“Enquire for pricing” feels like it protects your margin. For most fixed-departure tours, it mostly just protects your competitor’s chance to convert the traveller who left your site to compare.
The reasoning behind “enquire for pricing” usually comes from a genuine place. Operators worry that showing a number publicly lets competitors undercut them, that price alone won’t communicate the value of the experience, or that a phone call gives them a chance to sell the trip properly before a traveller fixates on the number. All three concerns are understandable. None of them hold up well once you look at what actually happens on the other side of that decision.
A traveller comparing tours across several tabs treats “enquire for pricing” as friction, not mystery. Very few people email three operators and wait for replies before deciding who to book with. Most simply move on to the next tab, where a competitor or an OTA listing shows the number immediately.
“Complete a booking on your own site as a first-time visitor. If you can't find the price without submitting a form, neither can the traveller who's about to close the tab.”
This isn’t an argument that every tour operator must publish an exact number on every page. There’s a real, legitimate case for an enquiry-based model: genuinely bespoke, tailor-made itineraries where the final cost depends on choices the traveller hasn’t made yet, group size that varies significantly, or highly customised luxury travel where a conversation is part of the value.
The distinction that matters is between a tour with a knowable price and a trip that genuinely can’t be priced until requirements are gathered. Most operators default to hiding prices even when they’re selling the first kind.
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Showing a price doesn’t mean showing it badly. A few principles make pricing feel confident rather than exposing:
Seasonal pricing, group discounts and add-ons don’t require hiding the number entirely. A starting-from price with a short explanation covers most of these cases without adding friction.
An operator selling 1,000 experiences a year at R2,000 each, currently entirely through OTAs at a 25% effective commission, recovers roughly R450,000 a year in margin by shifting just half of that volume to direct bookings. Even a tenth of that shift is a meaningful number, often enough to fund a proper website rebuild several times over.
If your current site hides pricing behind a form, the fastest test is simple: try to book your own tour as a first-time visitor and count how many steps it takes to see a number. If it’s more than one, that’s very likely costing you bookings you never see, because the traveller who leaves doesn’t tell you why. This is one of the checks in our direct booking website checklist, and one of the quicker fixes available without a full rebuild.
For most fixed-departure, fixed-itinerary tours, yes. Hiding a knowable price adds friction that a competitor or an OTA listing doesn't have. The exception is genuinely bespoke, quote-dependent trips where the final price can't be known until requirements are gathered.
Competitors researching your prices almost always find them anyway, whether through an OTA listing, a screenshot, or simply asking. Hiding the price mainly inconveniences genuine travellers, not competitors who are motivated enough to find it regardless.
Show a starting price or a clear range, with a note on what affects it, rather than hiding the number completely. "From R2,500 per person, exact pricing depends on group size and season" gives a traveller enough to decide whether to continue, without pretending complexity doesn't exist.
Yes, for genuinely tailor-made itineraries where cost depends heavily on choices the traveller hasn't made yet. Even then, a starting-from price or a rough range helps qualify the enquiry and sets expectations before the conversation starts.
It varies by operator, but pricing transparency is consistently one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort changes a tour website can make, because it removes a point of friction and hesitation right at the moment a traveller is deciding whether to keep looking at your site or move on.
Book a free 30-minute strategy call. We'll look at your OTA mix and your current site, and show you what shifting even a small share of bookings direct would be worth.
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