Over 90% of Drop Bear Adventures bookings now come direct, up 34 to 36% since Hana Robinson started using Dazhboards to automate the repetitive tasks that were burning out her team.
Hana Robinson co-founded Drop Bear Adventures in Queensland, Australia fifteen years ago, running multi-day four-wheel drive tours to the world’s largest sand island. She joined Tourpreneur to talk through five forces that are pressing on tour operators right now: rising OTA commissions, Google AI overviews eating direct website traffic, tightening booking windows, peak season staffing cycles, and a new wave of AI native competitors who are scaling faster than established operators did. She is also an advisor to Dazhboards, an operations and business intelligence platform for tour operators, and draws on both roles throughout the conversation.
The practical center of the session is what Hana’s team actually built with Dazhboards: a website chatbot that reads every page of your site and catches outdated pricing before guests do, an omnichannel inbox that pulls Facebook messages, Instagram DMs, Google messages, and email into one feed, automated waiver sending and chasing, group booking alerts with a threshold the operator sets, and an AI analyst her husband uses to ask direct questions about tour performance without touching a spreadsheet. Hana also walks through the data question she and her business partner wrestled with: is it the right time to scale? The answer, anchored in two years of consolidated booking history inside Dazhboards, was yes. Drop Bear Adventures is launching a new product in 2027.
Resource offered to attendees: Dazhboards offers a free diagnostic tool to help tour operators identify whether they are stuck, stalling, or scaling, available at dazhboards.ai/diagnostic. They are also offering a free 30-minute consultation (not a product demo) at dazhboards.ai.
Takeaways
- The five forces pressing on tour operators right now are not new individually, but hitting at once. 00:01:30 to 00:04:00 OTA commissions are up and API connections are now being charged for separately. Google AI overviews are intercepting searchers before they reach operator websites. Booking windows are compressing, with last minute bookings rising across the board. Peak season staffing cycles are getting harder to manage. And AI native competitors are entering the market and scaling faster than established operators were able to a decade ago. Knowing which of the five is your biggest drag is the first step.
- Google AI overviews are not just taking traffic, they are testing how current your website is. 00:08:00 to 00:09:30 When AI surfaces information to a searcher, it pulls from whatever is on your site, including old blog posts you forgot about. Hana’s Dazhboards chatbot gave her three different prices for the same tour on day one. The source turned out to be a blog article she hadn’t updated in years. That same audit function applies to Google: the more outdated pages you have, the more likely a searcher gets a wrong answer attributed to you. Being the local expert means actually being the local expert on your own site.
- Last minute bookings are rising because today’s traveler, particularly Gen Z, is booking on present conditions, not future plans. 00:03:00 to 00:04:00 Hana describes her youth adventure market as booking when the UV index looks right. They are not planning a holiday six months out; they are arriving at a destination, checking the weather, and booking that afternoon. For operators in seasonal markets, this changes how you staff and how you communicate with leads who are in destination right now rather than dreaming from a desk.
- AI native competitors are entering your market with almost no setup time. 00:05:36 to 00:06:00 When Hana started Drop Bear Adventures fifteen years ago, other operators in her region did not have websites. She built one and got ahead. Today, a new operator can be fully set up on social media, automated, and marketing-ready within weeks. Hana knows of a new operator in her region who reached in six months what took her three years to build. The tools are more affordable, more accessible, and require far less technical knowledge than they did when she was the new kid.
- The chatbot is a website audit tool before it is a customer service tool. 00:22:00 to 00:24:00 Hana’s recommendation to anyone starting with Dazhboards is to put in your URL and ask the chatbot your own questions first. When she asked it the price of her tour, it gave three different answers. Each answer linked to a source page. One of those pages was an old blog post with an old price that she had never updated. The chatbot found it. So did guests who were calling to double-check. Fixing the site before going live is the first return on the chatbot.
- An omnichannel inbox stops inquiries from disappearing into platforms no one is actively watching. 00:25:00 to 00:26:00 Before Dazhboards, Hana’s team was spread across Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, Google messages, and email. Her receptionist would catch messages on Facebook or Instagram that Hana never saw. Hana would not find out until it was too late to follow up. The omnichannel inbox pulls all of it into one feed. Every team member can see every message and know what has been responded to.
- Setting a group booking alert changes peak season lead handling. 00:23:30 to 00:24:30 A group booking in off peak season is the difference between a tour departing and a tour not going out. Dazhboards lets you set a threshold: any inquiry with four or more people triggers an immediate notification. The chatbot continues the conversation on its own, but you get flagged so you can step in and handle it personally if that is what it takes to convert the booking. Hana describes this as getting back in the driver’s seat on a sale.
- Waiver chasing is exactly the kind of task that should not take a person’s attention. 00:28:00 to 00:29:30 Hana’s team was manually sending waivers, then cross-referencing one system against the booking system to confirm who had completed them, then chasing the ones who had not. That is now fully automated through Dazhboards. The platform sends the waiver, follows up three times, and tracks completion. A 20-day trip Hana took walking the island to pick up rubbish ran without her involvement partly because the pre-departure communication was handled.
- The repetitive questions that erode your patience at 7pm are answerable by AI and guests are fine with that. 00:18:00 to 00:19:00 The call checking what time the pickup is. The question about where to store a bag. The person asking about the surf conditions the night before. Hana describes the eye-roll point you hit when you have answered the same question thousands of times, and how that seeps into your voice on the phone. Those questions are now going to the chatbot. Guests are getting accurate answers without anyone losing patience, and Hana’s team is handling the layered questions that actually need a person.
- Taking your foot off the controls feels risky at first and then feels like the whole point. 00:29:00 to 00:31:00 Hana describes helicopter-bossing her own chatbot for months, reading every chat to make sure it was responding correctly. Two years in, she spent 20 days walking the island on a project she cared about, and her business ran without her. Her team was not overwhelmed. They had the tools and the capacity to handle it. She says she loves her business now in a way she had stopped feeling before she started with Dazhboards.
- When you cannot recruit for a role, look at whether automation freed up capacity to distribute it. 00:31:00 to 00:32:00 Drop Bear Adventures had a part-time position on the mainland washing vehicles that they could never fill. People took the job, got bored with the repetition, and left. After Dazhboards freed up time for the logistics team, they distributed the car washing across several staff members who now each do a few vehicles a week. Nobody is doing it all day. They find it a break from the laptop. The job got filled by restructuring around available capacity rather than continuing to recruit for a role no one would stay in.
- Having a single source of historical booking data changes what you can ask about your business. 00:37:00 to 00:40:00 Drop Bear Adventures has used multiple booking softwares over fifteen years. Hana uploaded spreadsheets from their earliest days, connected the old platforms, and connected their current one. Everything is now in Dazhboards. She can see average lead time, review patterns, future booking curves, and direct versus OTA split across the full history of the business. Her husband, who dislikes working in data tools, uses the built-in AI analyst to ask direct questions: why are tours down, what should we be charging, where is there capacity to grow.
- Running a business with your partner is easier when neither of you is the source of truth. 00:41:00 to 00:42:30 Hana is a dreamer. Her husband Mark is practically minded and skeptical. Before Dazhboards, their conversations about whether to scale or what to try next were person versus person: passion versus caution. Now there is a third input. The data shows what their booking pipeline looks like. It shows where they hit capacity. It shows demand they could not service. Mark asks the AI analyst and gets an answer he trusts. Hana gets to make the case without having to be the case.
- Deciding whether to scale is easier when the data shows demand you already had to turn away. 00:40:00 to 00:42:00 Two months before the webinar, Hana was in a place of fear. They had automated a lot but the booking volume had softened with global uncertainty. They spent time inside the data. What they found was a backlog of booking requests from times when experiences were fully sold out, evidence that demand for their product exceeded their current capacity. They are launching a new product in 2027. That decision, which Hana describes as something they had wanted to do for a long time, came from being able to see the data clearly rather than from gut.
- Over 90% of Drop Bear Adventures bookings now come direct, up 34 to 36% since using Dazhboards. 00:43:30 to 00:44:00 Hana gives this number in the context of advice to operators who feel like they are losing ground to OTAs. She attributes the shift to better facilitating customers directly rather than losing them to aggregators who answer questions faster. If customers can get accurate information from your site, through your chatbot, through your omnichannel inbox, they do not need a third party to sort it out for them. The business that answers the question first and accurately gets the booking.