Your Viator bookings are real. Your safety net isn't.
Viator takes 25–30% of every booking. GetYourGuide takes another cut. You can't even email your past customers. Scalepact runs Direct Booking OS, the framework that takes it back through SEO, paid ads, and retention. We don't touch your OTAs. We build everything around them.
“Three months in, the math finally works.” , Operator, PrimeOne Tours
See the full PrimeOne case study below↓
We don't touch your OTAs. We build everything around them.
Most operators are afraid an agency will mess with their Viator listing and tank their best revenue source. We won't. Your OTAs are your business. Direct Booking OS builds parallel infrastructure, the slice you own, that grows alongside.
Over time the math shifts. Direct goes up. OTA share goes down. The relationship between you and your customers comes back into your hands.
We never log into your Viator, GYG, or third-party listings. The revenue line you depend on today doesn't get touched, paused, or experimented with.
- Edit, optimize, or 'fix' your Viator listing
- Touch your GetYourGuide account
- Mess with your TripAdvisor listing structure
- Pause OTA campaigns or change your OTA pricing
- Compete with the OTA channel on price
Everything we build lives on assets you control, your domain, your ad accounts, your email list, your WhatsApp number, your social profiles. If we ever part ways, every piece comes with you.
- Build SEO that captures direct-search demand
- Run paid ads to your owned site, not OTA pages
- Set up email + WhatsApp flows to past customers
- Create the rebooking + referral engine OTAs forbid
- Produce content + social so the brand keeps showing up
PrimeOne started 99% Viator-dependent. Twelve months of Direct Booking OS later, direct bookings up 127%, and Viator's share of total revenue dropped from 99% to 59%. Same OTA listing. We never touched it.
Three layers. Stacked into the OS.
Direct Booking OS is built from three layers, Visibility, Acquisition, and Retention & brand. Each tier adds a layer on top of the one below it. Pick your bleed; we'll point at it on the audit.
Get found by people already searching for your tour.
Local SEO, Google Business Profile, TripAdvisor, AI-search optimization, and on-page SEO for the destination keywords your future customers are typing right now. The base layer of every Direct Booking OS engagement.
Drive direct bookings with paid ads built for tour math.
Google Search for high-intent queries, Performance Max for destination targeting, Meta retargeting and lookalikes, wired through proper conversion tracking so you know which dollar bought which booking. You hold the ad accounts; we manage them.
Turn each booking into the next two, and own the relationship.
Post-tour email and WhatsApp flows, rebooking incentives, referral programs, past-customer reactivation. Plus social management and content production so the brand keeps showing up between bookings, not just at the moment of search.
Don't take our word for it. Look at the math.
How we walked into a 99% Viator-dependent operator and built a direct slice that runs on its own engine, documented, server-side tracked, real numbers.
From 99% Viator-dependent to a direct slice running on its own engine.
A Cancún day-tour operator who started 99% Viator-dependent. Twelve months later: direct bookings up 127% at a 2.8× blended ROAS, straight from their site, not Viator. Viator went from 99% to 59% of total bookings, and we never touched the listing.
Twelve months in, Viator is down to 59% and the direct slice running on our own engine does more revenue per dollar than anything we've tried. The math finally works.See the screenshots and numbers
- 127%Booking lift12-month direct-slice growth, site-direct bookings, not Viator volume.
- 2.8×Blended ROASGoogle + Meta combined, server-side tracked, fully attributed to direct revenue.
- 40%OTA dependency cutViator share of total bookings reduced from 99% to ~59% over the engagement.
- 0OTA listings touchedWe never logged into their Viator account. Parallel infrastructure, not interference.
Three tiers. One escape route
from the OTA tax.
Each tier builds on the one below it. Visibility is the floor, Growth adds paid acquisition, Pro adds retention and brand. Flat retainer, ad spend paid direct to Google and Meta. No percent-of-spend trickery.
The 'test the water' tier. For operators who want to start escaping OTAs without committing to ad spend yet. SEO + GBP + TripAdvisor + AI search.
- Local SEO for destination + tour keywords
- Google Business Profile optimization + weekly posts
- TripAdvisor optimization (still a major direct-booking driver)
- AI search optimization for 'best [tour] in [city]' queries
- On-page SEO for your existing website
- + 1 more on the full tier page
The 'I'm serious about this' tier. Everything in Visibility, plus paid acquisition wired through proper conversion tracking. Recommended $1,500–3,000/mo ad spend (paid direct to platforms).
- Everything in Visibility ($600 tier)
- Google Search Ads (high-intent: 'book Cancun tour', 'Tulum tour deals')
- Google Performance Max for destination targeting
- Meta Ads (retargeting site visitors + lookalike audiences)
- Conversion tracking + attribution setup
- + 1 more on the full tier page
The full operating system. Everything in Growth, plus the Retention layer and Social & content production. For operators ready to build a brand, not just chase bookings.
- Everything in Visibility + Growth
- Email capture + post-tour automation flows
- Direct rebooking incentive system + referral program
- WhatsApp follow-ups (huge in tourism, most operators miss this)
- Past customer reactivation campaigns
- + 3 more on the full tier page
From Viator chaos to direct-booking clarity in 21 days. Exactly.
No kickoff workshops. No status-meeting theatre. Three steps, each with a duration, a deliverable, and a clear way to tell whether it worked, in writing on day one.
Audit
Read-only access to your booking system, ad accounts, GBP, analytics. We ship a 20+ page audit doc with screenshots, dollar-value-of-fixes math, and a prioritized punch list, yours to keep, billed or not.
Plan
Signed 30 / 60 / 90 with day-by-day milestones, kill-switch criteria, and the tier we'd actually recommend (sometimes that's a smaller one than you expected).
Execute & report
SEO ships, GBP gets weekly posts, ads launch with proper tracking, retention flows go live. Live dashboard, weekly Friday narrative Loom, monthly cohort review.
See exactly what's leaking before you commit a dollar.
Show me my leaksThe questions you're thinking , but haven't asked yet.
No. We never log into your Viator or GYG accounts. We don't optimize them, change them, or interfere with them. That's your business, and your single biggest revenue line right now. Direct Booking OS builds parallel infrastructure (your site, your ads, your SEO, your retention layer) that grows the slice you own without touching the slice they own. Over time the math shifts in your favor; the OTAs keep working in the background.
Then we build you one, $3–8k one-time, scoped after the audit, as the website build add-on. A surprising number of operators we audit are 100% Viator and have nothing else; that's actually the easiest place to start because there's no legacy site debt to untangle. We ship a clean, fast, conversion-optimized site sized to your booking system (FareHarbor / Bokun / Rezdy), then start the Visibility tier on top. About 4–6 weeks from kickoff to your own bookings landing.
Submit the form, get a Calendly link the same day. We pre-review your accounts before the call (if you've shared read-only access by then), walk findings live, and send a written audit doc within 48 hours, whether or not we end up working together. No pitch. About 1 in 5 audits, we tell you you don't need an agency yet.
You do. The ad accounts stay in your name, billing goes straight from Google and Meta to your card. We manage and optimize, you own the asset. If we ever part ways, every campaign, every audience, every conversion event, yours. Recommended starting spend is $1,500–3,000/month for most destinations; we'll calibrate to your booking margin during the audit.
Most agencies pricing tour operators at $5K+ are also working hotels, e-commerce, SaaS, and three other verticals to keep the lights on. Scalepact works tour operators only, the playbook is templated where it can be (SEO structures, GBP cadence, GHL retention flows), and the founder (Hamza) handles strategy on every account. Lower price reflects the productized model, not lower quality. Tier 3 retention + content is where labor scales, that's why it jumps to $2K.
The playbook, one piece at a time.
Tracking, brand bidding, retargeting, reactivation: the exact moves behind the direct slice, written up so you can run them yourself.
Meta Ads for Tour Operators: Structure, Budgets, 30-Day Plan
Google catches searchers. Meta reaches the travelers who booked the flight and have not searched yet. Account structure, audiences by timing, creative, budgets and a 30-day launch plan.
Read article Paid acquisition · 9 min readClick-to-WhatsApp Ads for Tour Operators: Setup, Scripts, Tracking
Travelers ask questions before they book. Click-to-WhatsApp ads put the question one tap from your ad and the booking one tap from the answer. Setup, scripts, tracking, budgets.
Read article Visibility & SEO · 9 min readThe Direct Booking Playbook for Cancún Tour Operators
Mostly-American travelers, a saturated market, operators at 95–99% Viator. Cancún is the hardest place to own your bookings, and where PrimeOne did it. The full playbook, layer by layer.
Read article Paid acquisition · 9 min readMeta Retargeting for Tour Operators: The 70% Who Leave to Think About It
About 70% of your visitors leave the first time, and tour buying takes weeks. Meta is where you stay in front of them. Retargeting and lookalikes done right, not “boost post.”
Read article Retention & brand · 9 min readReferral and Reactivation for Tour Operators: The Cheapest Bookings You Already Own
A new customer costs ad spend or 25–30% commission. A referral or a reactivated past customer costs almost nothing, and most operators never ask. Here are the two plays that fix that.
Read article Paid acquisition · 9 min readDefensive Brand Bidding for Tour Operators: Stop Paying Viator for Your Own Name
Search your own tour company on Google. If a Viator ad sits above your site, you're about to pay commission on a customer who typed your name. The cheapest, highest-ROI fix in paid media.
Read articleLet's find out exactly how much money your broken booking funnel is costing you.
Drop your details. We look under the hood of your booking system, OTA mix, ad accounts, and tracking, and send a written audit doc within 48 hours showing exactly where you're losing money. 100% free. Zero obligation. Tour operators only.
About 1 in 5 audits ends with us telling the operator “you don't need us yet”, and we send the audit doc anyway. That's by design.
