Client acquisition for Australian water tour operators
OTAs take up to 30%
of every booking.
We do the same job for 8%.
Same deal you already say yes to every time Viator sends you a guest. Paid only when a seat actually sells, never a cent before it.
Free 15 minute call
Pick a time that suits you
I ring you personally, no call centre. We talk about your tours and your free booking page.
Calendar not loading? Open it here.
✓ No card. No pressure. Move it or cancel any time.
The problem
You are already paying a toll collector.
You just call him Viator.
Dear skipper,
You did not get into this business to become someone's toll booth. But that is what happened.
A stranger books your reef trip on Viator. Money changes hands. Somewhere between 20 and 30 cents of every dollar peels off before it ever reaches your account.
You still fuel the boat. You still run the safety briefing. You still do the whole job, start to finish.
The toll collector does not fuel anything. Does not know a good deckhand from a backpacker on a working holiday. He just stands at the boom gate with his hand out, because he owns the road you are standing on.
Maybe that is not quite you. Maybe your version is simpler. Dumber, too.
Maybe your booking system is a mobile phone that rings mid-safety-briefing, so you are apologising to twelve guests while some bloke on the other end asks if Saturday is still free.
Maybe you do not even have that. Sixty-eight of the water tour operators on our own list have no website at all. Just a phone number and a five-star Google listing, waving from the dock.
Whichever one is you, here is the bit that matters. None of it is because your tour is no good.
It is because nobody ever built you a machine that sells seats while you are out on the water, at a price you actually keep, without handing a stranger 30 cents of every dollar for the privilege.
That machine is what we build.
Tour and cruise operator
Viator, GetYourGuide or Booking.com already own a slice of your season. Every seat they sell, they keep the toll.
Charter skipper
Your booking system is a phone that rings at the worst possible moment, then goes unanswered for the rest of the day.
Hire and activity operator
First fine day after a week of rain. Your calendar is empty because nobody could find you online in time.
No website at all
Just a phone number and a Google listing. Every single enquiry depends on someone catching you between trips.
The maths
The maths every operator already knows.
We just changed the number.
Say a seat on your tour sells for $200. Here is where that $200 actually goes, two different ways.
The OTA way
The TourRevenue way
Forty-four dollars a seat, back in your pocket. Times every seat, all season.
This is example maths on a $200 seat, so you can run your own numbers next to it. Viator and GetYourGuide publish their own commission rates at 20% to 30%. FishingBooker publishes 10% to 30%, set by the operator.
*does the maths again* Still $44 more in your pocket, every single seat.
Here is the part that actually matters, though.
We do not send an invoice for "strategy". We do not bill you a retainer sitting there whether the boat sails full or empty.
We only get paid when you get paid. Exactly like the OTA you are already paying. Just a lot less.
Proof
We already run this machine on a real Australian water tour operator.
Cooly Eco Adventures. Gold Coast whale-swim and eco tours. Forty-six days, 28 June to 12 August 2026. Named with Lachy's permission.
$141,621.66 in platform-reported bookings off $8,190.79 in ad spend. 17.3 times, blended.
A hundred and forty-one grand in bookings, off eight grand of ads.
Two platforms, two screenshots. We never merge them into one "revenue" figure, because Meta and Google can each claim credit for the very same booking. Here is exactly what each platform reported, split out, nothing hidden.
That is enough whale-swim bookings to fill every seat on every boat leaving the Gold Coast for a month.
Here is the honest part, the part a flashier page would leave out.
This proves ads can sell real tour seats to people who had never heard of the business before. It does not prove operators shift bookings away from OTAs, because we never measured that.
We are telling you the true thing, not the shinier one. What we put in front of people who had never heard of Cooly, then filled seats. That is the whole claim. It is a big one.
How it works
The whole machine.
Not just ads.
Everything below is included in the one fee. We do not sell you the booking page, then upsell the CRM, then upsell the follow-up texts. It is one system.
A booking page you own
Your branding, your tours, your prices, a real calendar. Not ours. Yours.
Meta ads built for perishable seats
This weekend's departure, this Saturday's tide, not a vague "book anytime" ad nobody acts on.
Google ads that catch the people already searching
Including the people searching your own business name, who should be landing on your page, not a competitor's ad.
A CRM that captures the real mobile number
Every enquiry, not just an email address that goes stale in a spreadsheet nobody opens.
Automated SMS follow-up
Chases the booking someone started and never finished, then refills the day the weather cancelled on you.
Rebooking prompts
So this season's guest becomes next season's booking, automatically, without you lifting a finger.
What the system actually does, in full:
One. Find people who want to be on the water.
Two. Learn who actually books, not just who looks.
Three. Find more of their twins.
Four. Never gets seasick. Never asks for a sick day either.
The free build
Before you pay us anything,
we build you a real booking page. Free.
Here is how this actually starts.
You tell me about your tours. Fifteen minutes on the phone.
Before we hang up, I am already building your booking page. Your name on it. Your tours. Your prices. Your photos. A calendar that works.
Not a mockup. Not a PDF. A real page, live, on a real link, that you can send to your own mum to check.
It is yours either way. Say no to everything else and you still keep the page.
We only build it after you say yes to the call, never before. That is the point. It has to cost us something for the goodwill to actually mean anything.
The terms, in writing
Everything you need to know, before a dollar moves.
Performance-only. A one-off setup fee, then 8% of the bookings we actually track. Nothing else.
No retainer. No monthly management fee sitting there whether the season is hot or dead.
Your ad budget goes straight to Meta and Google. It never touches our account. We will walk you through the exact minimum spend on the call, so you know precisely what you are signing up for before you sign anything.
Three-month minimum. Long enough for the machine to actually learn your best guest, short enough that we have to keep earning it every day after.
Everything we build stays yours. The booking page, the ad accounts, the CRM, the data, every mobile number captured. Walk away and you walk away with all of it.
Two new operators a month, maximum. That is how many accounts one person can actually run properly. Archie runs every account himself.
How a booking counts as ours goes in writing before you sign. No arguing about it after the fact.
What is the risk to you? Everything you have got.
*settle down* Kidding. It is performance-only. If we do not book you seats, we do not get 8% of anything.
Sounds too simple? It is. That is kind of the whole point.
Who you are actually dealing with
The bloke on this page is the bloke who answers your phone.
I am Archie Fairbairn-Gray.
I build the machine and run the account myself. No account manager, no handoff to a call centre in another state.
Big agencies will hand you an account manager who thinks bow and stern are yoga poses. There is no account manager here. There is me, a headset and a working knowledge of what a manifest is.
I have never skippered a boat in my life. I have run this exact system for a whale-swim and eco-tour operator on the Gold Coast. The screenshots above are what it did.
You run the boat. I run the hunting.
Judge me on tracked bookings. Nothing else.
Rather talk than fill in a form? Ring me direct.
Questions
Straight answers, before you ask.
Will this hurt my ranking on Viator or GetYourGuide?
No. We never touch your OTA listings. Keep them, drop them, that is entirely your call. We just build you a second channel that does not take 30 cents of every dollar.
I do not even have a website. Can this still work for me?
That is exactly who this is built for. The booking page comes first, whatever you have now.
What if I already have a booking system I like?
It runs alongside whatever you already use. We are not asking you to rip anything out.
It is the quiet season. Should I wait until it picks up?
The quiet season is exactly when the machine gets built. So it is already running the day the season turns.
How do I actually know ads sell tour seats?
Ask Cooly Eco Adventures. $141,621 in platform-reported bookings, screenshots above. Happy to put you on the phone to talk it through.
What happens to the mobile numbers you collect?
They go straight into a CRM you own. Every enquiry gets an automatic SMS follow-up, so nobody who almost booked just disappears.
Do I have to sign up for ages?
Three months, minimum. After that it runs month to month. No surprise lock-in past the three.
What if I get zero bookings from this?
Then you owe us 8% of zero. We do not get paid a management fee for showing up. We get paid when you get booked out.