exist to promote a whole region collaboratively, which makes them an obvious fit, though Ray finds individual operators grasp the model faster than DMOs do. The common objection is that a government-funded DMO cannot take outside affiliate revenue. His answer is to route that money into a community fund, a charity, or a local event instead of the budget.
- This is a new layer, not a replacement, and the older channels may have to adapt to it over five to ten years. (40:37 to 41:48) BugMe is not trying to displace Direct, OTAs, or existing distribution partners today. Ray expects collaborative thinking to grow more prominent over the next five to ten years, which could push DMOs and OTAs to shift from extracting as much as possible toward giving in order to get. He frames the platform as a gateway to that mindset rather than a competitor to current tools.