Tourism and attraction marketing is its own discipline: the demand is large and growing, the booking happens late and on a phone, and the biggest opening is that most operators haven’t closed the gap between getting found and getting paid. You win by capturing direct bookings, not by renting them back from a third party.
The experiences sector (tours, activities, and attractions) reached US$271 billion in 2025 and is projected to top US$342 billion by 2029, growing at an 8% CAGR against 5% for travel overall, per the Arival x Phocuswright Global Market-Sizing Report. The demand is there. The problem is conversion: only 33% of experiences gross bookings happened online in 2025, versus 64% for travel as a whole, and one-third of attractions still use no modern online ticketing system at all.
That gap is the whole story. A generic “hospitality marketing” approach treats an attraction like a hotel, but the buying behavior is different: the decision comes late (38% of bookings happen the same day or within two days of the trip), it happens on mobile (roughly 52% of attraction website bookings), and the shopper compares deeply before they commit. We build around those exact moments, and every number on this page is backed by a real source, listed at the bottom.
The case for doing this differently is not our opinion. It is what the data says, every figure sourced below.
Your demand is online. Your bookings aren’t.
This is the defining problem of the niche, and the largest lever. The Arival x Phocuswright market-sizing report found that just 33% of experiences gross bookings happened online in 2025, while travel overall sat at 64%. Three-quarters of experience businesses are small or micro operations, and one-third use no online booking system at all. The shoppers are searching; the checkout often isn’t there to catch them.
That gap is projected to close to 42% online by 2029, which means the operators who modernize now capture the shift while their competitors are still taking phone calls and walk-ups. We treat the booking site as the product: live availability, a checkout that takes payment on the spot, and the search visibility to feed it. A modern booking experience is not a nice-to-have here; it is the difference between a sold ticket and a lost one.
Only 33% of experiences book online, against 64% for travel overall. The booking flow is the lever, not the brochure.
Experiences lag the rest of travel online
OTAs are taking the bookings you could keep.
When an attraction has no direct booking path, the demand doesn’t disappear. It routes through an online travel agency that takes a cut. Arival’s State of Visitor Attractions research found that OTAs now deliver 18% of all attraction bookings globally, up from less than 10% before the pandemic, and one in three attractions still have no modern online ticketing system or connectivity to reseller partners.
That share is margin you’re renting back on bookings you could own. The fix is not to abandon OTAs; they have real reach. The fix is to make your own site the easiest, cheapest place to buy, so the OTA becomes a top-of-funnel discovery channel rather than the only checkout that works. We build the direct booking path and the search and AI presence that points demand to it, recapturing margin on every booking that no longer needs a middleman.
A growing slice goes through middlemen
The decision comes late, and it comes on a phone.
Attraction demand spikes at the last minute. Phocuswright research carried by TrekkSoft found that 38% of bookings happen the same day or up to two days before the trip, and Checkfront puts roughly 40% of tour and attraction bookings within three days of the experience itself. These are spontaneous, high-intent buyers deciding on the move, which means a slow or clunky mobile checkout loses the sale outright.
Mobile is now the dominant surface for these bookings. Viator’s operator data shows attractions take roughly 52% of website bookings through mobile, up from 37% in 2019, with mobile near 40% of direct online bookings across tours and activities. We build mobile-first: fast pages, live availability the moment someone lands, and a checkout that takes two thumbs and a few seconds. The shopper deciding on a sidewalk an hour before showtime should be able to buy before they change their mind.
38% of bookings land within two days of the trip. If mobile checkout stalls, the impulse is gone.
Mobile now carries the booking
And 38% of bookings happen the same day or within two days of the trip itself.
Source: Viator Operator Resource CenterShoppers read ten reviews before they pick one.
Experiences are a researched, compared purchase. Viator’s data shows 89% of travelers rank reviews as an important factor when choosing whether to book an experience, and 79% view up to 10 experiences and read up to 10 reviews for each before deciding. By the time someone reaches your booking page, they’ve already weighed you against a shortlist and scrutinized your proof.
That depth of comparison is why review volume, rating, and search presence are demand levers, not vanity metrics. The attraction that shows up across the shopping journey, with enough recent reviews to clear the bar, wins the comparison before the click. We treat reviews as an owned asset with a steady, ethical engine for earning them, and we build content and structured data so your experiences are the ones that surface when a shopper is deep in their ten-tab compare.
A compared, review-driven decision
AI is becoming the new trip planner.
Discovery is moving in front of the blue links. Pew Research found that about 18% of Google searches now return an AI summary, and when one appears, people click a traditional result only 8% of the time versus 15% with no summary, with just 1% clicking a source cited inside the AI answer. Meanwhile Amadeus reports 17% of US travelers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity for travel ideas, up 30% year over year.
For an attraction, that means being on page one is no longer enough; you have to be the experience the AI names when someone asks what to do this weekend. The work is structural: schema that describes your experiences cleanly, entity clarity so the AI knows what you are and where, reviews it can trust, and pages built to be quoted, not just ranked. We build for both Google and the AI layer, so the answer a traveler gets includes you.
AI answers are eating the click
And only 1% of searchers click a source cited inside the AI summary.
Source: Pew Research Center, 2025Cheap clicks, leaky carts: win on conversion.
Paid search is genuinely affordable in this category. WordStream’s 2024 benchmarks put the Travel average Google Ads search CPC at $1.92, among the lowest of any industry, with a 10.16% click-through rate and a 5.36% conversion rate. The traffic is buyable and the intent is high, which makes a tracked paid program viable even at modest ticket sizes.
The catch is the checkout. Travel and hospitality carts are abandoned at some of the highest rates of any category, and in this niche the leak compounds because the buyer is on a phone, deciding fast, with an OTA one tap away. So the money isn’t in buying more clicks; it’s in keeping the ones you paid for from leaking out of the funnel. We point spend at the moments that turn a cheap click into a sold ticket: a frictionless mobile checkout, live availability, trust signals at the point of decision, and reporting on bookings and revenue, not vanity traffic.
Clicks run $1.92 and the intent is high. The money is in the checkout, not in buying more clicks.
The sector has not only recovered - it is now the fastest-growing segment of travel, reshaping how people choose where to go and what to do.
Douglas Quinby, CEO and co-founder, Arival
Roughly 40% of tour and attraction bookings now happen within three days of the experience itself.
Jeffrey Radin, Checkfront
89% of travelers selected Reviews as an important factor when they’re considering to book an experience.
Viator Operator Resource Center
Ready to capture the bookings you’re renting back?
The demand for your experience is already searching; the question is whether it lands on a booking flow that converts or routes through a middleman that takes a cut. We build the direct booking site, the local and AI search presence that feeds it, and the review engine that wins the comparison, then report on tickets sold and revenue, not traffic. If you want to see where the bookings are leaking and what it would take to keep them, let’s talk.
Frequently asked
Why do so few attraction bookings happen online?
Should we sell through OTAs or our own website?
How important is mobile for attraction bookings?
Do reviews really affect whether people book an experience?
Is paid search worth it for selling tickets?
How does AI search change marketing for attractions?
Every figure on this page comes from a primary platform, an independent study, or a named industry source. No competing-agency stats, no made-up numbers.
- Arival x Phocuswright Global Market-Sizing Report (via The Star)
- Arival, The State of Visitor Attractions (via Travel Professional News)
- TrekkSoft, Last-Minute Booking Trends for Tours and Activities (citing Phocuswright)
- Checkfront, Last-Minute Tour Bookings
- Viator Operator Resource Center, Trends in Online Trip Planning and Booking
- Viator Operator Resource Center, How Reviews Impact Your Business
- Pew Research Center, 2025
- Amadeus 2025 research
- WordStream 2024 Google Ads Benchmarks
