6 Tour Operator Tips to Increase Your Sales

Tour operators are heading into 2026 more confident than they’ve been in years. In USTOA’s latest member survey, conducted in  2025, 88% of tour operators expect sales to grow next year, and 68% already reported growth in 2025 over 2024. The sector backs that confidence with scale: tours, activities, and attractions generated $271 billion in gross booking value in 2025, according to Arival’s Global Operator Landscape report.

That’s good news if you’re a tour operator. Increasing your sales is a top priority, and expanding your services and capabilities is crucial. A travel ERP system is essential to accomplishing these goals.

Below are tour operator tips to increase your sales in the coming year

1. Use social proof

While well-written advertisements and value-packed podcasts can help your business grow, one of the most powerful marketing tools is social proof.  It’s human nature to follow what other people are doing. That’s why customer reviews, referrals and recommendations are so important.

Especially in the travel industry.

Reach out to your customers and ask them for testimonials regarding their experiences with you. Ask them to post positive reviews on travel sites like Tripadvisor. Then, upsell your customers and attract new ones by posting these reviews on your website and on social media. 

Your tour operator software’s communication portal makes this easy to do at scale: an SMS or email request sent automatically once a trip closes gets far more responses than one sent manually, weeks later, if it gets sent at all.

Reviews are worth this effort for more than trust alone. Per Expedia Group’s 2025 Traveler Value Index (11,000+ travelers surveyed across 11 markets), three-quarters of travelers say they’ll pay more for lodging with better reviews, rising to 80% among travelers under 40. A well-reviewed operator can charge more for the same itinerary a less-reviewed competitor is discounting to move.

2. Transition to online booking

The industry saw this coming, the prediction was that by 2026, 74% of total travel and tourism revenue would come from online sales. That’s roughly on track. Online channels already accounted for about 70% of total sector revenue in 2024, according to Statista, and Euromonitor projects online bookings will reach 73% of all travel sales by 2029.

Website-connected tour operator software that enables online reservations does more than sell. It stores customer data, tracks booking trends, and gives you transparency into which destinations are popular, which promotions are working, and which regions need more marketing attention. And the gap is still wide open for operators who haven’t made the move: Arival’s Global Operator Landscape report found that 39% of operators still run their business with no booking system at all, phone, email, and OTA listings only.

3. Connect with your clients through new channels

Email and SMS remain fast, cost-effective alternatives to printed ads and mailed materials. Omnichannel marketing lets you promote services across multiple channels, devices, and platforms with minimal added effort once it’s set up, and the same system that builds a customized proposal or itinerary can distribute it through whichever channel a given client actually uses.

The one addition worth making in 2026: trigger these messages from what’s already in a client’s record (a trip that just ended, a renewal window coming up) instead of sending the same message to your whole list at once. A travel CRM is what makes that possible, since it keeps booking history and preferences in the same place as the contact.

4. Build strategic partnerships

Partnering with complementary vendors still drives the creativity and innovation that result in products that attract new clients. A food expert can help build a culinary-themed tour. A yoga specialist can turn a standard itinerary into a niche offering for wellness travelers. Networking with the right partners opens the door to innovative domestic and international tour options you couldn’t build alone.

What’s changed is how fast a new partnership needs to become sellable. If pricing a new package means re-entering supplier rates by hand into a separate quote every time, a promising partnership stays a side project instead of a new revenue line. See How Outbound Tour Operators Build and Price Travel Packages for what that workflow should look like.

5. Expand your B2B Network

Business travel is a well-established channel today, and companies that once relied on video calls are back to valuing face-to-face meetings alongside cost-conscious planning. Reach out to businesses to encourage conference and meeting attendance, and use your tour operator system to streamline workflows, customize business travel offerings, and follow up with new leads.

It’s worth building out the channel structure around it. B2B distribution opens your inventory to travel agents, who book on behalf of their own clients without renegotiating your rates. B2B2C distribution goes a step further: a partner sells through their own white-labeled or co-branded site, using your inventory and pricing rules, with your brand staying invisible to their end customer. Both only add revenue cleanly if they run off the same base inventory as your direct channel, instead of a separate, parallel catalog someone has to maintain by hand.

6. Use Agentic AI to Personalize at Scale 

Rule-based automation has been part of travel software for years: if a booking is confirmed, send the voucher; if a payment clears, update the file. That’s reliable, but it can’t do anything a rule didn’t anticipate.

Agentic AI goes further. It can draft a personalized itinerary from a client’s past trips, check it against their stored preferences, and send it, checking in with a person only when something falls outside rules set in advance, like a price above a client’s usual range. As Can AI Replace a Travel Mid-Office? covers in more depth, this works well today for repeatable, well-defined tasks. Judgment calls and exceptions still need a person, and that’s fine: the point isn’t replacing staff, it’s freeing them from the personalization work that used to eat a full day.

FAQ

What’s the fastest way for a small tour operator to increase sales in 2026?

Start with review collection and online booking, the same two fundamentals the original version of this post led with. Both are low-effort to set up, and both directly affect whether a traveler completes a booking once they’ve found you. Distribution expansion and AI-driven personalization compound those gains, but matter less if the basics of trust and booking friction aren’t solved first.

Do tour operators still need email and SMS marketing when most booking happens online?

Yes. A generic blast to the full list underperforms, but messages triggered by what a client actually did, a completed trip, an approaching renewal window, a past destination pattern, still convert well because they’re relevant to that specific person.

What’s the difference between B2B and B2B2C distribution for a tour operator?

B2B distribution sells inventory to travel agents, who book on behalf of their own clients using the operator’s rates. B2B2C distribution goes further: a partner runs their own white-labeled or co-branded site on top of that inventory, so their customers book without ever seeing the operator’s brand directly.