Large wholesale, retail and directory listing sites carry lots of weight in the travel industry – and so they should. Many of them are longstanding and very impressive operations.

My online search ended at 2 perfectly positioned niche tour companies

This makes it hard to see past these mighty edifices and consider alternative distribution routes.

But this is exactly what online marketing is offering small tourism operators – an alternative, and very effective, route to acquiring and converting customers.

Still, always open to a challenge, I decided to go on a little test journey online to see exactly how vital the larger travel sites are to an online searcher, and I invite you to follow the same journey as I explain.

The starting point

The premise of this journey is that the searcher is looking for a specific kind of experience in a particular destination. For those who simply want to browse because they don’t know what’s out there yet, state tourism organisation and regional sites are often the places a searcher will start, simply because these are the sites that come up when the destination is keyed into a search engine.

Once both parameters have been set – “I want to have this kind of travel experience in this destination” – the searcher will gravitate towards the sites that match these two most closely. They may go straight through from state or regional sites and follow the directory links (for this reason, we recommend working with destination-focused travel sites that allow you a link to your site).

For the purposes of this experiment, I began my journey by visiting an Australian travel retailer: FreemanX.com.au.

I like FreemanX because it starts with the experience – and we know that this is what today’s travellers are looking for. I would certainly recommend the site to browsers wanting to find out more about the amazing experiences available across the country.

However, I knew I wanted to experience dolphins in Western Australia, so I clicked on ‘dolphin and whale’ in the Water section and narrowed my search to WA.

Unfortunately, FreemanX returned no results. This isn’t a criticism of FreemanX, but simply illustrates that it’s hard, even for the best travel sites, to be comprehensive when covering a whole country full of experiences.

Resorting to Google

Hm, what does an online searcher do next? I decided to go to good old Google and key in ‘dolphins and whales Western Australia’.

The results gave me a link to a book list at the top – not quite what I’m looking for – and then came the travel section of News.com.au, another excellent wide-ranging site. The two listings on this page gave me a whale-watching cruise and a full package that covered every experience under the sun and I eventually found out also included a peek at the Monkey Mia dolphins.

Now I was getting somewhere, but it still wasn’t the adventure-of-a-lifetime that I was looking for.

Below the News.com.au link came a link to Naturaliste Charters.

Even better, when I keyed in “dolphins Western Australia”, I found not only some excellent listings in WesternAustralia.com, but the captivating Rockingham Dolphins site.

If you’ve followed me on this journey you’ll immediately see that Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins are giving me exactly what I want. I bounced right off the large travel retail and media pages right into specific pages related directly to the experiences I was searching for.

And – importantly – rather than a flat directory listing, I am looking at experiential sites with photos, news, useful links, and a chance to communicate with the tour companies directly. Naturaliste Charters enables me to book accommodation too via their affiliate links, and Rockingham Dolphins has a depth of personality that beats the larger, more faceless sites hands down.

In my next post I’ll go into detail about why Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins appeared in just the right place at just the right time to capture my interest, what they are doing – and what else they could be doing – to convert site visitors to bookings, and how any small operator can do this – and more.

Confirming my results

Back to my journey. To see if this result was just a fluke, I did the same experiment starting at a different generic travel site (GoDo Australia) and looking for walking holidays in Tropical North Queensland.

Again, my journey bounced me off the unsatisfactory results on the larger directory sites and took me to a specific page on Auswalk.com.au – another small, specialised travel site giving me precisely what I wanted. The pattern of my journey was almost exactly the same.

The message to take home from these journeys is that small operators with a vibrant travel experience have the chance to beat the large travel wholesale and retail sites to the post, because marketing online does more than put you on a level playing field – it gives you an advantage.

Try the experiment with your niche travel experience and see where it takes you.