A plan for The Nature's Trail
Your guides, your vehicles, your reputation and your ninety three reviews are all yours. The one part you do not own is the moment somebody actually pays. That happens on GetYourGuide, who take a cut of every booking and keep the customer afterwards.
What this plan is for: move your bookings from rented to owned, one phase at a time, without breaking anything that works for you today.
Start here
None of this is about how your website looks. It looks good, and the writing on your tour pages is better than the operators currently ranking above you. These are the strengths everything else gets built on.
5.0
Your Business Profile is claimed, accurate and very well rated.
4.9
Ranked 20th of 157 outdoor activities in Christchurch.
2,473
Real detail on Akaroa and Christchurch. Most competitors manage a paragraph.
6
NZD 180 for Christchurch through to NZD 320 for Mount Cook, with times and group sizes.
Review figures as at 16 September 2026. Everything else checked live on 21 September.
The problem
In order of what they cost you, not how technical they are.
Six of your tour addresses are still listed by Google. Every one now leads to an error page, and none of them forwards the visitor to the page that replaced it. Anyone who clicks, and any travel website that ever linked to you through one of them, lands on nothing.
Checked at 11am on 21 September: /one-day-tours/, /small-group-tours/, /5-days-south-island-tours/, /10-days-south-island-tours/ and two booking pages. All six dead, none forwarding.
You have thirty four pages and several are near duplicates. Three separate pages currently tell Google they are called "One Day Tours". Six more all call themselves "5 Days Tour", including your airport transfers and event transfers pages.
When several pages claim to be the same thing, Google picks one and discounts the rest. Your airport transfers page cannot win a search for airport transfers while it is telling Google it is a five day tour.
On your Akaroa page the words "Christchurch to Akaroa Private Day Tour" are there, and a person reads them as the title. They are not marked up as the page's heading though, so a search engine does not see them as one.
The only headings it can find on that page are your sidebar, which says "Recent Posts", and "Get In Touch". That is a page with 2,473 words of genuinely good writing about Akaroa, and the strongest signal it sends about itself is "Recent Posts".
This is also what decides whether an AI assistant can quote you when a traveller asks it for a guided tour in New Zealand. It has to be able to tell what the page is for.
You hold 35 five star reviews on Google and 58 on Tripadvisor at 4.9. Your website shows five short quotes with a first name and an initial, linked to neither, so a visitor has no way to check any of it is real.
Somebody choosing between you and three other Christchurch operators is deciding on proof. Your strongest proof is invisible at the exact moment they decide.
There is no analytics on your site and no connection to Google Search Console. Nobody can tell you which tours people look at, where they give up, or whether anything anyone does actually helps.
Your home page also takes a while to open on a phone, mostly because of one background video file larger than most entire websites, which the browser gives up on before it ever finishes. Your customers are travellers on phones, often on hotel wifi, often overseas.
Having no measurement also means you cannot sensibly run advertising yet. Not that it would not work, but that nothing on the site could tell you a booking came from an ad, so you would be spending blind.
The part that costs the most
Every page of your website links to your GetYourGuide listing, and there is no way to book or pay on your own site at all. Your "Book Now" buttons open a form that sends you an email.
So the job your website currently does is hand your customer to a marketplace that takes a commission, owns the relationship afterwards, and keeps the review.
GetYourGuide is worth keeping. It finds you customers you would not find on your own, and nothing in this plan asks you to leave it. The aim is that it stops being the only way somebody can book you.
Why the order matters
Every booking you get passes through all six. Fixing one on its own does very little, which is why this is a plan rather than a list of jobs.
Step 1
Leaking
Dead pages, and pages competing with each other
Step 2
Slow
Takes a while to open on a phone
Step 3
No proof
Your 93 reviews are nowhere on the page
Step 4
Rented
Goes to GetYourGuide, or an email form
Step 5
Not yours
No way to take payment on your own site
Step 6
Nothing asks
And reviews are what lift step 1
Step six feeds step one. Reviews lift your ranking, ranking brings more people, more people means more reviews. Joined up, that loop compounds on its own. Right now it is six separate things.
Phase one · one to two weeks
Your look and your words are good, so they stay. What gets replaced is everything sitting under them, because that is where all five problems actually live.
The problem today
Your site was built on a template. The things that are wrong with it are not mistakes anyone made, they are the way the template works. Page names are set once and shared across pages, which is why six of them are called "5 Days Tour". Headings are styled instead of marked up, which is why Google reads "Recent Posts" as the most important thing on your Akaroa page. Nothing tells search engines what exists, because there is no sitemap.
Fixing those one page at a time, on somebody else's template, means thirty four separate repairs that can be undone the next time the template is touched.
What that is costing you
Every search that should land on your Akaroa or Hanmer Springs page is being weakened by pages that claim to be the same thing. Every link any travel site has ever given you through one of those six dead addresses is worth nothing today. And every traveller who opens your home page on a phone waits while a video loads that they will never see.
You are paying for all three right now, every day, in bookings that go to the operator listed above you.
What we do
What you get
$899
plus GST, once
$79
plus GST a month
The monthly covers hosting, your domain, security updates, backups and content changes made for you when you ask. No contract, cancel any month. A website of this size in New Zealand generally runs between $1,500 and $6,000. This is our standard price, not a discount that expires.
Phase two · ongoing, once phase one is live
This is the part you asked about first. It is a separate, ongoing service on top of the website, because it is continuous work rather than a one off build.
The problem today
Nobody can see what is happening. There is no Search Console, so you cannot see what people search before they find you, which pages Google shows them, or which of those they ignore. Your backlinks, the other websites pointing at yours, have never been measured. Your blog exists as six headlines that all open the same page, so there is nothing for a travel site to link to even if they wanted to.
What that is costing you
Two Christchurch operators selling the same day trips have done the plain groundwork you have not: a sitemap, a robots file, and their business details in a format Google reads. Their tour pages are more thinly written than yours and they are still ranked above you. You are losing that comparison on labelling, not on quality.
What we do, every month
What you get
Phase two is a monthly service and it replaces the $79 care plan rather than adding to it. We will put the number in writing once phase one is live, because the honest scope depends on what Search Console shows in the first fortnight. What we will not do is quote you for ongoing work before we can see what it involves.
Phase three · when the numbers justify it
This is the one that changes the economics of the business rather than the traffic. It is a genuine piece of work and it is not included in anything above.
The problem today
Somebody can find you, read everything about the tour, and decide they want it. At that point your own website has to hand them to GetYourGuide, who complete the booking, take the payment, keep a commission and own the customer from then on. Your own "Book Now" buttons open a form that emails you, which you then answer by hand.
You also have no way to ask a happy customer for a review at the one moment they are most likely to leave one, which is the day the tour finishes.
What that is costing you
A commission on bookings that were already yours, on travellers who found you, read your pages and decided on you before GetYourGuide was involved at all. Plus the reviews that go to their platform instead of your Google listing, which is the thing that lifts you in search.
What we do
GetYourGuide stays alongside all of this. It brings you customers you would not otherwise reach, and the point is not to leave it. Worth checking what your agreement with them allows before we plan the detail.
What you get
Quoted separately when you are ready for it. It only makes sense once phases one and two are bringing enough direct traffic for the commission you are saving to be worth more than the build.
Every figure in this document was measured from your own website, your Google Business Profile and your Tripadvisor listing. Where something could not be measured, it has been left out rather than guessed at.