That ‘Local Tour’ You Booked? 30% Took a Detour.

Who’s Really Getting Paid When You Book That Tour?

Imagine this.

There’s a boat tour operator in the Florida Keys who has been running trips on the same reef for 22 years. He knows the water the way most of us know our own street. His guides have watched the same coral heads grow for a decade. Guests come back year after year — not because an algorithm served them a targeted ad, but because someone mentioned it at a dinner party and said: this is the real thing.

Last year, he handed 28% of his revenue to a tech company in San Francisco that has never touched saltwater.

And here’s the part that really stings: the people who booked through that platform weren’t customers who never would have found him otherwise. Most of them were exactly the kind of traveller who would have Googled “best boat tours in the Florida Keys” and landed right on his website.

Except they didn’t. Because his website is on page three. And pages one and two belong to GetYourGuide, Viator, Tripadvisor Experiences, and Airbnb Experiences — all of whom are also selling his tours, just with a 25–30% cut taken off the top before he sees a cent.

I know this story because I live it. I’m a tour operator, and this is the reality of our industry right now.

The Toll Booth You Didn’t Know You Were Paying

Here’s what’s actually happening every time you open one of these platforms to find something to do on your trip.

These companies have spent extraordinary amounts of money — we’re talking nine-figure Google Ads budgets — to make sure that when you search for a local experience, you find them first. Not the operator. Not the actual human being who built the thing you’re about to enjoy. Them.

Then they list that operator’s tour on their platform, charge you a booking fee, take their commission, and position the whole arrangement as a service they’re providing to everyone involved.

It’s basically like Walmart sitting in front of every local business asking for a 25% cut before you can even get in the door.

Except at least Walmart stocks its own shelves.

The operator does all the work. Knows all the things. Hires the local guides, maintains the equipment, holds the permits, carries the insurance, shows up in the rain. The platform processes the transaction and keeps a quarter of it.

You didn’t know you were paying a middleman. The middleman made sure of that.

The Search Result That Wasn’t Neutral

This is the part that tends to make people genuinely annoyed once they understand it.

When you search for things to do in a city you’re visiting, you probably assume the results have something to do with quality — that the top listings are highly rated, or popular, or genuinely recommended. And technically, there’s a star rating involved. But the more important factor in what you’re seeing is who paid for placement, who’s been on the platform longest, and whose listing best satisfies an algorithm you’ll never see.

GetYourGuide will tell you they’re marketing for operators like me, reaching customers we couldn’t reach on our own. But those same customers would have found us on Google — if these companies weren’t buying up the entire first page.

The small operator who started a sea kayaking company last year and knows every tidal pattern in the bay? She’s on page four. The large aggregator that bulk-lists hundreds of generic experiences across dozens of cities and has been optimizing their SEO since 2014? Right at the top.

You’re not seeing the best option. You’re seeing the option with the deeper wallets.

What You’re Actually Losing

Here’s the real irony. The entire reason people choose to book a local tour — rather than staying at an all-inclusive and never leaving the pool — is because they want something real. Something specific. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else in the world, with anyone else leading the way.

That thing — that specific, unrepeatable, locally-obsessed expertise — is exactly what the platform model is quietly grinding down.

Platforms reward scale. Volume. Standardization. Experiences that can be categorized, filtered, refunded, and reviewed using the same interface whether you’re booking a cooking class in Oaxaca or a whale watching trip in Nova Scotia. The messy, particular, irreplaceable stuff doesn’t fit neatly into a dropdown menu. And so, gradually, it gets squeezed out in favour of things that do.

We’re taking great, individualized, irreplaceable experiences and turning them into a generic brand. Not because travellers wanted that. But because the economics made it easy to look the other way while it happened.

The Fix is Embarrassingly Simple

Book direct.

That’s it. Find the operator’s actual website — it usually takes about 30 seconds of extra searching — and book through them instead of through the platform. Same tour. Same guide. Same experience. Except the person who built it gets paid properly for it.

When you book directly, the operator gets your contact information. They can follow up, invite you back, build something that no platform can own or monetize. You’re not just saving them a 25% commission on a single transaction — you’re giving them something the platforms structurally deny them: the ability to know who their customers actually are.

Ask your hotel concierge. Look for regional tourism websites. Search one page deeper than the first result. The recommendation you get will be better than anything an algorithm serves you, and the money you spend will reach the people who actually deserve it.

The 22-year reef guide in the Florida Keys isn’t asking you to save him. But he’d be doing a lot better — and you’d have found him a lot more easily — if a tech company in San Francisco wasn’t sitting between you and him with its hand out.

Book direct. Tell your friends. It’s one of the easiest ways to make sure the kind of travel you love still exists in ten years.