Industry Report · September 2025 to September 2026
Food & Drink Tours.
The booking data behind food and drink tours, and what it means for how you market, price, and staff your calendar.
from booking to the tour. Food and drink guests plan a month ahead.
A seat on your tour gets planned like a dinner reservation, not picked up like a walk-up. That moves where your marketing has to land: in front of someone a month before the date, not the week of it.
Days booked in advance
Run two calendars, not one. Open inventory and prices at least 45 days out so the planners can find you, and keep a same-day slot live for the 23% who book inside a day. Send your reminder and upsell messages against the tour date, not the booking date, because a month of silence sits between them.
A $212 table for 3, and cancellations land early.
At 2.92 tickets and $212.20 a booking, guests buy for a table, not a seat. 12% cancel, which is high, but they cancel an average of 31 days before the tour. That is a month of runway to resell the spot, not a no-show at the meeting point.
Price and package for a party of 3: pairings, a premium tasting tier, a private-group option. Treat the 12% as recoverable inventory, because a seat freed 31 days out is still sellable at full price. Offer self-serve reschedule before refund, and push freed spots back onto your calendar automatically.
Cancellation rate, and they arrive early: an average of 31 days before the tour date. Long notice means most freed seats can still be resold rather than written off.
Average booking value. Tastings, pairings, and add-ons push a food and drink cart well past a single ticket.
Tickets per booking on average. Close to a table of 3, so size your seatings, your pours, and your minimums around groups.
Locals fill the seats. Tourists pay the premium.
Locals are the single biggest group at 47%, but they spend the least, $125.08 a booking. Tourists are 38% of bookings and spend $222.00, 78% more. Distance does not just change who walks up, it changes what the booking is worth.
Sell two different products to the same tour. Locals book bigger groups at 3.15 tickets, so give them a reason to come back: seasonal menus, a neighborhood series, a members rate. Sell tourists the premium version through social discovery and "things to do" search, because they are already paying $97 more per booking.
3 in 4 travellers are domestic. The other one spends the most.
75% of the travellers on your tours come from inside the country and book $201.34 at a time, in groups of 3.31. The remaining 25% arrive from abroad and spend $286.00, the highest average booking value anywhere in this report. That is a quarter of your travelling guests, not a rounding error.
Build the plan around domestic travellers, who bring the volume and the biggest groups. Then remove the friction that costs you the $286 booking: show prices in the guest's currency, translate your checkout, and list dietary and allergen details up front. A quarter of your travelling guests are crossing a border to eat with you.
Every month sells. Saturday sells out.
Your sales calendar is flat. Your operating calendar is not. Bookings arrive almost perfectly evenly, every day of the week and every month of the year: just 2.2 points separate the busiest booking day from the quietest, and only 1.4x separates the busiest month from the quietest. Then the tours themselves collapse onto one day: 25% run on a Saturday, nearly twice any other day of the week.
Stop running seasonal campaigns and run one always-on campaign, because there is no off month to recover in. Put your guides, your capacity, and your premium pricing on Saturday, where 1 in 4 tours lands. Then use the flat Tuesday and Wednesday, at under 12% each, as your discounted or private-hire inventory rather than leaving the slots dark.
Bookings arrive evenly, every day of the week
Only 2.2 points separate the busiest booking day from the quietest.
1 in 4 tours runs on a Saturday
Saturday runs 1.8x the next busiest day, Friday.
Guests buy on a weekday and eat on a weekend
There is no off season, only a slightly quieter January
Chart shows when tours take place (product start date). Bookings run an average of 33 days earlier. On the booking-date view, March is the single busiest month at 10.27%, the one month where the two calendars pull clearly apart. Trailing 12 months to September 2026.
of bookings never touch a reseller.
Exactly 54.69% come through your own booking widget and another 19.09% through your team, so about 3 in 4 bookings already run on your own tools. Your website is not a marketing asset. It is the business.
Put your first dollar into your own booking flow, SEO, and abandoned booking recovery. With a 33 day lead time you have a month to win back an abandoned cart, so run the recovery sequence for weeks, not hours. Every point you move direct is margin you keep and a guest you can invite back.
Your guide to more bookings.
The world's most advanced operating system for food and drink tours, now supercharged by Peek Pro 9. From the first click to the follow up review.
Sell More Seats
Drive more revenue with a booking flow designed to recapture customers and accommodate walk-up reservations. Abandoned booking recovery that returns guests to their last completed page, add-ons for extra pairings, a bottle to take home, or branded merch, and dynamic pricing that takes advantage of weekends, holidays, and peak seasonality.
Run the Day Without the Stress
Build a system that takes the stress out of daily management. Automated messaging for reservations, meeting points, weather updates, and tour reminders, IDs collected before arrival so age checks never hold up a tasting, guide availability tracking that keeps the schedule full, and a customizable required minimum so a seating never runs at a loss.
Keep Guests Coming Back
Enjoy a powerhouse system that takes the work out of building a better business. Host booking info, menus, and dietary and allergen notes in one place, send confirmations and reminders automatically, push your best reviews to Google and Tripadvisor, and track revenue, popular times, and which tours sell out most often.
"The ability to manage bookings, process payments, and check customers in all in one place."
Foodie Crawls"Peek Pro continues to grow and evolve with us as our business grows. They integrate user feedback and rollout new features regularly, to keep up with our thriving business year after year."
Avital Food ToursMake the booking
as good as the tour.
Join Foodie Crawls, Avital Food Tours, and food and drink tour operators everywhere turning these numbers into their growth plan.