The Discovery Problem - Why Most Travellers Aren’t Finding You

Tourism, But Smarter: Finding Clarity in a Crowded Industry
The Discovery Problem - Why Most Travellers Aren’t Finding You

Great experiences shouldn’t be buried five clicks deep. This blog explores why visibility is still the biggest barrier in tourism, and what to do about it.

One of the biggest frustrations in tourism today isn’t that great experiences don’t exist. It’s that travellers can’t find them. And when I say travellers, I don’t just mean international visitors with weeks to plan their dream trip. I mean the family looking for something to do on a Saturday afternoon, the conference attendee with a free evening, the couple planning a quick weekend away.

Too often, what they end up doing isn’t what they would have loved most, it’s simply what was easiest to find. Discovery is still the problem we don’t talk about enough.

You can have the most incredible guided tour, the most charming inn, the most unforgettable local festival, but if people can’t find you easily, they will end up somewhere else. And in today’s landscape, “easy to find” usually means “favoured by algorithms.” That’s where the disconnect starts.

Search engines and big travel platforms don’t showcase everything. They prioritise what’s already popular, what has the biggest ad spend, or what ranks well for SEO. That’s not the same as what’s most interesting, most authentic, or most representative of a community. Travellers want to explore, to stumble onto something new, to discover. But too often the digital pathways they’re given filter out the very experiences that make travel meaningful.

And this isn’t just a traveller problem, it’s a business problem. If your experience is buried five clicks deep, or hidden behind clunky systems, you’re losing bookings. You’re also losing the chance to build lasting relationships with people who would have loved what you offer. Visibility is the first domino in the tourism economy. If it doesn’t fall, nothing else moves.

I saw this up close when I worked for a fabulous local resort (shout out to Elk Ridge Resort - elkridgeresort.com) in northern Saskatchewan. We had amazing experiences to offer, but outside of our own website and social media posts, there was no meaningful way to showcase the full picture. We did incredible work offline, but online it was a patchwork of tools and "discovery" systems that were built to extract value, not create it. Our experiences weren’t missing, they were just largely invisible to the people looking for them.

And while not small, Elk Ridge is a destination resort in a lower populated region. So we didn't have the natural visibility of a high-traffic or tourism-centric area, and we didn't have the advertising budget to effectively rise above the noise on Google and Facebook...and now the noise is even louder in those spaces. Because that's what they're designed for --> noise and data. They're not designed for any individual business to thrive, and they're definitely not designed for intentional discovery.

That invisibility is what Roamlii was built to solve. Plus, effective customer relationship management paired with the incredible efficiency of automations and accessible AI tools, all aligned specifically for this industry, from direct industry experience. Tourism is so important it deserves its own platform! Not to be cluttered among everything else on Google and social media. Even the existing tourism platforms are designed for themselves, as extractive money-harvesters...not to add real value to this industry, its small operators, its events, festivals and sports, and not to travellers.

We designed our platform with the understanding that discovery is the foundation. Travellers should be able to see everything a community has to offer, not just what paid the most to show up first. And businesses should have a way to be visible without draining their bank accounts on ads or battling SEO giants. By connecting discovery with bookings, and by making it simple for operators to show up, we’re helping shift the balance back to the architects who actually create the experiences, and the people who want to find them.

The discovery problem won’t disappear overnight. But we can chip away at it. It starts with recognising that visibility isn’t just marketing, it’s infrastructure. It’s as important to tourism as roads or airports, because it determines whether people even know where to go in the first place.

So if you’re running a small business in tourism, take a step back and look at your discoverability. Can a traveller find you in two clicks, if they don't know you exist? Can they book you right from the place they discover you? Are you optimising your day to day operational efficiency with modern tools? If the answer is no to any of these, then it might be time to consider working with Roamlii.

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Let’s make discovery simple, accessible, and fair. #GetRoaming and let’s build a tourism ecosystem where every great experience has a chance to be seen.

Founder & CEO
Roamlii