Why sell your outdoor and adventure activities on booking sites?

Since 2015, we've been lucky enough to be able to talk regularly with many outdoor and adventure activity professionals from all over the world. Our aim has always been to understand the way you work, the challenges you face and, above all, to show you the advantages of selling your activities on the internet and, more specifically, on Manawa's booking website! In this article we're going to try to go beyond the scope of Manawa.com in order to explain the added value of promoting your activities on booking websites (including our competitors).

What is a booking site?

To begin with, let's talk about the definition. A reservation site, as the name suggests, is a website that allows customers to make reservations. Today the most famous booking sites are Booking.com and Airbnb for accommodation, TheFork for restaurants, Expedia for travel, Rentalcars for cars, GetYourGuide and Viator for activities, and of course Manawa for outdoor activities and adventure.

The vast majority of booking sites in the world are based on marketplace models. The idea is that sellers (outdoor and adventure professionals in the case of Manawa) can put their offers on a website and then use the marketing resources of the booking site to promote them to new customers.

In a nutshell, the booking site is a showcase for promoting your brand and your offers in a different way and attracting additional customers in return for payment - always, or almost always, in the form of commission on sales.

A few techniques for easily recognising a booking site:

• Accurate and comprehensive product presentation (photos, technical information, customer reviews, prices, schedules, etc.)
• A diversified range of products across several countries and languages
• Identical prices on the booking site and vendor page. It's always the vendor who pays for the service and never the customer (except for Airbnb, which works with private individuals who don't necessarily have direct prices).
• Pay for sales performance is almost always on a commission basis
• Transparent communication on the commercial names of vendors (Les Heures Saines, Corsica Canyon, Tahiti Nui Hélicoptère, etc.)
• A "Book" button visible on all product pages with calendars for choosing a date.

Be careful not to confuse booking sites with gift voucher sellers such as Wonderbox, Smartbox or even Sport Découverte. Most of their customers buy without a date in mind to gift to a third party, which means their business model is based on customers who might never make a purchase.

Why sell your outdoor activities and adventures on booking sites?

As you can see, we're going to try and convince you to sell your outdoor and adventure activities on a booking site, including our competitors Get Your Guide, Viator, and CheckYeti. We'll still take the liberty of mentioning the advantages of Manawa to encourage you to start with the best booking sites for promoting and selling your outdoor and adventure activities ;)

1. Free visibility

Promoting your brand and your activities on a booking site is free and can bring your business a lot of visibility. The only up front cost is some time to set it up and then you only pay if it brings you customers. In just a few hours', you'll have new page on the internet highlighting your brand and activities in several languages, giving you legitimacy with customers and search engines like Google.

The Manawa advantage: maximum 2 hours of work for our partners, then it's up to the in-house and specialist content teams to manage the creation and translation of your pages on the website.

2. No commitment

One of the common features of booking sites is that there is no commitment - you can stop the promotion of your activities whenever you want. If you're not satisfied after a trial period, you can quickly end the partnership. What's more, there's no commitment in either direction: a booking site can also decide from one day to the next to remove your offers.

Manawa's plus point: All you need to do to end the partnership is send a simple email to your account manager.

3. Increase in sales

The primary aim of a booking site is to bring you more customers; it is only by enabling you to increase your sales that we are remunerated. The volume of business brought in will vary greatly from one booking site to another depending on their specialities, the type of activity, and the location.

Today, Get Your Guide is the site with the highest volume for city activities, CheckYeti is the best for selling ski lessons, while we at Manawa are leaders in all manner of outdoor and adventure activities such as canyoning, paragliding, and dog sledding...

The Manawa bonus: Manawa aims to bring between 5 and 15% more customers to our partners offering outdoor and adventure activities.

4. Learning good practice

It's important to remember that if booking sites are good at anything, it's selling your products. By finding out about and proposing your activities on booking sites, you'll be able to understand and learn how we go about selling your outdoor and adventure activities on the internet. Talking to the teams at various booking sites, creating your products so that they fit into our boxes (which can sometimes be a bit technical, we admit) and understanding how we communicate about your activities will give you ideas of good practices to replicate on your sites to increase your direct sales. Many booking sites also share industry training and advice via their newsletters to help you sell your business better.

It's in our interest to help you evolve, because if you can welcome more customers, we can send you more.

The Manawa advantage: You have a dedicated account manager available and responsive to answer your questions and help you develop your business. Don't hesitate to visit the Manawa blog to find out more about articles such as Improving your Google search engine optimisation (SEO) for outdoor professionals or Building an outdoor and adventure activity to sell on the internet.

5. Reaching different customers

Booking sites are the perfect distribution channel for reaching a different customer base that complements your traditional network.

Booking sites give you access to a different clientele. For example, when you sell your activities in France on a 4-language booking site, you give many more customers the chance to discover and then book your activities. Other aspects of reaching clients are mainly linked to the marketing channels that different booking sites use to promote your activities.

We're going to give you a brief overview of the 4 channels that are most widely used. Of course, there are others, and at Manawa we're constantly looking for new ways to better sell your outdoor and adventure activities.

Paid advertising (ads) :

This is the main acquisition channel for many booking sites. Some sites go so far as to invest in paid marketing in order to sell your activities. Whilst we recommend that you do impliment pay-per-click advertising, it can be complex and expensive so it is advisable to be careful.

Affiliation:

This involves paying external business providers (travel blogs, brands, tourism players, etc.) commission when they redirect customers to activities on the booking site. This is a difficult channel for direct professionals to access as it requires specific tools and a lot of time.

The brand:

Today, booking sites are becoming a normal part of your customers' shopping habits. Booking sites have more and more loyal customers who have confidence in the website following a previous positive experience or simply because the site seems professional. By associating your business with a booking site, you can take advantage of the site's reputation and lend credibility to your products.

Multi-booking :

It may be an indirect channel, but more and more customers are discovering new activities after making an initial reservation on a booking site. At Manawa, for example, it's quite common for a customer to book a canyoning trip in Annecy followed by a paragliding flight over Lake Annecy and/or a packraft trip on Lake Bourget.

The Manawa advantage: We specialise in outdoor and adventure products and have a responsive customer service team available by phone, email, and chat to answer our customers' technical questions.

6. Test booking online (if you're still hesitating)

Today, online booking is becoming a must, and businesses that don't have it will gradually start to lose customers over the next few years! Booking sites can also be a (one-off) solution to help you find out how things work before you go live. It's a good way to understand what online sales can do for you.

Many of our original partners, outdoor and adventure professionals, who are the best in their field but who had few resources when we started out in 2015, are beginning to understand the importance of online booking. Today, most of them have set up online booking directly on their website and a significant proportion of their bookings come through their reservation system.

The Manawa advantage: We have a global view of our partners' different software packages and are available to advise our partners and help them find the best software for their operation. We also offer our partners the option of a tracked link so that they can try out online booking very easily. We invite you to visit the website of our partner Espace Plongée Martinique and click on one of the "Book Now" buttons which redirects to Manawa.

7. Connect your booking software to the booking site via API

For professionals who already have a booking software, there's a good chance that it can (or will be able to) be connected via API with one or more booking sites like Manawa. This API connection enables the booking software to send your raw data (booking dates and prices) directly to the booking site and automatically fill in your schedules with customer information.

The main advantage is that you can guarantee instant confirmation to the customer and therefore increase sales whilst also saving time through automation.

The Manawa advantage: We are now connected to Rezdy, Fareharbor, Resamare, Yoplanning, Bokun, Regiondo, Turitop, BookingKit, Trekksoft and Activitar, and we are currently adding 2 to 3 new software applications a year, prioritising them according to the needs of our outdoor and adventure partners.

8. Protection against last-minute cancellations

In the majority of cases, customers who book on a booking site book for personal use with a specific date in mind and pay directly at the time of booking. This implies that the customer is motivated and wants to discover your product, which therefore limits the number of customer cancellations. What's more, booking sites always have strict cancellation policies to protect you against no-shows (last-minute cancellations), so you get paid even if the customer doesn't show up to the activity.

We also know that you, as an outdoor activity professional, will sometimes need to cancel activities based on unforseen events. However, be aware that some booking sites, such as Get Your Guide, charge the vendor fees in the event of a cancellation. At Manawa, we fully understand the concerns of our partners in the outdoor adventure industry and do not charge any fees if you have to cancel due to weather or technical problems.

The Manawa advantage: Our partners can choose from among our 5 cancellation policies to pick the one that best suits each of their activities. By default we follow the cancellation policies that our partners have chosen, but you can send us different instructions if you need to be more flexible in certain cases.

9. Payment and automatic billing

By working with booking sites, you don't have to worry about payments or invoicing. You'll receive a bank transfer and a commission invoice every month for services rendered. The majority of booking sites work on the same invoicing model as marketplaces, i.e. we invoice professionals for a business referral service that corresponds to the amount of the commission. Therefore, you and your team will remain the face and heart of your business while we take care of the billing.

The Manawa bonus: Every 15th of the month our partners automatically receive a bank transfer of the previous month's services in their own currency and an email with an invoice listing all the bookings.

We're probably forgetting many other benefits, but we hope we've convinced you to try promoting your brands and selling your outdoor and adventure activities on a booking site, or at least inspired you to get in touch with us to find out more.

To make an appointment with our regional teams, please register directly here: Make an appointment with Manawa.com

The entire Manawa team is at your disposal should you have any questions, and we'll always be happy to help you promote your outdoor and adventure activities worldwide!

Vincent de Manawa