How We Research Tours

ScalePact builds direct booking systems for tour operators. That means our working week is spent inside operator pricing, availability, booking flows and the commission arithmetic that decides whether an operator takes a booking through their own site or pays twenty to thirty per cent of it to a marketplace. We know what a tour listing is hiding, because we have spent months rewriting listings for the people who run the boats.

That is the whole basis of our authority, and it is worth being blunt about what it is not. We have not taken most of the trips we write about. Anyone publishing guides to forty destinations who tells you otherwise is lying to you, and we would rather tell you exactly where our knowledge comes from and let you judge it.

What we publish

A small number of destination booking sites, one destination each. The first was BookBelizeTours.com. The second is SydneySideTours.com. Each one covers the tours available in one place, with live prices and availability from Viator, and a written guide to each experience that answers the questions the booking page leaves out. The full list is on our where we publish page.

How a destination gets picked

We do not pick destinations because we like them. We pick them on two numbers.

The first is whether people are searching for tours there in enough volume to be worth a site. For Sydney we pulled 4,070 keywords from Semrush with a combined 220,670 monthly searches, then split them into the ones where somebody wants to book something and the ones where somebody wants to read something. Those two groups need different pages and mixing them is the commonest reason a tour site ranks for nothing.

The second is whether a site with no history can actually rank. We check this by the age of the sites already ranking, not by domain authority scores. If a four year old independent site is sitting at position six for the best keyword in the set, then a new site can get there. If every result on page one is a fifteen year old operator and a government tourism board, we leave that destination alone. Sydney whale watching passed on that test because whaletales.com.au ranks sixth on a four year old domain.

How an experience gets picked

Every experience in a destination gets scored before a word is written. For Sydney that was 86 experiences, ranked on three things: how many people search for it, how hard the search results look by the site-age test above, and how many reviews the tours themselves carry on Viator. An experience with high search volume and no bookable product behind it is a page we will never monetise. An experience with 2,500 reviews and no search volume is a tour grid with nobody arriving at it.

That scoring produced 1,187 individual Sydney tours clustered into groups, and fifteen experiences that cleared the bar for the first wave of pages.

How we learn what a trip is actually like

This is the part most affiliate sites skip, and it is the part that takes the longest.

For every experience we select, we find the people who took that trip and recorded it. Not reviews. Video. We pull the transcripts, read them end to end, and write up what the footage shows that the listing does not. For the Sydney build that was 27 separate videos and 42,915 words of transcript, cached so we can go back to the source when something gets challenged.

What comes out of that is the detail you cannot get from a booking page. That a particular whale watching operator asks for a 6:30am check-in at a pontoon that is hard to find in the dark. That humpbacks surface on a five to eight minute cycle, so the people who put the camera away in the gap miss the second pass. That two separate travellers brought up seasickness without being asked, which tells you how often it comes up.

We also record what the footage does not show. Six of the Sydney experiences we scored had no traveller video evidence at all. Those pages either wait, or they say plainly that we have no first-hand account of that trip.

How we order the tours on a page

Review count first, then rating, then what the tour actually is. A tour with 900 reviews at 4.5 goes above a tour with 18 reviews at 5.0, because eighteen people is not a sample. We move a tour up the page when its rating is far better than the tour above it and the review count is close. We move one down, or off the page entirely, when the rating is poor and there are too few reviews to explain why.

We do not take payment for position. No operator has ever paid us to appear higher on a page, and if one offers we will say no and say so on the page.

What we will not do

• We will not write a first-hand account of a trip nobody on our team has taken. Where a detail comes from a traveller's own recording, we name them and link the video.
• We will not quote a price in our writing. Prices move weekly. Every price on our sites comes live from Viator, and if we typed one into a sentence it would be wrong within a month and you would find out the expensive way.
• We will not claim a guaranteed sighting, a guaranteed weather window or a guaranteed anything that belongs to the operator rather than to us.
• We will not name a boat as wheelchair accessible on an operator's behalf. That phrase covers everything from a level gangway to two crew lifting a chair, and the difference matters far too much for us to guess.
• We will not publish a page with an unverified claim in it. Every page we write carries a verification list, and the page does not go live until the list is clear.

How we are paid

Booking through a link on one of our sites costs you nothing extra and pays us a commission from the marketplace. That is the entire business model and we would rather you knew it on the first page you read than worked it out later.

It does not change what we recommend. The commission is the same percentage whichever tour you book, so we have no financial reason to push you towards one over another, and every reason to be right, because a site that recommends badly gets no repeat visitors and no links.

When we get it wrong

We do get things wrong. In October 2026 we found three different prices for the same tour on different parts of one of our own pages, and a date table with two rows in the wrong month. Both were our mistakes, both are logged, and the log is public on each site.

If you find something wrong on any page we publish, the page has a corrections address at the foot of it. We answer inside two working days and we write down what we changed and when.

Who is behind this

The research team is led by Hamza Liaqat, who signs the judgement on every page we publish. The full team is on our team page.