A small tour company should set its marketing budget as a percentage of expected revenue, then divide it into three buckets: the foundations that make bookings possible, the channels that capture demand that already exists, and a smaller amount for testing. There is no single correct percentage, and anyone quoting one without knowing your margins is guessing. What you can do is work backwards from the number of bookings you need, the cost of winning one, and the cash you can afford to commit before the season starts.
This guide shows a practical way to do that, with a worked example using invented numbers, a sensible order of spending, and the mistakes we see most often. It pairs with our marketing calendar for 2027, which covers the timing of each campaign.
Start from bookings, not from a percentage
Many operators ask what share of turnover they should spend. A better first question is how many extra bookings the business needs. Take last year’s results, decide the target for next year, and subtract the bookings you expect from repeat guests, partners and word of mouth. The gap is what marketing has to win.
Then ask what each booking is worth. Use gross margin, not turnover, because a tour that sells for 120 euros but costs 90 to deliver leaves 30 euros to pay for the marketing that sold it. That 30 euros is your ceiling for acquisition cost on a first booking, unless you have good evidence that guests come back or refer others.
Your marketing budget is limited by the margin per booking, not by what feels comfortable. If winning a guest costs more than the guest is worth, no amount of clever campaign work will fix it.
A worked example with made-up numbers
Imagine a fictional operator, Birchwood Tours, running guided day trips. These figures are an illustration only.
| Item | Example value |
|---|---|
| Average price per guest | 100 euros |
| Delivery cost per guest | 65 euros |
| Margin per guest before marketing | 35 euros |
| Average guests per booking | 3 |
| Margin per booking before marketing | 105 euros |
| Maximum affordable cost per booking | about 50 euros, leaving half the margin as profit |
If Birchwood needs 400 more bookings next year, and a realistic cost per booking across its channels is 40 euros, the paid and content programme costs 16,000 euros. That sounds large until you set it against 400 bookings at 105 euros margin, which is 42,000 euros. The point of the exercise is to see the trade-off before spending, and to notice quickly if the real cost per booking turns out to be 90 euros, not 40.
Split the money into three buckets
We suggest dividing the budget into three parts. The exact proportions depend on your situation, so take the numbers below as a starting point to adjust.
- Foundations, roughly half in the first months. The website, the booking path, tracking, photographs and the pages that show up in search. These are one-off or slow-burning costs that make every later euro work harder.
- Demand capture, the largest recurring share. Search ads for people already looking for what you sell, plus your content and search visibility, and email to past guests.
- Testing, a small fixed share. Social ads, new markets, new products and anything you have not proven yet.
Ring-fence the testing bucket. If an experiment fails, you want it to cost a known, small amount and not creep into the core budget.
What belongs in the foundations bucket
Before paying for traffic, check that the site can turn it into bookings. A slow, confusing mobile checkout wastes whatever you pay to send people to it. Our guide to tour booking flow and mobile checkout explains the checks worth making. A short audit of the booking path is often the cheapest improvement in the whole plan, and we offer a website and booking-flow check for 149 euros for exactly this reason.
Tracking belongs here too. If you cannot see which channel produced a booking, you cannot make a sensible decision about where to move money. Set up conversion tracking on the confirmation step before any ad budget goes live.
Finally, photographs and short videos. Real images of your tours, your guides and your guests are used by every channel, from your site to your ads to your emails. A day with a photographer, or a few hours with a good phone and a clear shot list, spreads its cost across the whole year.
What belongs in the demand capture bucket
People searching for “guided hike near Bergen” or “northern lights tour” already want to book something. Capturing them is cheaper than creating demand from nothing, so this is where most of a small operator’s ad money should go first.
- Search ads. Our starter Google Ads structure shows how to begin with a few tightly targeted campaigns.
- Organic search and content. Slower, but it keeps working after you stop paying. Google’s SEO Starter Guide is a good free baseline for what to fix first.
- Email to past guests. The cheapest booking you will win is usually from someone who has already travelled with you.
- Reviews. Not a paid channel, but a cost of time that lifts every other channel. See how to ask for reviews after a tour.
What belongs in the testing bucket
Paid social is a common test. It works differently from search, because you reach people who were not looking for you, so it suits filling quiet periods and promoting new products. Our article on Meta ads for filling the shoulder season sets out how to run a small, measurable trial. Other candidates are a new source market, a translated version of your site, or a partnership with a hotel.
Write the test down before you start. Name what you are trying, how much you will spend, what result would count as a success, and the date you will review it. A test without a decision date is simply spending.
Match the spending to the calendar
Tour demand is seasonal, and so should the budget be. Booking decisions come weeks or months before the trip, which means your spend should lead the season, not follow it. For a winter product, the main booking push may fall in autumn and early winter, and the first planning conversations for the following summer may begin soon after. Work out when your guests book, using your own booking data, and move budget to the weeks before that window opens.
Keep a small reserve for last-minute gaps. A weak week three weeks from now is a good use of a quick email or a short ad burst, and that reserve lets you act without taking money from the plan.
Decide what you will measure
Keep the scoreboard short. We would track four numbers monthly:
- Bookings by source, as far as your tracking allows.
- Cost per booking for each paid channel.
- Revenue and margin per booking.
- The share of bookings that come direct, rather than through marketplaces. Our comparison of OTA commissions and direct bookings shows why that last number matters.
Review on a fixed day each month. Move money from channels whose cost per booking is above your ceiling to those below it, in small steps, and give each change enough time to show an effect.
Common budgeting mistakes
The same few mistakes appear again and again. Spending on ads before the booking path works. Splitting a small budget across five channels so that none gets enough to learn anything. Judging a campaign after a week. Counting marketplace bookings that would have happened anyway. Cutting marketing in the quiet season and then paying more to recover when the season arrives. And never writing down the cost of winning a booking, so that every decision rests on a feeling.
If you want a sense of what an external programme would cost, our pricing page lists the monthly plans, with ads management from 290 euros a month plus ad spend and the SEO blog system from 350 euros a month, both excluding VAT. Use those figures to test whether doing it in-house or outsourcing fits your plan.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of revenue should a small tour company spend on marketing?
There is no figure that suits every business, and we would be wary of any that is quoted without your margins. Start from the bookings you need and the margin per booking, and let the percentage fall out of that calculation.
Should we spend more in the busy season or before it?
Before it. Guests usually decide weeks or months ahead, so the money that matters most is spent while bookings are still being made, not once the tours are full.
Is it better to spend on ads or on the website first?
Check the website first. If the booking path is slow or confusing, ads simply send more people to a page that loses them. A modest fix to the site often pays back faster than extra traffic.
How long before we know whether a channel works?
Paid search can show early signals within weeks, though you should allow enough time to collect a meaningful number of bookings. Content and organic search take longer, often several months, so judge them on direction as well as results.
Can a very small company still do all this?
Yes, by doing less. Pick one search channel, fix the booking path, email past guests and ask for reviews. Add a test only when the basics are running and measured.
Next step
Take one afternoon with last year’s booking data. Work out the margin per booking, a maximum cost per booking, and the number of bookings you need. Then draw three boxes on a page, foundations, demand capture and testing, and put a figure in each. That one page is the budget, and it is easier to improve than to build from nothing.