Built for concerts and conferences.
Not for surf lessons and food tours.
Eventbrite is the world's go-to platform for one-off events — it has the audience, the brand, and the infrastructure for a conference or a music night. But it charges per ticket, it doesn't connect to Google Things To Do, and it wasn't built for tour operators running daily time-slotted products. Spotinga was.
Purpose-built for tours & activities. 0% commission. Free to start.
Eventbrite is excellent software — for the wrong use case
If you're running a one-night comedy show or a weekend workshop, Eventbrite's discovery platform and name recognition genuinely help. The problem is that tour and activity operators have fundamentally different needs — and Eventbrite wasn't designed around them.
~3.5% + $1.59 per ticket. That's per ticket, not per order.
Eventbrite charges a service fee on each ticket sold. You can absorb it (and lose margin) or pass it to the buyer (and look more expensive). Either way, it compounds fast on volume.
* Based on Eventbrite's standard service fee of 3.5% + $1.59 per ticket absorbed by organiser. Actual fees vary by plan and region.
Tour operators need things Eventbrite was never designed for
A concert needs a date, a venue, and a ticket count. A surf school needs time slots, per-session capacity, seasonal pricing, instructor assignment, waiver collection, Google visibility, and repeat customer marketing. These are different problems.
Run 9am, 12pm, and 3pm departures simultaneously — each with their own capacity, cutoff, and pricing. Eventbrite is built around single-date events.
Appear in Google Search and Maps when travellers are actively looking to book. Eventbrite has no GTTD connectivity — your products don't appear on Google's booking panel.
Every booker becomes your contact. Segment past guests, run campaigns, and drive direct repeat bookings. On Eventbrite, guests follow your page — you can't extract that relationship.
Age-tiered rates, group discounts, seasonal pricing, early-bird windows. Eventbrite supports basic ticket types but not the pricing logic tour operators need day-to-day.
Pay hotels, bloggers, and travel agents commission when they drive bookings. Eventbrite has no built-in referral infrastructure for ongoing partner programmes.
Your own booking page, under your brand, at your domain — not inside an Eventbrite listing where competitors are one click away.
How they compare for tour & activity operators
"We used Eventbrite for two years before realising how much we were haemorrhaging in fees. The bigger issue was that our repeat guests were following us on Eventbrite, not booking directly with us. Eventbrite owned that relationship and we had no way to reach them outside the platform."
A platform purpose-built for tours. Not adapted from events.
Google Things To Do publishing, time-slotted inventory, CRM, affiliate programme, and 0% commission on direct bookings. Built from the ground up for operators who run experiences — not concerts.