"We can't compete with the OTAs." We hear it from tourism operators everywhere: accommodation providers, tour companies, activity operators. Booking.com, Expedia, Viator and GetYourGuide have budgets you will never match, so why bother running your own Google Ads?
Here is the short answer, and the rest of this article is the proof. One scenic helicopter company spent $1,200 on Google Ads in December 2023 and took $69,494 in direct bookings from it. If those bookings had come through an OTA at 20% commission, the bill would have been roughly $13,898. At 30%, about $20,848. Instead, the effective "commission" through Google Ads was 1.73%.
You are not trying to outspend the OTAs. You are trying to stop paying them for customers who were already looking for you. Those are very different problems, and the second one is far cheaper to solve than most operators believe.
The OTA problem, laid out plainly
Let us be clear about what you are up against, because the OTAs have built a very effective machine.
They are the biggest ad spenders in travel. Search for almost any accommodation, tour or activity and the OTAs are there at the top of the page, paying for the click. That is their model: buy the customer once, then charge you 20% commission, sometimes 30%, on every booking that customer makes.
It gets worse. They bid on your brand name. Someone searches for your business, by name, having already decided they want to book with you, and an OTA ad appears above your website. There can be four ads and three Google listings before your organic result even appears. A customer who typed your name into Google, looking specifically for you, can click an OTA ad, book your product on the OTA's site, and you pay 20% or more for the privilege.
Think about what that means. The OTA did not find you a new customer. Your reputation, your reviews, your word of mouth, your years of hard work found that customer. The OTA simply intercepted them on the way to your door and charged you a toll.
We cover the full picture of this fight, and how to win it, on our direct bookings versus OTAs page.
Brand defence: the cheapest ad you will ever run
This brings us to the single highest-return move available to almost every tourism operator: branded Google Ads on your own name.
The objection is always the same. "Why should I pay Google for clicks from people who already searched for me?" It feels like paying for something you should get free.
Here is the reality. If you are not running well-targeted branded ads on your own name, you are leaving the door open, and the OTAs, the biggest spenders in the game, will bid on your brand anyway. The choice is not between paying and not paying. The choice is between paying a few cents or dollars per click to bring that customer to your own website, or paying an OTA 20% commission on the entire booking because their ad sat above your organic listing.
Run the maths on one booking. Say your average booking is $500. The OTA commission at 20% is $100. The branded click that would have kept that booking direct might have cost you a dollar or two. That is the trade you are declining every day the campaign is not running.
Branded search is the lowest-cost, highest-return advertising you can run. Even if it is the only campaign you ever run, it is worth it. Your brand terms are cheap because they are specific to you, the intent is as strong as intent gets, and every booking you defend is a full-price direct booking with the customer relationship attached: their email address, their details, the chance to bring them back next season.
The real numbers: a scenic helicopter company
Talk is easy, so here is a real month, anonymised.
A scenic helicopter company we work with, December 2023:
- Google Ads spend: $1,200
- Revenue from those ads: $69,494
- Average booking value: $2,168
- Average cost per conversion: $15.01
Read that middle pair again. It cost about fifteen dollars of ad spend to win a booking worth over two thousand dollars.
Now compare the acquisition cost against the OTA alternative:
- Via OTA at 20% commission: roughly $13,898 to acquire that revenue
- Via OTA at 30% commission: roughly $20,848
- Via Google Ads: $1,200, an effective commission of 1.73%
- Via Google Ads including our agency cost: an effective commission of 4.24%
Even with the agency fee counted, direct acquisition through Google Ads cost less than a quarter of the cheapest OTA rate. Against a 30% commission it is about a seventh.
This is the direct rebuff to "we can't compete with the OTAs". This operator did not outspend anyone. They ran well-targeted campaigns, tracked them properly, and treated Google Ads as what it really is: a commission structure they control, at 1.73% instead of 20-30%.
If you think of your ad spend as a commission, the whole conversation changes. Nobody blinks at handing an OTA a fifth of every booking, because it is invisible, deducted before the money reaches you. But suggest spending 2-4% of booking revenue on ads and many operators treat it as a risky cost. It is the same money, except one version is five to fifteen times more expensive and hands your customer relationship to a third party.
How we structure these campaigns is on our Google Ads for tourism page.
Why operators don't see this: broken tracking hides the truth
If the numbers are this clear, why do so many operators still believe they cannot compete? Because most of them are flying blind, and the instruments they do have are lying to them.
The biggest culprit in tourism is broken cross-domain tracking. Most operators use a third-party booking system on a different domain to their website. If tracking is not configured correctly across that boundary, every booking looks like it started on the booking engine. The result: your "direct" traffic looks far bigger than it really is, and the ads, emails and search results that actually earned the booking get no credit.
So an operator looks at their reports, sees a big "direct" number and a modest Google Ads number, and concludes the ads are not working. The data seems to confirm the belief. In reality the ads did the work and the measurement swallowed the evidence.
The second layer of the problem is how conversions get into Google Ads in the first place. There are two ways: native Google Ads conversion tracking, or importing goals from Google Analytics 4. The GA4 import route can under-report your success by up to 50-60%. On one anonymised scenic-flights account, native tracking reported about $42,000 of bookings while the GA4 import showed about $31,000 for the same activity: a 25% gap in that case, and we have seen far worse elsewhere.
That gap has consequences beyond the report. Google's bidding systems optimise on the conversion data you feed them. Starve them of half your real results and they bid timidly, campaigns look mediocre, budgets get cut, and the belief that "ads don't work for us" hardens into policy. The operators who track properly quietly take the bookings.
Before you judge whether you can compete on Google, make sure your measurement is telling you the truth. Most of the time, it is not, and fixing it is the first job.
What it looks like at scale
The helicopter numbers are one month for one operator. Here is the same principle over a full campaign.
One flagship direct-booking campaign we ran turned roughly $23,000 of ad spend into about $717,000 in tracked bookings. In the peak month, the total cost of acquisition through Google Ads, all ad spend plus our agency fee, was about 4.2% of booking revenue. The OTA alternative for the same bookings: 20% or more.
Take the difference on $717,000. At 20% commission, the OTA route costs about $143,000. The direct route cost around $30,000 all-in at peak-month rates. That is roughly six figures staying in the business instead of going to a platform, and every one of those customers is in the operator's own database, not the OTA's.
The scale is not the point. The ratio is the point, and the ratio holds whether you are spending $1,000 a month or $10,000. Direct acquisition through well-run, well-tracked Google Ads consistently costs a fraction of OTA commission.
Where the OTAs still fit
None of this means abandoning the OTAs entirely. They have reach you do not, especially in markets where nobody has heard of you yet, and for many operators they are useful for filling gaps. The problem is not that OTAs exist. The problem is paying OTA commission on bookings that would have come to you directly, and believing you have no alternative for the rest.
A sensible position looks like this: defend your brand so nobody pays commission on customers who searched for you by name, build direct acquisition through search so your cheapest channel grows, and let the OTAs fill in around the edges on your terms rather than being the terms.
Where to start
If you take three things from this article, take these:
- Run branded ads on your own name, this week if possible. It is the cheapest campaign in your account and it closes the door the OTAs walk through every day. Even if it is your only campaign, run it.
- Fix your tracking before you judge your results. Cross-domain tracking into your booking engine, and native Google Ads conversion tracking rather than GA4 imports. Until then, your data will keep telling you ads do not work while they quietly do.
- Reframe ad spend as commission. You already accept a 20-30% acquisition cost through the OTAs. A direct channel running at 2-4% is not a gamble. It is the same purchase at a fraction of the price, with the customer relationship included.
You can compete with the OTAs. Operators smaller than the ones in this article do it every day, and it costs far less than you think. But it starts with tracking the truth, because until your numbers are honest, every decision you make about the OTAs is a guess.
If you want to know what this looks like for your business specifically, book a Growth Plan Session. We look at your accounts, your tracking and your OTA exposure, work out which pieces matter for you, and tell you straight where the growth is. You get value from it whether or not we work together afterwards. You can also explore everything we do for operators on our tourism and hospitality hub.