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Tourism & Tasting Experiences · 12 weeks

Glen Ness Whisky Tours

Inverness, Scotland

+412% direct bookings for a small-group Highland whisky tour operator

Direct bookings
+412%
vs. baseline quarter
OTA share of revenue
92% → 38%
commission savings ~£1.8k/mo
Google rank
#2
for "whisky tour Inverness"
Page load time
6.2 → 0.9s
mobile, 4G connection
The Situation

Where they started

Hamish McLeod had been running curated whisky and Speyside tasting tours for twelve years. The work was excellent — five-star TripAdvisor — but every booking came through Viator or GetYourGuide, which took 25-30% of the ticket price. He had a website, technically, but it ran on a builder that produced 6MB pages that timed out on coastal mobile connections. Direct bookings were under 8% of revenue.

The Work

What we built and ran

  • 1
    Rebuilt the site as a sub-second-loading static site that works on weak rural mobile connections
  • 2
    Localized into German and French (the two largest non-English visitor groups for Highland whisky tours)
  • 3
    Targeted "whisky tour Inverness", "Speyside tasting", and "Highland distillery experience" with a mix of SEO and modest Google Ads
  • 4
    Built a deposit-based booking flow with calendar holds that respect the operator's genuinely available days
  • 5
    Negotiated co-listings with two boutique Inverness hotels in exchange for guest-card promotion
Timeline

How it unfolded

Week 1-3
Site rebuild, multilingual content, booking flow scoped against real connectivity tests
Week 4-6
New site live; first direct bookings within 48 hours of launch
Week 7-9
Google rankings stabilize in top-3 for primary keywords
Week 10-12
Direct bookings cross 60% of revenue; OTA dependency drops materially

"We run small-group tastings in the Highlands. Andreja got us ranking for "whisky tour Inverness" and "Speyside tasting" and rebuilt our booking page so it actually works in a Land Rover with one bar of signal."

HM
Hamish McLeod
Owner, Glen Ness Whisky Tours

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