Stop Wasting Ad Spend: What Actually Fills Seats with Understory

Most tour operators say sales and marketing is their biggest problem, then spend less time on it than anything else in their business.

Lasse Kjaer, co-founder of UnderStory, joins Pete for a deep dive into how experience-based businesses can build a more predictable marketing engine. Lasse brings 14 years in the industry, including building TrueStory, now the largest local experiences marketplace in the Nordics, before pivoting to create UnderStory, a booking system built specifically around growth infrastructure for tours, events, and courses. The conversation centers on the specific numbers operators must understand before paid advertising can work, and why most operators either burn budget on agencies applying the wrong playbook or fly blind because their tracking is broken from the start.

Operators leave with a clear framework for thinking about Meta ads in 2026, including why broad audiences now outperform narrow targeting, how to calculate blended customer acquisition cost across channels, and why the real return on ad spend is always higher than the dashboard shows. Pete and Lasse also challenge the default fixation on OTA commission as the primary distribution cost, making the case that operators with more diverse channel mixes routinely bring their average distribution cost down to 15-18%, rendering the 30% OTA complaint largely irrelevant.

Takeaways

• Before running paid ads, every operator needs to know three numbers. 0:36 – 5:30 Average margin per tour, marginal cost per additional seat, and website conversion rate are the foundation of any distribution or paid advertising decision. Without these, operators cannot evaluate whether an ad spend is working or set a rational customer acquisition cost target. These numbers also differ significantly by business type, so they cannot be borrowed from another operator.
• Build your direct channel first, then add OTAs as a fill layer. 5:30 – 8:00 The ideal distribution model treats direct bookings as the foundation an operator controls and OTAs as a topping to fill remaining capacity. Direct gives you ownership of brand, data, and customer relationships. Starting with OTAs before establishing a direct foundation creates dependency on channels that can change their algorithm or commission structure at any time.
• Stop measuring OTA commission in isolation, measure blended customer acquisition cost instead. 8:00 – 10:30 An example using a 100 euro ticket, 60% direct at a 15 euro CAC and 40% OTA at 30 euro CAC, produces a blended CAC of 21 euros, which is entirely workable. The fixation on a single channel’s commission obscures what is actually a reasonable aggregate cost. Operators who think in terms of blended CAC stop resenting OTAs and start managing their channel mix more strategically.
• More distribution partners lower your average cost and reduce dependency. 26:00 – 29:00 Pete’s audits of over 2,000 operators in person found that more than 95% have fewer than five distribution partners. With that few channels, OTAs make up a disproportionate share of the mix. Operators who build to 30 or 40 partners routinely see their average distribution cost drop to 16-18%, which eliminates the OTA commission pain entirely because it becomes just one line in a larger mix.
• Corporate is the highest-margin, most underused channel available to most operators. 29:37 – 33:20 Corporate bookings typically come on weekdays, away from peak weekend tourist periods, at higher price points and higher margins than consumer tours. A single corporate client can generate hundreds of returning participants over years, not the same people but the same brand sending new groups. Operators with strong corporate channels are consistently among the most profitable businesses Lasse sees across his customer base.
• Meta advertising in 2026 requires broad audiences, not narrow manual targeting. 38:43 – 42:00 Four years ago, manual segmentation by age, geography, and interest worked. Today, Meta’s algorithm segments better than any operator can manually. The job now is to feed the algorithm the right pixel data and let it work. Constraining the audience manually reduces the algorithm’s ability to optimize and typically produces worse results than a broad audience with strong signals.
• The pixel is what feeds the algorithm, and most operators have it set up wrong. 11:00 – 14:00 The events you fire back to Meta determine the quality of the targeting you receive. Operators who send incomplete or incorrect pixel events get poor targeting as a result. The feedback loop between your booking system and Meta’s algorithm is only as good as the data going back. Getting the pixel right before spending any money is the single most important technical step.
• Your ad creative is now also your audience targeting. 14:00 – 17:00 Because Meta handles segmentation algorithmically, the creative itself needs to communicate clearly who the tour is for and what is being offered. That information is what Meta uses to find the right people. A vague or generic creative does not just underperform on attention, it gives the algorithm nothing to work with for targeting. Specificity in the ad replaces specificity in the audience settings.
• Strong hook plus rich pixel data plus broad audience beats narrow targeting almost every time. 17:00 – 20:00 This is the repeatable formula Lasse sees working across campaigns in multiple tour and experience categories. The hook, meaning the first visual or three seconds of video, must catch attention immediately. When combined with proper pixel events and a broad audience, this approach consistently outperforms the old manual segmentation model. This is the correct starting configuration for any operator beginning paid ads today.
• Sending paid ad traffic to your homepage wastes budget. Dedicated landing pages are non-negotiable. 19:30 – 22:00 Every campaign, every tour, needs a dedicated landing page built to move a visitor toward a decision as quickly as possible. Pointing ad traffic to a homepage and hoping users self-navigate to the right tour is one of the fastest ways to burn budget without results. A well-built landing page aligned to the specific ad creative also contributes to lower customer acquisition cost by increasing conversion rate on the same traffic.
• A waitlist function on your landing page captures intent that ads have already paid for. 20:30 – 23:00 Not every visitor who clicks an ad is ready to book immediately, either because of timing or availability. A waitlist gives operators a mechanism to capture that intent and re-engage those visitors with targeted messaging when the time is right. Lasse describes this as one of the simplest and most underused levers to increase the return on paid ad spend across different tour and experience categories.
• The dashboard return on ad spend is always an undercount. 22:00 – 25:30 Meta can only attribute revenue it can directly track. Lasse’s model adds four layers on top: unattributed revenue from guests who found the tour through ads but booked via another channel (often 40% or more), retention revenue from guests who rebook, referral revenue from guests who bring others, and B2B spillover from private guests who later book corporate or group experiences. On a 1,000 euro spend showing 2,000 euros in direct return, the total blended return may exceed 4,000 euros.
• The minimum committed spend to see real Meta results is 400 to 600 euros per month for at least two months. 34:55 – 38:00 The first month is largely a learning phase for the algorithm. Results improve materially in the second month as targeting data accumulates. Spending below this threshold or stopping too early prevents the algorithm from reaching its optimization potential. The old model required spending 5,000 euros with an agency just to get started, which is no longer the entry point.
• DIY paid ads and generic e-commerce agencies are the two main ways operators waste ad budget. 36:20 – 39:00 Most performance marketing agencies apply an e-commerce playbook that does not translate to experience businesses, which have different conversion windows, purchase psychology, and seasonality. Running ads independently without understanding pixel setup, creative hooks, and optimization signals also typically produces poor results. Small budgets of 500 to 1,000 euros per month make the agency model uneconomical even when the agency is competent.
• Website conversion rate of 3 to 4% is normal, and inquiry conversion should be above 50%. 49:01 – 54:00 Across UnderStory’s customer base, three to four visitors out of every hundred book online, which is the industry benchmark. Operators should not treat this as failure. Pete adds that a more important conversion metric for many operators is inquiry conversion, meaning contacts who email or message rather than pressing book now. These are warm leads who have already taken action, and operators who track and work this channel consistently convert 65 to 75% of inquiries into bookings.
• Voice of customer language, pulled directly from your reviews, makes better ad hooks than anything you write from scratch. 41:28 – 43:00 Lasse describes using AI to analyze what actual guests write about a tour in their reviews, then using that specific language in the hook of the corresponding ad. The words real customers use to describe an experience resonate more accurately with prospective customers than generalized marketing copy. This approach also helps Meta’s algorithm identify and target people who respond to that language.
• An operator without a daily marketing engine is running a hobby, not a business. 22:30 Lasse cites this framing directly and uses it to explain why UnderStory’s Bloom product exists: most operators know paid marketing matters but have no repeatable, automated system for it. AI and modern data infrastructure have made a genuine daily marketing engine possible for small operators for the first time, without requiring an agency or a dedicated marketing hire.
• Testing your own website with five strangers at a coffee shop will improve your conversion rate faster than most software tools. 46:16 – 48:30 Before spending any money on advertising, asking random people to navigate your booking site and narrate their experience aloud reveals conversion problems that analytics cannot surface. What visitors perceive your offer to be, how they read pricing, and where they get confused are the exact inputs needed to improve conversion. This requires no budget and produces actionable feedback in an afternoon.
• Courses and classes are the fastest-growing segment in the experiences industry. 56:08 – 56:42 Pete notes this category is growing from a small base but is expanding faster than tours. The underlying driver is a shift in traveler expectations toward hands-on learning rather than passive guided experiences. Operators in adjacent categories, food, craft, cultural skills, are positioned to capture this demand without rebuilding their businesses.