It’s amazing that as a tour operator, you can have a website up and running within a couple of weeks without writing someone a big check. Some booking platforms offer you a free site (well, “free” in the sense that it’s included in your booking fee). Some tourism-themed WordPress templates are available for less than what you charge for one of your tours. All of the sites are responsive. Some are beautifully designed. Some of them might even be fast. And wow, the feature set can legitimately be downright impressive.
But everything comes with a cost. If you’re not paying for the website up front, you may be paying for it in the long run. And sometimes, you might be paying far more than you’d expect. Let’s take a look at whether “free” is the right price for your #1 marketing asset.
When A Free Website Makes Sense
That’s not to say that a free website is never the right choice. We’ll explain why it’s rarely the right choice, but there are some scenarios in which choosing the free site could be the right move, even if only temporarily. Here’s one such scenario: cash is tight, traffic volume is low, and you have no unique needs.
- Cash is tight. There might be times where you just don’t have an option to pay for a website; you need the site up and running to generate the cash to pay for your next site. But keep in mind that plenty of firms will be willing to work out a payment plan; so cash flow challenges don’t necessarily mean you can’t invest in a solid website.
- Traffic volume is fairly low. The cost of underperformance is exacerbated at higher traffic volume, so high-volume sites should almost never compromise on performance.
- You have no unique needs. Free sites are almost always based on templates, which have pre-defined functionality and layouts, but limited flexibility. Check the free site to make sure it’s going to handle your needs. Are you able to show pricing for adults and children, or do you get a single price? What if you use variable pricing and you simply want to say that the price is “starting at?” If you offer many tours, does the template offer a good way to present a proper decision tree so prospective customers can successfully find the right tour for them?
If the scenario above describes you, a free site might be a good place to start. You’ll avoid up-front costs and start generating some revenue. But as you exit that phase, the free site may no longer be a good fit.
Calculating the Cost of a Free Website
Templated sites don’t always perform poorly, but there’s often some sacrifice in the conversion rate when the site wasn’t built to suit your exact needs. It’s easy to think that a small sacrifice in performance isn’t meaningful, but it’s always worth running the numbers to be certain.
The website calculator below is interactive. Feel free to plug in your own numbers. For a company with 25,000 sessions every month, a 2.75% conversion rate, and an average order value of $200, even a slim 5% improvement in the conversion rate would yield an additional $80k in revenue per year—more than enough to not only cover the cost of a custom website, but enough to pay for itself multiple times over during its lifespan. Raise the AOV or the conversion rate improvement in this scenario, and these numbers become so compelling that a free site—if it indeed hinders your conversion rate—becomes a clear liability.
When a client on a templated site recently asked us what kind of results we see when we upgrade from a free, templated site to a fully custom site, we looked up the last few such sites we had built, and found that the conversion rate improvements ranged from modest to substantial (20+%), leading to significant revenue gains for our clients.
Why Free Tourism Websites Underperform
So why are we making the assumption above that the conversion rate will be lower on a free (templated) website? Because we’ve seen it. But also, it’s somewhat intuitive.
Let’s say you were starting a food truck business and someone was selling you a modular truck with different shelves and racks, custom paint, and a logo. Can you get to your location and haul the food? Sure. But what about a refrigerated compartment, a side window for service, and plumbing? Don’t just ask, “can I make this website work?” Ask, “can this website help me thrive?”
Before we give some specific examples, we have to acknowledge that many suppliers of templated sites will provide some customization beyond just a “coat of paint.” You can often create additional pages, create forms, and request features. But for every hour of effort put into the templated site, ask yourself whether that time would be better spent toward a site that’s purpose-built for you.
Let’s look at some specific examples of how a custom site outshines a templated one.
You may find that you actually can’t afford that free site, but you can afford a custom-built one that you love and that helps generate revenue.
Brian Nicholson
Your Brand: “Commodity Plus” vs. Custom
Many tourism companies are fighting commoditization. You want to stand out in the minds of the customers. While brand positioning is the place to start (the substance), you also want to present a distinct and recognizable appearance (the style). Your brand is more than colors, fonts, and a logo. You want to not just say “that’s my version of that website,” but rather “that’s totally us.”
The Coral Crater brand is a unique combination of fun, high-energy, and laid-back—much like the tour guides that are core to the experience. Without the boundaries of a templated site, we were able to fully express that brand, giving Coral Crater a distinct personality among the zipline and adventure park competitors on O’ahu.
The owner of Sail San Diego had a clear vision for how the brand should be portrayed. Both he and Blend worked with the developer of a free, templated site to make that vision a reality, but ultimately the template was too restrictive, and the end result was never quite right. So we designed a custom website that reflected their unique personality and creative direction. The site has touches such as custom nautical backgrounds and well-placed script fonts to convey the brand’s category and vibe. The unlimited flexibility allowed us to use layouts tailored to the experience, such as image combinations that showed both context (wide shots of boats in the bay) and emotions (close-ups of people having a great time together). The whole is more than the sum of the parts here, with the new site being a much better expression of Sail San Diego’s brand, and also easier for customers to use. The result? Conversion rate improvements of as much as 40%.
Your Sales Process: The Way Everyone Else Does It vs. How You Do It
If someone called you today to determine which tour they should take, how would that conversation flow? What questions would you ask, and how would you get your customer to a high degree of confidence that they landed on the right tour?
Now look at your website. How closely does that process match the one you just described?
Decision Trees
Lake Geneva Cruise Line currently offers 23 different cruises. While some of these are holiday-specific, the list of even the standard cruises was quite long, putting a big cognitive load on the customer to understand what tours were available before narrowing down the options and selecting one. Templated sites often lead with the full tour list, doing little to reduce cognitive load. We talked with the client’s sales team to find out how they guide customers to the right tour, and we used that information as we built the site. Most notably, the tour finder largely replicated the salespersons’ expertise so that a customer could get top recommendations by answering the 3 simple questions that a salesperson would ask.
Coral Crater had a similar issue. Their free site led with a long, side-scrolling list of way too many tours, when in fact the tours fell into 3 clear categories. A/B testing showed that leading with categories improved performance, so when we rebuilt the site, we led with categories. But since a big part of the value proposition for this brand was choice, we included cross-promotion throughout, to promote bundles.
Customizations
Little customizations can help facilitate decision-making. When we encounter challenging content or some friction point in the booking process, we can work through it with custom layouts without bumping into limitations.
For example, when a client wanted to push an offer for one of their tours, we added an unmissable promotion on the page and on the site banner. We didn’t have to shoehorn it into the body copy, hoping that people would see the bold text.
Sail San Diego offers both ticketed (public) sails and private sails. It was important for us to show the two side by side with a message explaining that the private sails are truly the best value for groups of 4 or more. A templated site typically would not have supported the exact layout we landed on.
Book with confidence messaging (cancellation policy, price guarantee, etc.) is often not well-placed on templated sites. We’re able to place that messaging at high-visibility locations and near decision points like booking buttons.
A lack of customization ability can hinder a/b testing as well. You want as much flexibility as possible to try out different designs, element placements, and features.
Functionality: Don’t Compromise
Templated sites range from rigid to semi-rigid in their functionality. If you have a need the template doesn’t serve, you may not have the choice to get exactly what you need. Some examples:
Tour pages can often be long, filled with several things that people want to browse before making a decision—FAQs, photo galleries, social proof, policies, inclusions, etc. We’ll sometimes add sticky, page-specific navigation to help people navigate long pages. This is often not included in the templated sites we see.
Another technique we use to facilitate mobile browsing is selectively determining when a list should be displayed horizontally (side-scrolling) or vertically. A templated site won’t always provide choices like this.
Additional features such as first-party reviews, FAQ tracking, the daytime/nighttime toggle on 360 Chicago’s TILT page, and others have their place in the marketing process, ultimately leading to better performance.
If You’re Going To Pay, Pay For Great Results
We recommend calculating the true cost of your free or low-cost site, including up-front costs, monthly hosting and maintenance, downtime, and—perhaps most importantly—the cost of less-than-peak performance. You may find that you actually can’t afford that free site, but you can afford a custom-built one that you love and that helps generate revenue.
