What happens when you book through a third party?

Booking through third-party sites hurts small businesses.

As a small business, it can be tough to get your name out there. After almost 8.5 years running successful brewery tours around Brisbane and the Gold Coast, we still encounter people every day who think we are brand new or who have never heard of us. Fair, in a way, because sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you aren’t looking specifically for a beer tour then we may not be on the radar.

When starting out, it’s important to cast a wide net and get the most amount of eyes on your product, and unless you’re an SEO guru who can make your direct booking site rank number one straight away, it’s a no-brainer to get listed with as many third-party providers as possible. They have the reach, the resources, and the consumer confidence built in, so why wouldn’t you want your brewery tours and distillery tours on their websites?

While more eyeballs might see your product, but the vast majority of consumers will not take the extra step and follow the link directly to the business’s website and book through them. This means fewer clicks on your business page, which doesn’t improve your website ranking, which keeps your business page below those of the big guys.

To be very open, we have our business listed on all the sites above, and we do get bookings through them, but we are always weighing the pros and cons.

With TripAdvisor/Viator, for example, our reviews that are linked to a specific product will no longer be shown if we remove that product from their booking system. So TripAdvisor, which used to be a trustworthy, unbiased review platform, is now a preferred booking site and no longer gives equal footing to all products, whether we are looking at restaurants, activities, hotels, etc.

Looking at the example below, you can see our Best of Brisbane Full Day Brewery Tour with Lunch has 58 reviews attached to it on TripAdvisor.

Our Coldie on the Goldie Full Day Brewery Tour with Lunch has 57, our Dash of Brisbane has 31 and our Quickie on the Coast has 19, equalling a grand total of 165 reviews. However, as you can see, we actually have 516 reviews:

What this means is that if we removed our products from TripAdvisor/Viator, we would drop to just 351 reviews showing, and this wouldn’t give us priority over other Food & Drink listings on the platform.

Another disadvantage is that if a booking is made and minimim numbers aren’t met, any cancellation we put through – whether the guest has requested it or we need to do it – negatively impacts our rating. Instead of keeping things in house and chatting with upcoming guests about their and our availability, we are pigeonholed into specific dates.

Fortunately for us, the majority of our bookings come to us directly, but it would be fantastic if we could capture the percentage we receive from third-party platforms. The other benefit of this would be the ability to communicate directly to the consumer as soon as they book (currently we don’t get their email address and must use the messaging system to chat with them, which isn’t always efficient) and, if needed, move them onto another tour when minimum numbers aren’t met.

The consumer pays more.

You may notice that the price listed on the website for our brewery tours is $10pp more than it is to book directly with us. Why is that, when TripAdvisor/Viator offer a lowest price promise? It’s because of the commission they take. Viator more or less sets their commission structure to whatever they want (anywhere from 25-30+%), and we were noticing that we started getting paid less from them than our agreed-upon 20% rate. At some stage they began taking a higher percentage (25%) which meant that, in order to not lose money on our tours, we had to raise our prices across our brewery tour offers.

We have made it as clear as we are allowed (without having our product removed from their site) that booking directly offers the best price, but whether it’s due to uncertainty around cancellation, trust in the existing entity that is TripAdvisor, or myriad other reasons, we still receive bookings from this platform.

So not only is the guest paying $10pp more for the exact same tour, we are receiving almost $50pp less (on full day tours) than if that person had visited our website and booked directly with us.

Stop paying the big guys; book direct.

Sponsored ads hurt.

The searches for the above screenshots were in Google using the terms “Brisbane brewery tours” and “Gold Coast brewery tours”. Organically, those search terms do well for us and we appear at the very top of the results, but what can get in our way are the sponsored ads.

Looking at the Brisbane brewery tours example, there are five options that come up in the sponsored ads: ExperienceOz (who take a commission), Backpacker Tours (you guessed it – commission), and Adrenaline. Interestingly enough, when I did the same search in a new window (the screenshots were taken using an incognito browsing page), eight sponsored ads came up, including ads for Groupon and for winery tours.

For the Gold Coast brewery tour example, the first two tours are for Pineapple Tours and the third one – while it’s our Quickie on the Coast Half Day Brewery Tour – isn’t a direct link to our page, but an ad by ExperienceOz.

This means that even if people know what they want and search for a brewery tour, they are often led by convenience and will click on one of the very first links, which is almost always a sponsored ad which does not lead directly to the business itself.

Of course we could invest money in sponsored ads, but that’s a slippery slope and is a job unto itself. What search terms to focus on, which products to promote, and so on. What we’d like to teach consumers is to look past the sponsored ads and focus on the organic search results that offer a wider range of options directly from the tour providers themselves.

Your decisions matter.

From booking a hotel room to checking out new restaurants using Groupon (fun fact: Groupon [and other daily deal sites] take a huge chunk of commission and the retailers don’t get paid unless the deal is redeemed. If you find something you like, we suggest calling the venue directly as usually they will match the promo deal featured on Groupon and other similar sites), every dollar earned by a small business helps them grow. Convenience is important, absolutely, but direct bookings will almost always offer you more flexibility, a better price, direct communication with the business and – you never know – perks like free upgrades or additional benefits.

So we ask to think about the next booking you make online, whether for a hotel, restaurant, or activity, and check that you can’t make the same reservation directly with the business itself instead of a giant booking retailer. We guarantee it makes a difference.