Practical guides on travel SEO, blog content and AI search visibility for tour operators, small hotels, travel agencies, DMCs and vacation rentals — how to rank for the searches your guests actually make and win more direct bookings.
Airbnb takes 14–20% of every booking made through its platform. On a €150-a-night property booked 200 nights a year, that's several thousand euros handed over annually for something the platform did once: put your listing in front of a guest who was already searching for a place like yours. The listing itself — the photos, the description, the reviews — that's all yours. Airbnb just owns the search traffic.
Most claims about content and SEO in the travel industry are theory. This one isn't. CostaExcursions.es, the private day tour company behind BlogDone, used to depend on OTAs for 100% of its bookings. Today, Viator, GetYourGuide, and similar platforms account for roughly 30% of revenue. The other 70% books direct.
Most travel businesses don't have an SEO problem because they're missing some clever trick. They have one because the basics were done once, years ago, and never revisited. This is the checklist we actually run — on our own site and every client's — before writing a single new page. Work through it in order. Each section builds on the one before it.
Ask ChatGPT right now for the best private day tour in your city. It will answer — confidently, with two or three specific names. Somewhere, a tour company that's never heard of "AI visibility" just lost a booking it didn't know it was competing for. Somewhere else, a company that got its structure right six months ago just picked one up for free.
A traveler planning a trip used to type a destination into Google, scroll past the ads, and click through five or six results before booking anything. Increasingly, they skip that entirely. They open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and ask a direct question: "What's the best private day tour from Málaga to Ronda?" The assistant gives three or four specific answers — names, brief descriptions, a sense of price. If your business isn't one of them, that traveler never even sees you.
Most destination blog posts never rank, and it's not because the writer lacks skill. It's because "Things to Do in [City]" has been written ten thousand times, by every hotel, every tour operator, and every content farm with an SEO plugin. Google doesn't need the ten-thousand-and-first version. It needs one that actually answers something specific.
You know you need to blog. You've known for two years. You open a new WordPress post, stare at the blank title field, and close the tab. This is not a writing problem — it's a framing problem. You're trying to think of something to write when your destination, your guests, and your own operations are handing you 50 topics a month.
A traveller planning a day trip from Málaga types into ChatGPT: "What's the best private tour from Málaga to Ronda?" The AI gives them three or four specific recommendations — operator names, brief descriptions, a sense of pricing. One of those names might be yours. Probably, right now, it isn't.
You hand 25% to Viator on every booking. Sometimes 28%. GetYourGuide takes its slice too. Some months the OTA invoice is the single biggest line item that isn't your own time. And the operators paying the least to OTAs almost always have one thing in common — they publish content on their own site, consistently, for years.