5 Reports Every Tour Business Owner Should Run Before Next Season

Why Your Numbers Matter More Than Your Gut

Let me be direct. Do you actually know where your bookings are coming from? Not vaguely. Specifically. Do you know which tours are making you money? Which marketing channels are driving bookings? What your actual profit margin is on each product?

Most tour business owners can’t answer these questions. And that’s exactly why so many folks work harder every year without seeing income growth.

If you don’t know which tour is your most profitable, how do you decide where to invest your marketing budget? If you don’t know which booking source drives the most revenue, how do you know where to double down? These decisions have real consequences.

Think of these reports as your annual performance review, not for your guides, but for your entire business. They show you what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to change.

Report #1: Bookings by Product

This report shows you which tours are actually selling. Not which tours you think are popular or which ones you enjoy running most. Which ones people are actually booking.

Most booking software platforms built for tours have this capability. Whether you’re using FareHarbor, Rezdy, Bokun, Ventrata, or similar tools, you can run a report by product showing the number of bookings for each. This is one compelling reason to move away from generic e-commerce options like WooCommerce and get software dedicated to tours and activities.

Run this report for a full season or year, then sort by number of bookings or total revenue. You’re looking for the 80/20 rule in action. Usually about 20% of your tours generate the bulk of your revenue. These are your workhorses. These are the tours you should be optimizing, marketing, and perfecting.

Then look at the bottom of the list. Tours that rarely got booked. Ones you only ran a handful of times all year, or maybe didn’t book at all.

Here’s what you do with that information: either cut these low performers entirely, or figure out why they’re not selling and fix it. Maybe the sales pages are weak. Maybe your marketing messaging was off. Maybe the pricing wasn’t right. But don’t keep them on your roster just out of habit or because they were there last year.

Your top performers deserve more of your attention. Your bottom tours need to justify their existence.

A colleague ran VW van tours in the Bay Area, mostly to wine country. He created an oyster shucking experience that he absolutely loved. After years of running the same wine tours, this new experience was his passion project. But when he ran his numbers, he discovered those wine tours weren’t just selling better—they were substantially more profitable because of the higher costs associated with the oyster experience. He wanted to increase his take-home pay and make his business more profitable, so he cut the oyster tour. That single decision substantially increased his profit the following year.

Report #2: Bookings by Source

Every channel has a different cost. Direct bookings mean you keep most of your money, but you balance that with a marketing budget. OTA bookings mean you’re paying anywhere between 25-30% or more in commissions.

Pull this report and look at the percentages. If 80% of your bookings are coming through a single channel, you have a problem. You’re basically renting your customer list from someone else and paying for the privilege. You’re also incredibly vulnerable to changes in AI algorithms that aren’t even necessarily the fault of an OTA like Viator or a search engine like Google or Bing.

If you’re overly reliant on one channel, you’re simply not as resilient a business.

Your goal is to have a healthy mix, and this report helps you get there. It also tells you where to invest. If your direct bookings are low, you may need to increase your marketing spend or lift your conversion rate through work on your website, SEO, or email marketing. If you’re looking to grow your indirect channels and you see that one product on one particular OTA is crushing it, maybe you should offer that same tour on other OTA platforms.

Report #3: Average Order Value

This tells you how much the average customer spends per booking. More importantly, it shows you whether your upsells, cross-sells, and packages are actually working.

Growing your average order value is hugely valuable because you’ve already spent the money to acquire that customer, either through your own direct marketing efforts or paying commission to a reseller. They’re your customer now. If you can increase the amount they’re spending, that’s a lot cheaper than going out and getting a new customer.

Maybe you don’t have any upsells at all. Trip protection is one of the easiest to add. Tests run by booking software companies recommend charging anywhere between 10-15% of the ticket price for a more generous cancelation policy, like free cancelation up to one hour before. If you haven’t played around with trip protection, this is a great chance to implement it and track the impact on your average order value.

This report shows you progress on the important task of increasing that average order value. You’ll do it with creative upsells. What could you add to your tour that can be added with a single click during checkout or offered when guests arrive on site?

You also have multiple points in your checkout experience, or in the time between booking and arrival, where you can invite guests to book another tour or give them a special discount. The details don’t matter as much as running the report to see the impact of those initiatives.

This type of optimization makes your business more profitable not just over the next season, but year after year. This stuff really compounds.

Report #4: Conversion Rate

This is the percentage of people who make a booking on your website versus the total number of visitors passing through. You’re typically tracking this metric through a combination of Google Analytics with goals set up and information from your booking software.

Industry research shows that conversion rates for travel websites typically range from 0.2% on the low end all the way up to 5-6%. If you’re above 2% conversion rate on your total traffic, you’re probably in the top 20%. But if you’re between 4-6%, you’re making your way toward the top of the heap. Many experienced operators hit 5% or more on all traffic to their website, which is exceptional.

Here’s a simple benchmark: if your conversion rate is under 2%, your website and sales page need work. Period.

If you’re sitting there thinking you don’t even know what your conversion rate is or how to set that up, you’ve got your first project. What gets measured gets managed. If you don’t have that set up, figure out what your conversion rate is now, find a way to track it, and take your first benchmark. Your goal is to beat that benchmark after you tackle one or two initiatives. But you have to start with the benchmark.

Your website conversion rate is one of the most important numbers in your business. Track it, test it, improve it.

Report #5: Profit Margin by Product

Revenue is not profit. We all need to hear that again sometimes. Revenue is not profit.

You can have a tour that brings in $10,000, $20,000, maybe even a million dollars a year, but after you’ve taken into account all the costs, if it’s just breaking even, you’re not profitable. You might be working two or three times as hard, but you’re not making any more profit. That’s where this report helps shine a light on blind spots in your business.

Most of the time, your booking platform won’t calculate this for you directly. You’ll have to do some manual work here, but it’s 100% worth it.

After you get the total revenue figures from your booking software, start layering in all the costs associated with any given product over the course of the whole year. All those fixed and variable costs like guide pay, your time, cost of goods sold, everything.

What you’ll definitely find is that you have certain products that are more profitable than others. You’ll likely find others that are barely breaking even. These are the tours that either need to get repriced, restructured, or cut.

You want to make sure you’re using all the resources at your disposal—from vehicles to guides—to generate the most profit you can. If that equipment, that guide, or that vehicle can be used in one way that generates $2,000 of profit for a day, but those same resources could be put to use and earn $5,000 in profit for that same usage, you now have incredibly actionable data to help make your tour business more profitable.

Making These Reports Work for You

These five reports help you build a roadmap for the off season. It’s natural to run these reports on an annual basis, but here’s the thing: when we’re coaching operators, we often encourage them to run these reports more than once a year.

If you’re just getting started with optimizing your tours, maybe quarterly is all you need. Eventually you might get to a point where you’re running these monthly and setting aside a little time to see what progress you’re making on these numbers.

You’re looking for trends in these reports. If your only data points are every year, it’s very difficult to adjust your strategy, policies, or decisions over the course of any given year.

But here’s the thing: once you have those numbers, sitting down with an experienced tour business coach or mentor who’s got experience running tour and activity businesses changes everything. What they see in your numbers can be very different from what you see in those exact same numbers.

Want help creating more engagement (and stellar reviews) for your tours? Book a free 45-minute strategy call with us today!