Colin Harrison is the founder of Booked Wild, working between Bristol and Levi in Finnish Lapland. The love of travel and hospitality came first — the trips, the places, the exploration, and nearly 30 years spent seeing first-hand how the industry actually works.
Booked Wild grew out of watching brilliant independent businesses lose bookings to bigger operators with better websites, and pay OTA commission for the privilege. Colin is the team’s strategy and growth partner, looking beyond how a website looks to where a business is going, where bookings are being lost and what needs to change. In the Journal he writes about websites, direct bookings and search visibility for independent travel and hospitality businesses.
A guest who enquires has already chosen you once. New analysis of hotel reservations shows how often the booking is lost in what happens next, and the lesson it teaches applies to every travel and hospitality business.
Your guests aren’t only booking somewhere to sleep. A lot of them are booking space, privacy and the chance to switch off — and your website should tell them they’ll get it.
Next year’s holidays get planned over Christmas and booked from Boxing Day. A new site that launches in January has missed the biggest booking window of the season.
Most travellers keep researching after they book. The weeks before arrival are where a direct booking proves its worth, and most independent operators spend them saying nothing.
In the US, a guest can now find and book a hotel room without visiting the property’s website. What independent operators can put in place before it arrives here.
Organic reach on Instagram and Facebook keeps shrinking, and a follower count was never a list you could rely on. Where social media fits in digital marketing for travel.
OTAs, marketplaces and reservation platforms can bring valuable bookings, but relying too heavily on them comes at a cost. How to strengthen your direct channels and protect more of your margin.
AI is becoming a discovery channel alongside Google, OTAs and social — but travellers still use the property’s own website to verify what they were told. What guests check, where properties lose the booking, and three places to start.
We tested mobile site speed on 606 independent accommodation websites. 86% took longer than four seconds to load, the average was 13.3 seconds — and a tenth of a second can move a booking rate. What we found, why it matters, and five fixes you can make today.
Amadeus is bringing its travel tools into Claude. What the Amadeus–Anthropic collaboration actually is, what it isn't yet, and the one question independent operators should be asking instead.
Everyone in travel says they want a frictionless booking website. Almost nobody has one. Where friction actually hides in a direct booking journey — before the booking engine, at the handover, and after it — and a five-minute test you can run on your own phone today.
The six schema.org JSON-LD types that decide whether AI engines can extract and cite your property — LodgingBusiness, Room, Offer, FAQPage, Person and BreadcrumbList — with the code for each.
How independent travel and hospitality operators use sensory storytelling — atmosphere, human presence, place-specific detail, practical confidence — to reduce OTA dependency, raise perceived value, and turn direct websites into stronger booking channels.
A citation block is the 60–120 word, plain-text, AI-extractable paragraph at the top of every page on a travel site that gives ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity an answer they can quote verbatim.
What llms.txt is, why travel and hospitality sites should publish one, and a working template for lodges, tour operators, restaurants, and experience providers. Plain-English explanation, ready-to-deploy file, and the realistic limits of what it does.
The structural reference for getting independent travel and hospitality operators cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. What changed, what AI engines actually read, the four-layer fix, and how much work it involves.
Not ready to book a free strategy call? Tell us what you're after and we'll get back to you directly. We reply in person, usually the same working day.
Got it. We'll be in touch.
One of us will read what you've written and come back with a straight answer — not a proposal template.
Tell us what's not working
A real person reads every one of these.
We reply in person, usually the same working day.
Got it. We'll be in touch.
One of us will read what you've written and come back with a straight answer — not a proposal template.