Most of us are underpriced. Probably more than we think.
That's the unpopular truth that emerges when you actually look at the economics of running a tour or activity business in 2026: costs have risen sharply over the last few years (insurance, fuel, labour, payment processing, software), and most operator pricing has lagged behind. The gap between what we should be charging and what we actually charge has been growing, often without us noticing.
The reason we don't raise prices isn't that we don't want the revenue. It's that we're afraid bookings will drop. The fear is reasonable. It's also, in most cases, overstated. And the operators who navigate this well end up substantially more profitable than the ones who hold pricing steady out of caution.
This is the practical playbook for raising prices without the booking collapse most of us fear.
The Elasticity Reality
The starting point is understanding how price-sensitive your customers actually are. This is the question that drives the whole decision.
Demand for tour and activity experiences is, generally speaking, less price-elastic than most operators believe. The reasons are structural.
Customers don't shop on price the way they shop for commodity products. They shop on relevance (is this the experience I want?), trust (do I believe these operators?), convenience (can I book this for the day I'm here?), and only then on price. A $95 tour and a $115 tour, all else equal, often convert at very similar rates because the price isn't the deciding factor.
The competitive set is local and limited. A customer in your destination has a finite number of options for "morning kayak tour" or "wine country day trip". The realistic price comparison set is two or three operators, not a national market. Within that set, modest price differentials don't generally drive customers to switch.
Customers are often locked in by booking timing. By the time someone is in your destination and searching for tours, they've already committed to the trip. The decision they're making isn't "should I take a tour?" It's "which tour should I take?" Price matters less in this second decision than it does in the first.
This is good news for pricing. It means most operators have more headroom than they realise.
The Signal That You're Underpriced
Three signals tend to indicate underpricing, often more reliably than market comparison.
Your peak departures sell out consistently and far in advance. If your Saturday morning tour is fully booked four weeks ahead, week after week, you're leaving money on the table. The price is below what the market would actually pay; the only question is by how much.
Your reviews praise value disproportionately. Reviews that emphasise "great value for money" or "couldn't believe how cheap it was" or "felt like we got more than we paid for" are reviews from customers who would have paid more without complaint. Reviews matter for marketing; they also tell you about your pricing position.
You haven't raised prices in two or more years. Inflation alone, between 2022 and now, has eroded most operator margins meaningfully. If your nominal prices are unchanged over that period, your real prices have dropped significantly. You're effectively running a quiet discount you didn't decide to give.
If two or three of these signals apply to your business, the case for a price increase is strong.
The Right Amount to Raise
The instinct is usually to raise prices in small, cautious increments. 3%. 5%. Just enough to make a difference without scaring customers.
In practice, small increases often perform worse than meaningful ones, for two reasons.
First, the administrative cost of a price change is roughly the same whether you're moving 3% or 15%. You're updating your website, your OTA listings, your printed materials, your booking flow, your customer expectations. The marginal effort of a bigger change is small once you're already making the change.
Second, small increases get absorbed by the inflation and competitive drift that prompted the increase in the first place. A 3% increase in a year where your costs went up 5% means you're still falling behind. The price increase that moves the business is the one that re-establishes your real pricing position with a margin of safety.
For most operators in 2026, that's a 10% to 15% increase, sometimes more for products that have been static the longest. The headline conversion impact is usually smaller than feared. The revenue impact is straightforwardly positive.
When to Raise
Timing matters more than most operators realise. Three timing principles tend to work.
Raise before the peak season starts, not during it. Customers who book during peak season have less time to comparison shop and are more committed to their travel plans. They're the most price-tolerant audience you'll see all year. A price increase that goes live two to three months before peak season catches the peak inventory at the new price without affecting shoulder bookings that were placed at the old rate.
Raise during a renovation or product update. If you've improved the experience (new gear, new route, additional guide, better food, expanded duration), the price increase has a clear narrative. Customers don't object to paying more for more. They object to paying more for the same thing.
Don't raise during a public controversy. If your destination has just had a bad press cycle, if a competitor has been in the news for a safety incident, or if the industry is otherwise under scrutiny, hold the price change. The optics of raising prices into a moment of public concern are bad.
How to Communicate the Change
This is where most operators get it wrong, often because they over-communicate.
The right approach for most price changes is to make them quietly. Update your booking page. Update your OTA listings. Move on. The customer who books at the new price doesn't know it's a new price; they only know it's the current price.
What you don't need to do: send an email to your customer list announcing the increase. Justify the change with a detailed explanation. Apologise for the change.
Each of these makes the change a bigger event than it needs to be, and bigger events are more likely to produce a negative response. The customer who would have booked at $115 without thinking about it now reads a justification email that draws their attention to the fact that the price has gone up, and they think harder about whether to book.
There are exceptions. If you've notified customers of specific future pricing in writing (for repeat customers, for groups, for travel agents), you owe them an explanation. If a regulator or accrediting body has visibility into your pricing, you may need a formal announcement. For everyone else, the change is just the new price.
The Repeat Customer Question
The exception worth handling carefully is repeat customers.
A guest who paid $95 in 2024 and is rebooking in 2026 at $115 will notice. Some will mention it. A few will be unhappy.
The right move for the most loyal repeat customers is a small acknowledgment, not a frozen price. A returning-guest code that gives them 10% off the new price (which still works out to slightly above the old price), framed as a thank-you for their loyalty, captures the price increase without alienating the relationship.
This works better than holding their old price indefinitely, which creates a small but growing population of legacy-priced customers whose existence eventually creates resentment among newer guests.
The Competitor Comparison Trap
A common mistake: looking at the cheapest competitor in your area and using that as your ceiling.
Almost every market has a price floor competitor. The operator running on thin margins, often subsidising the operation with another business, often delivering a substandard product that's reviewing poorly. They aren't your competition; they're a distraction.
Your real competitive set is the operators delivering a comparable product to comparable customers. Pricing against them, not against the cheapest option in the market, is the right benchmark. In most markets, the median operator is materially under-priced, and there's room for higher pricing among the operators delivering a better experience.
The OTA Pricing Problem
A practical complication: OTA contracts often require price parity between direct and OTA channels. Raising your direct price means raising your OTA price, which raises the OTA commission you pay in dollar terms, which can complicate the math.
There are workarounds. Some operators add value to their direct-channel offer (small extras, more flexible policies) rather than dropping direct price below OTA. Others negotiate parity exceptions with their major OTA partners. Others accept the OTA commission increase as a cost of the broader pricing reset.
The honest answer is that OTA price parity is a constraint to work within, not a reason to avoid raising prices entirely. The math of a price increase still works even with the higher commission, because the percentage commission applies to a higher absolute number that still nets you more.
A Final Note on Confidence
The biggest internal obstacle to raising prices isn't market resistance. It's the operator's own discomfort with charging more.
This discomfort is, in most cases, misplaced. We tend to undervalue our own products because we know what they cost us to deliver, and we assume the customer values them at the same internal cost. The customer doesn't. They value the experience at what the experience is worth to them, which is almost always higher than what it costs us to provide.
Raising prices is, more than anything, an act of confidence in the product. The operators who can hold that confidence, with the data and the timing on their side, tend to be the ones running healthier businesses five years from now.
Dazhboards' sales tracking module surfaces the underpricing signals (sell-out rates, advance booking patterns, demand pressure on specific departures) that tell you whether and where you have headroom. The pricing decision is still yours; the data to defend it tends to be the part operators most often lack.