Search your own company name right now. There is a good chance the first result is not your website. It is a booking marketplace, showing your tour, with your photos and your reviews, taking the booking and keeping a cut of it. Then search your main tour plus your town. Same thing.
The marketplaces are not the enemy. They fill seats you would not have filled, especially in the slow months. But every seat they sell that your own site could have sold is money you handed over for nothing. The goal is not to leave the marketplaces. The goal is to be the one that ranks, so the traveler who was going to book anyway books with you.
Why the marketplace outranks you
Three reasons, all fixable. Their page for your tour has more words than yours. It has more reviews than your Google listing. And it is on a site Google already trusts. You cannot fix the third one quickly. You can fix the first two this month.
1. Make your tour page better than theirs
Open the marketplace page for your tour next to your own. Theirs probably has the full description, the times, the price, the meeting point, the cancellation policy, a map, forty photos and a few hundred reviews. Yours probably has a paragraph and a button. Build your page to beat theirs on every one of those, plus the things they cannot have: the captain's name and face, what you saw last week, the dock from the parking lot, your own phone number. The pages guide walks through it.
2. Get your Google reviews up
The marketplace has hundreds of reviews because it asks every guest automatically. You can do the same, in person, at the dock, with a QR code, and it works better because you are a human being. The reviews guide is the routine. Within a season, your Google listing can have more reviews than the marketplace page, and Google notices.
3. Make your own booking the easy one
If your book-now button sends people to a marketplace, you have paid a cut on a traveler your own site found. Use a booking system you control, with your own calendar, and put the link on every page and on your Google listing. If you need the marketplaces for slow weeks, keep listing there, but hold back your best times for direct booking, and price direct the same or a little better.
Do not try to hide from them
Some operators pull their tours off the marketplaces in frustration. Then the slow season comes and the boat sits. The better move is to keep the listing, keep the photos a little less complete than your own page, and let your own site be the place with the most detail, the most reviews and the best price. Travelers compare. Give them a reason to pick you.
4. Own your own name
Your company name should bring up your website first, your Google listing second, and the marketplace somewhere below. If it does not, your site is too thin. A homepage with your name in the title, a real about page with the people on it, and a few pages that mention the company name naturally usually fixes it within a few months.
5. Say “book direct” out loud
On the boat, at the end: “If you come back, or you send friends, book on our website, it helps us keep the boat running.” People like being told how to help. Put the same line on the card with the photos.
What to keep on the marketplaces
The slow season. The 9 a.m. weekday departure. The tours that only fill with the marketplace's traffic. Treat the marketplace as the overflow channel it is good at being, not as your website. Review the split every few months: how many seats came direct, how many through the marketplace, and which way it is moving. If direct is growing, the pages and the reviews are working.
What this looks like after a year
Your tour page ranks for “[tour] [town]” above or next to the marketplace. Your Google listing has more reviews than the marketplace page. Travelers call the dock and say “I found you on Google.” The marketplace still fills the slow mornings. You kept the whole ticket on the rest.
Want this done for you?
I run a tour lead site in Tampa Bay myself, so I have watched exactly how the marketplaces show up for a local tour. If you want me to look at where your site stands against them, the audit is free.