Industry Report · September 2025 to September 2026
Operators running more than one tour.
The booking data behind multi-tour operators, and what it means for how you market, price, and staff across your whole lineup.
of bookings are made the same day the tour runs.
55% of bookings land within a day of departure. Another 17% come in more than 3 weeks ahead, which is what lifts the average lead time to 18.9 days. Both windows are filling the same departures.
Same day is the single biggest booking window
Days booked in advance of the tour date. Trailing 12 months to September 2026.
Keep every departure bookable on mobile until it leaves, and buy against "today" and "near me" search. Give advance bookers their own rate, and let the same-day price rise as seats sell. A guest at your meeting point should be able to book in under a minute.
3.56 seats a booking, and 92% of them hold.
A booking here is a party of 3 or 4, not a pair. At $198.60 a cart, that works out to $55.79 a seat, and only 8% of bookings ever cancel.
You are selling a party, so price one: group rates, private departures, add-ons quoted per head at checkout. One cancellation empties 3.56 seats, so put self-serve rescheduling ahead of the refund button and waitlist your sellouts.
Cancellation rate. Low in absolute terms, but each one takes a group-sized block of seats off a single departure.
Average booking value, which is $55.79 a seat once you divide by party size.
Tickets per booking. One person is choosing the tour and the time slot on behalf of everyone else.
1 point separates locals from tourists. $86 separates their carts.
Locals are 41.47% of bookings and tourists 40.47%, near-identical shares. Spend is not close at all: tourists average $236.30 a booking against $150.45 for locals and $134.10 for semi-locals. They are not buying many more seats either, 3.96 against 3.67. They are buying pricier tours, $59.67 a seat against $40.99.
Put your premium tours in front of tourists through "things to do" search and geo-targeted social. That is where the $59.67 seat lives. For locals, sell the second visit as a different tour, not a discount on the one they already took.
5 in 6 visitors are domestic. The other 1 buys the pricier seat.
83.88% of the visiting guests on your tours come from inside the country and book $192.23 at a time, in groups of 4.04. The remaining 16.12% arrive from abroad and book almost exactly the same amount, $192.14, but in parties of 2.68. That is $71.69 a seat against $47.58.
Build the plan around domestic visitors, where the volume and the group bookings sit. The international 16% pay 51% more per seat, so surface your small-party departures to them, with pricing and checkout in their currency.
Half your guests come midweek, and 7 in 10 come March to August.
Saturday leads at 18.52% of visits, but it does not dominate. Monday through Thursday carry 50.09% of the year between them, and the booking week is flatter still, running from 12.69% to 16.58% across all 7 days. The bigger swing is seasonal: 70% of visits happen in the 6 months from March to August.
Midweek is half your business, so sell it as its own thing: specialty routes and smaller-group departures, with guides scheduled Monday to Thursday. Spend in February, before the March ramp, not in June.
Bookings arrive on every day of the week
Saturday leads, and Monday to Thursday holds the other half
The weekend is exactly half the week, and bookings tilt the other way
A 6 month season: July peaks, and March is already running hot
Chart shows when tours take place (product start date). Bookings run 18.9 days ahead on average, though 42% are made the same day. October and November visits fall partly outside the 12 month booking window and read slightly low. Trailing 12 months to September 2026.
of bookings never touch a reseller.
Only 27.71% run through Viator, GetYourGuide, or Octo. The other 72.29% is yours. 34.92% are guests booking themselves on your site. Another 36.41% are your own staff keying bookings in by phone, at the counter, or on the POS, and those desk bookings carry a bigger cart, $206.45 against $176.86 through the widget.
More than a third of your bookings are typed in by a person. Each one you move to self-serve is a phone call you do not take and a booking that can happen at 11pm. Start with abandoned booking recovery, then teach the widget the upsells your counter staff already know.
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Join Chicago Gangsters and Ghosts Tours, Avital Food Tours, Bend Ghost Tours, and multi-tour operators everywhere turning these numbers into their growth plan.