Guided tours: how to boost your sales and attract more clients?

You're a tour guide and you've polished your guided tour offering? The hardest part is still ahead: selling them! You're now in the thick of it, because you need to find clients to fill as many of your time slots as possible, all year round. No easy feat, especially when you have to compete with other guides who are also offering their guided tours. But here's the good news — the internet is going to be your best ally! Here are our 5 tips to increase sales of your guided tours.

Having a booking system on your website is essential in 2026 if you want to increase your guided tour sales. Clients will be self-sufficient and can book your guided tours directly, without having to write to you and without waiting hours or days for a reply.

This is all the more important as tourism is increasingly becoming a last-minute affair. A trend that grows stronger every year! For guided tours, this translates into clients who book just a few days before their visit, or even the evening before or the very same morning. There's no way to capture these clients if you're handling requests by email, without a booking system integrated into your site.

To sell your guided tours directly on your website with a professional booking system, welcome to Explorates! Our booking system for guided tours can be set up on your site in just a few minutes, with no fuss. With Explorates, your clients can book your guided tours around the clock, without any input from you, based on the availability of each time slot. A powerful tool that will save you a great deal of time and win you a great deal of sales!

Specialist activity distribution platforms allow you to reach a very wide audience and bring in a significant number of clients. Some guides work almost exclusively with Get Your Guide and Viator, filling the vast majority of their time slots through these two platforms alone.

But there's a catch... To sell your guided tours on activity platforms, you'll need to carefully monitor your slot availability every single day. As soon as a sale goes through on your website or on Viator, you'll need to immediately reduce the corresponding capacity on Get Your Guide. If you don't, you risk being penalised if a booking is cancelled due to outdated availability. And if it keeps happening, the platform could simply remove you.

The solution? Use Explorates! Our booking system also includes a Channel Manager — a tool that lets you centralise all your online sales, regardless of the platform. How does it work in practice? Instead of having to track your availability manually, platform by platform, Explorates technology handles it all automatically. For example: you've sold 2 spots for a guided tour tomorrow — Explorates immediately removes those 2 spots from sale on Get Your Guide and Viator. The two spots are cancelled? Explorates puts them straight back on sale on Get Your Guide and Viator. Explorates takes care of everything!

You should therefore regularly animate your Facebook, Instagram and TikTok accounts by introducing yourself and making people want to join your guided tours. An easy tip that can pay off handsomely: take a selfie or a short video just before your guided tour begins. You'll be right in the moment and can give a feel for the atmosphere of your upcoming tour.

Don't hesitate to reach out to influencers and invite them to experience your guided tour. They can then share your tour with their community. And that's far from trivial. Still according to the Expedia Traveler Value Index 2025, "73% of travellers say they have been influenced by recommendations from creators and influencers when booking a trip or a component of a trip".

Another tip: don't overlook LinkedIn. The well-known professional social network will help you reach the B2B market, whether that's travel agencies or works councils. These contacts can prove invaluable if you want to supplement your B2C activity, particularly during the off-season.

If your ranking isn't up to scratch, you'll need to rework your page so that the keyword appears in a far more prominent way for search engines. This also means adding images, to show search engines that you are a legitimate authority on the subject and the best site to feature.

Organic search is all the more important because it lets you capture direct traffic and therefore generate direct sales. You'll avoid the hefty commissions charged by activity platforms and maximise your margins.

And this is far from trivial. Many clients book their activities once they've already arrived at their destination, in their hotel. You can picture them planning the next day that evening over dinner, or even at breakfast in "so what are we doing today?" mode. A tip from the hotel receptionist or concierge can send clients straight to your guided tours. It's up to you to have a booking system like Explorates that will let you automatically accept last-minute reservations!

You can even think about a small incentive — for example, offering hoteliers a small commission or an exclusive perk. If your website or social media accounts attract a lot of traffic, you could even consider a visibility exchange, whether through reciprocal links or social media posts. Depending on your contacts, there will always be a way to create win-win partnerships. Let your creativity run free!