How tour operators can sell more: Meet datakyte
- Samuel Austin
- Sep 15
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 17
As a tour operator, you know there’s more potential. More direct bookings, better tracking, and smarter use of social media.
The problem?
You don't have the time, OTAs take high commissions, control your customer relationships, and leave you with little resources for marketing.
That’s where datakyte, our travel tech platform for travel and tour operators, comes in. Here is how we can help increase your sales:
Reduce OTA dependence
OTAs help improve your reach, but it comes at a cost: up to 30% commissions and limited autonomy. Besides taking commissions, they also control the cancellation, modification, and payment policies. As a result, you don’t take ownership of your client interactions and customer service.
datakyte’s solution is simple: use social media to increase direct bookings for tour operators.
Why? 77% of travelers already use social media for trip inspiration. More specifically, they turn to social media for destination inspiration, accommodation recommendations, influencers’ travel content, trip deals, and more.
Yet, travelers can’t book experiences without leaving the social media platform. In most cases, they go through an OTA, so the social media content ends up staying just as an inspiration, not a direct booking. datakyte has a solution to turn inspiration into conversion — and they’re called Kyte-Links (or KLINKs for short).
KLINKs turn your tours into bookable links. It’s that simple. Once you connect/upload your tour inventory to datakyte, you’ll be able to generate KLINKs. You can then share them on all your channels, including social media. The same KLINK works on all platforms. When someone clicks on the KLINK, they’ll be able to book the experience directly from you, without a third party in between.
Save time and leverage social media influencers
You already know how big social media is, with 5.24 billion users, it now reaches 63.9% of the world’s population. But what if you don’t have time for it? Promoting tours on social media is time-consuming. You need to find good ideas, create separate links for each platform, and even adapt images and captions to fit different channels.
On datakyte, you only connect your tour inventory once. That's it. The platform then structures them into a semantic inventory, which you can turn into KLINKs. These KLINKs are not just for you: social media influencers can generate them and use them too.
When influencers showcase your tours or experiences in their content, they can include KLINKs, making the experience instantly bookable. In other words, travel influencers create great social media content that drives direct bookings for your business. And travelers don’t just scroll for inspiration, they Scroll-to-Book™
Track ROI from marketing campaigns
You may have some metrics to track social media success, such as reach, follower growth, or likes. But none of these show you which posts drive bookings, where most of your audience come from or which creator partnerships are the most profitable.
datakyte’s KLINKs are connected to a built-in analytics dashboard, a visual map to see where your KLINKS are being sold and access to our 4Sight interface that gives you real-time recommendations on what’s trending and highlights adjustments you should make to improve your current tour offering. This way, you can see exactly which posts led to bookings, which influencers are driving the most conversions, and how your campaigns are performing in real time. With this type of data in hand, it’s easier to know what to post to boost sales.
Improve customer experience and brand awareness
Picture this: a traveler is scrolling through Instagram, searching for tours for their upcoming trip to New York. They come across an influencer sharing New York travel tips, including a recommendation for a city tour. It’s exactly the experience the traveler wants. But instead of booking right on the spot, they save the content. Later, they type in “New York city tour” on an OTA and book there, completely unaware of the tour operator behind the recommendation.
With datakyte’s inventory and KLINKs, travelers can book instantly on social media, upon the recommendations of creators they trust. As tour operators, you get direct bookings, which helps travelers associate great experiences directly with your company. We help you own the relationship, not just the booking.
Get an all-new platform for your operations
Your current process might be a bit fragmented: analytics on social media, inventory on a booking platform, and client communications on various platforms. And now, there’s AI in the picture, and it’s not going anywhere — according to an August 2025 survey, over 90% of people who used AI to plan trips were happy with the results.
With datakyte, you can combine multiple operations in a single platform:
You access social media post performance through the built-in analytics tools and services. That’s one tool to track campaign ROI and performance.
You manage your inventory directly on the platform. Only connect/upload once, generate KLINKs, and use them to sell and track bookings.
You utilize influencers who are experts at content creation. They’ll generate KLINKs for your tours to make their posts bookable, so their content brings you more sales.
You won’t need to worry about AI search. When you upload your inventory to datakyte, we make sure AI can read and display data on location, price, language, availability, and activity type.
Increase sales with datakyte
Travelers are already booking trips on social media. So why not meet them there? datakyte gives you all the tools to turn social content into bookable experiences. Everything they book through datakyte’s special Kyte-Links (KLINKs) is a direct booking, so you have full control over pricing, availability, and the customer experience.
Sign up now and join us in building the future of social selling for tours and travel. Let us help you grow your direct sales and take back control from the OTAs. Stay tuned for our upcoming announcement for the Tourpreneur community.
Disclaimer - This content reflects our ongoing development work. The datakyte platform is not yet publicly available, but we are building towards launch and are excited to share progress as we go.
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