Let millions of travellers find you direct

The Guide helps travellers to find your business and book direct, with no booking commission fees. Built using the local knowledge of independent tourism businesses, The Guide will make booking direct the new normal.

We are focusing on countries where travellers want better guidance and where tourism makes a vital difference by providing jobs and opportunities to local communities.

The Guide will encourage travellers to travel responsibly by booking direct with businesses – helping to keep money within the local communities they visit.

Through Payments by Tab, we've worked with thousands of tourism businesses across Latin America, Africa and South East Asia over the last five years.

We have seen how online travel agents and metasearch platforms have taken an increasing share of tourism spend – with typical commission rates of 15-20%.

At the same time, these platforms make it difficult for independent tourism businesses to communicate their own individual personality and to stand out in a sea of listings that all look the same. It is a real challenge for travellers to find the official website of most tourism businesses, because major platforms occupy the top search results.

With The Guide, we want to fix this by helping travellers to discover, engage and book direct with tourism businesses. The discovery and booking process has become too cold in its efficiency and automation. The Guide will help to bring back human warmth to the booking process – to match the warm welcome travellers receive during their stay.

The past year has certainly been a difficult time for the tourism industry. Tourism generates 1 in 10 jobs around the world – and a far higher proportion in many communities. Many businesses have needed to adapt in the short term, and likely in the long term to stay open.

However, the tourism industry will recover. Better times will come. We are launching The Guide now, so that as business returns, we can help shift travellers towards travelling responsibly – by booking direct with the businesses they visit. It’s more important than ever that traveller spending stays within local communities, rather than funding high commission rates set by online travel agents.

The Guide will be built with the collective knowledge of thousands of independent tourism businesses, and this is a positive step we can all take while we are spending less time with guests. The Guide will help businesses to recover by helping them find guests – and will help travellers to discover where to stay, what to do, and uncover emerging destinations they might otherwise miss.

Our initial focus with The Guide has been on Latin America, Africa and South East Asia – but we've already started to expand to the rest of the world to make sure we cover all of the most interesting corners of the world.

We are designing The Guide to produce coverage that is more local, more comprehensive and more up-to-date than any other travel guide or platform.

The Guide includes great accommodation and activity/tour businesses, alongside restaurants, bars and cafes. We'll be including tourism sights in the near future. The Guide will aim for universal coverage, including all tourism businesses rather than a selective list. Free basic listings will always be available.

However, we will not include “peer-to-peer” rental of rooms/apartments, unless these are being formally run as a tourism business with an appropriate level of service and staffing.

Many tourism businesses feel there are real problems with the current state of online traveller reviews. Though many reviews are genuine and helpful, a large proportion are deeply unfair, misleading or simply fake.

Over time, we plan to introduce reviews, but will use a fairer approach which promotes thoughtful feedback and the views of all guests, rather than just those who shout the loudest.

We are offering generous early-bird discounts for any businesses who signs up during our pre-launch phase. You can also earn free upgrades to the Pro Plan if you refer other businesses.

We will launch The Guide to travellers in the coming weeks – beginning in the areas where we have the broadest coverage of tourism businesses. You can help to bring forward your area’s launch by encouraging nearby businesses to complete their listing in The Guide.

The best way is to help The Guide to grow by encouraging other businesses to join The Guide and encouraging your guests to use The Guide to book direct next time. We will give extra visibility to businesses who refer other businesses.

You can improve the visibility of your listing by contributing information about your local area to The Guide. Travellers will see that your business contributed content, and top contributor listings will feature more prominently throughout The Guide. When you create your listing, you can tick a box to let us know you are happy to contribute content to The Guide.

The Guide will help to educate travellers that when they book through an online travel agent, businesses pay $15-20 of every $100 booking in commission. Booking direct lets business owners spend that money on improving the guest experience. This helps to keep the money in the local economy – helping to create more and better paying tourism jobs in countries where this is crucial to the economy.

Travellers increasingly want to travel responsibly – and this means booking direct wherever they can. The Guide makes this easy for travellers, and allows businesses to offer a reward, perk or discount to encourage direct booking.

Yes you can! Once you have completed your listing, you can apply for a Payments with Tab account directly from your dashboard, to activate our payments and bookings service on your account.

Payments by Tab currently powers payments & bookings for thousands of hotels and tourism businesses in 42 countries across Latin America, Africa & South East Asia.