The cheapest revenue available to a tour operator right now is the visitor already on the website.
Traffic to tour operator sites is falling. Peter Syme has checked hundreds of them over the past year and puts the decline between 10 and 40 percent as search behavior shifts. Brandon Lake runs Moab Adventure Center and Western River Expeditions and leads marketing education at Resmark. When his costs climbed faster than his revenue, he rebuilt both sites around the visitors who were already arriving rather than chasing traffic that keeps getting harder to win.
Brandon walks through the research his team runs before touching a page, the three questions that were stopping his own guests from booking, why product names carry more weight than they look like they do, the three things that kill a checkout, and where an upsell belongs so it raises order value instead of costing the sale. He shows the before and after on his own product pages and on three client sites in different markets.
Resources:
- Revenue Opportunity Report (Resmark). Free site analysis covering ranking positions, revenue projections, AI placement and conversion opportunity, plus four recommended actions. Requires Google Analytics and Google Search Console access. Offered to everyone on the call with no obligation.
- Moab Adventure Center packages section. Brandon’s live example of both a fixed multi activity package and a pick your own dates booking flow.
- Google PageSpeed Insights. The load speed score Brandon says affects AI citation as well as search ranking.
- llms.txt. The file to publish alongside your sitemap so AI platforms can read the site.
Key Takeaways
- A single point of conversion rate is a bigger number than it looks. [03:32 – 09:57] Brandon’s theater analogy: 100 people walk in, 98 stand up and leave within 15 seconds, 2 book at $100 each. Moving from 2 to 3 percent at that order value is close to $50,000 a year on the same traffic and the same marketing spend. Tour operator sites average 1 to 3 percent, and he puts the annual gap between the two ends of that range at over $700,000. Asked to put their own rate in the chat, the most common answer from the room was that they did not know it.
- Small absolute gains look unimpressive on the chart and pay like large ones. [09:57 – 10:57] Moab Adventure Center went from 1 percent to 1.37 percent after the rebuild, a 37 percent increase, and did it while raising prices. Online revenue for a single month rose $119,000.
- Treat conversion as three separate problems. [10:57 – 11:47] Keeping visitors on the site after they land, getting them to click check availability, and getting them through payment are different failures with different fixes. Checkout abandonment across the industry runs 78 to 82 percent, so the last one holds the most obvious losses.
- Rebuild the site off customer research, not opinion. [11:47 – 13:26] Resmark pulls 1,000 or more recent guest reviews from Google, Tripadvisor and Yelp, 12 months of Google Analytics, pre and post booking chat logs, and an 18 question interview with the owner. The chat logs carry the most weight, because every question in them is something a guest could not find on the site.
- Their research surfaced three questions guests were asking before booking, and each one got a fix on the page. [13:26 – 14:30] Can I physically do this, is this right for my group, and is it the right price. They answered the first with testimonials from guests who mention their age or being grandparents, the second with reviews from people who had the same hesitation about camping outdoors, and the third by pulling differentiators up from the lower half of the page.
- Mobile decides the layout. [14:30 – 15:26] 54 percent of Moab Adventure Center bookings come from phones. Anything that only works as a desktop sidebar needs a mobile equivalent designed at the same time, not retrofitted after launch.
- Rename products using search data and customer language together. [15:59 – 17:29] Moab folded the place names people were searching for into the product names: Castle Valley for the horseback ride, Hell’s Revenge for the Hummer tour, Canyonlands by Night. The old names were accurate and dull. Traffic is down 3.7 percent year to date and revenue is up significantly.
- Checkout killer one is friction. [17:29 – 18:42] The common version is the design changing the moment someone clicks book now, so the branding disappears and the guest wonders whether they have left the site. Walls of policy text, asking for every participant’s details before payment, and no progress indicator do the same damage.
- Checkout killer two is doubt. [18:42 – 19:43] A form asking for a card number gives the guest nothing to answer the questions that arrive at exactly that moment: should I trust this company, what if something goes wrong, can I get a refund. Reviews, awards and the cancellation policy belong inside the checkout, not back on a page the guest has already left.
- Checkout killer three is silence. [19:43 – 20:40] When a guest stalls mid checkout and there is no chat window and no visible phone number, abandoning is the only option on the screen. Brandon counts a hold timer here too, because a held booking makes the process feel real.
- Carry the trust elements through every checkout step, including on mobile. [23:19 – 26:31] The Moab checkout keeps a progress bar, reviews, awards, chat, a phone number and the hold timer in view while dates are being chosen. Policies sit in an accordion, so guests open each one instead of facing a wall of text. On phones the same elements pin along the bottom of the screen, and the team is testing making that section static.
- Collect the booker’s details and payment first, everyone else’s afterwards. [26:31 – 27:50] An attendee asked about requiring every participant’s information up front. Someone booking for friends rarely has their dates of birth or phone numbers to hand, so they leave to go find them, and a percentage never come back.
- The work does not finish at launch. [27:50 – 28:52] The order is customer research, then messaging and content, then layout and design, then monthly testing that keeps running. Brandon’s position is that a site declared finished is already drifting, because how people shop keeps changing.
- Conversion work compounds everything else you spend. [28:52 – 29:49] Every organic visit, every AI citation and every paid click converts at the higher rate once the site is fixed, so the same SEO and ad budgets return more. That is Brandon’s argument for fixing conversion first rather than last.
- A converting site can carry a price increase. [29:49 – 31:00] Moab raised prices between 12 and 94 percent on products that did not change, and orders still rose 31 percent. Brandon says the decision frightened him, and that the site had to be doing the reassurance work before the pricing would hold.
- AI referrals convert about three times better than search clicks. [31:00 – 31:57] Moab’s revenue from AI referrals went from $1,900 to $15,000. Brandon’s explanation is that someone arriving from ChatGPT or Gemini has already had the comparison done for them and lands ready to buy, where a search click is still shopping.
- Expect a temporary ranking dip when you rebuild a site that ranks well. [31:57 – 33:16] Western River sat untouched for ten years because it ranked first or second on its keywords. Moab did drop briefly after relaunch while Google reprocessed the changes, then recovered, which is what made them willing to rebuild Western River too.
- Put the booking decision in a sidebar that follows the guest down the page. [33:46 – 35:16] The new Western River product page carries reviews, awards and years in business along the top, then a persistent sidebar holding dates, price and the booking button. In page navigation jumps guests down the same page rather than sending them to separate pages for details, and on mobile the price and button fix to the bottom of the screen.
- Answer the practical questions on the product page itself. [35:16 – 36:23] The rebuilt page holds a 65 image gallery, a full 360 gallery, scannable trip details, what is included and what is not, maps and the full itinerary. Brandon rates maps as close to essential for multi day tours.
- Never call your own tours safe. Let guests say it. [36:23 – 37:07] Brandon’s attorneys treat a safety claim in the operator’s own voice as a liability if something goes wrong, while the same claim inside a guest review is fine. Safety is the first thing the new review section addresses.
- Research turns up the emotional driver you would not have guessed. [39:56 – 40:55] One Resmark client’s guests cared about travelling in a way that respected the places and cultures they visited, and the old site never mentioned it. The new site leads with traveling with a purpose, and responsible tourism runs through the copy.
- Getting cited by AI runs on the same work as ranking in search, plus a few additions. [43:31 – 47:22] Brandon’s list: a short direct answer to the likely question near the top of the page, fast load speed, clean technical health, an llms.txt file published alongside the sitemap, schema on the page, and links from sites that are already trusted. Review volume and recency feed it as well, because the AI platforms compare businesses much the way a guest would.
- Review analysis works below 1,000 reviews, with a floor. [47:22 – 48:39] An attendee asked what to do with a smaller review count. Brandon has run the analysis on 200 to 300 and prefers 500 as a minimum. With only a handful, the reviews of a genuinely comparable competitor can stand in, carefully, because the audiences are rarely identical.
- Give the visitors who leave a reason to hand over an email address. [48:39 – 52:58] The Moab Insider’s Guide collects more than 10,000 addresses a year and triggers ten emails over ten days, mixed with viewpoints, places to stay and things to do that Moab does not sell, plus a personal note from the office manager that asks a question. They built a second guide around a scenic drive page that unexpectedly ranked first, and doubled the leads coming from that traffic.
- Match retargeting ads to the page the guest actually looked at. [52:58 – 54:21] Someone who visited the Grand Canyon page sees Grand Canyon images and copy. Brandon uses the customer research to decide what those ads say, aiming at the specific hesitation that stopped the booking.
- You cannot upsell if you only sell one thing. [54:21 – 56:31] Moab operates its own rafting, Hummer, national park, climbing and canyoneering trips, and partners with other operators for horses and scenic flights rather than buying horses and airplanes. The same marketing dollar brings one visitor either way, so the breadth of what they can book decides the order value.
- Put the upsell after payment, and offer one thing. [56:31 – 57:55] Offering it during checkout created friction, so Moab now presents a single recommendation, the activity people most often add to the one just booked, immediately after payment. It takes a second payment and merges into one itinerary.
- Make booking several activities look like the normal thing to do. [57:55 – 58:23] The reviews chosen for the Moab site are the ones describing six days and three or four adventures. The lead magnet emails carry the same suggestion: this may be the only time you come, so do more than one thing.
- Bundle names sell the bundle. [58:23 – 59:36] Peter Syme’s operation sold a canyoning and rafting combination as Wet Wet Wet, and a four activity package as the Awesome Foursome. His advice for anyone not doing this yet is to try selling one extra thing alongside what already sells, rather than rebuilding the whole site around packages.
- Sell the extra activities before arrival, not after. [59:36 – 01:00:07] Peter’s own data showed pre arrival sales beating post arrival by a wide margin. Once guests are in the destination their days are committed, so anything extra has to fit the gaps they have left.
- Offer both a fixed package and a build your own version. [01:00:07 – 01:01:29] Moab’s Southwest Sampler bundles four activities and lodging into a single booking, which families take. The alternative flow lets a guest pick three activities, choose a different date for each, applies the discount at the end and checks out once.
About the partner
- Resmark builds booking software and marketing services for tour and activity operators. Brandon Lake leads marketing education there and runs Moab Adventure Center and Western River Expeditions.
- Resmark is offering Tourpreneur members a free Revenue Opportunity Report: resmarksystems.com/report