What the experience economy is paying for — that nobody chose

Last year, the European Experience Alliance published The Rise of Pseudo Pages: Threats to Tourism and Consumer Trust - bringing together first-hand evidence from Europe's most visited cultural institutions: the Van Gogh Museum, Museus e Monumentos de Portugal, Milan Duomo, and Sagrada Familia. Same pattern in every case: unauthorised resellers and fake pages intercepting travelers, who arrive on site holding invalid tickets and blame the institution rather than the actor that defrauded them.

This piece opens a new series on the marketing economics of the experience sector. It starts with a question the pseudo-pages paper raised but didn't answer: what does this cost the rest of the sector, every day, before a visitor ever reaches the door?

Three costs, often blurred together

There are three kinds of cost in front of every operator trying to reach a traveller, and they don't behave the same way.

The first is the gatekeeper layer: what you pay to be visible in the first place. The ad auctions, the surcharges, the upstream costs of getting in front of an audience at all. Every business in the experience economy pays into this layer — operators and OTAs alike.

The second is the distribution layer: what you pay to actually book the traveller. The commissions and fees of the platforms and OTAs that deliver real customers in the chain.

The third is the interference layer: what you lose to actors who deliver nothing in return. No discovery, no trust, no booking. Fake pages. Fake bidders. Fake clicks. Costs no one in the industry agreed to pay. This piece is about the third.

Where it shows up on the invoice

It isn't abstract, it lands in three places an operator can actually see.

You pay to bid on your own name. When an operator buys its own brand name in search, it isn't competing with rivals. It's bidding against impersonators and lookalike sites — many with no right to use the name at all. When that brand-defence CPC climbs 30, 50, 80% year on year, that's the cost rising.

You pay for traffic no human saw. A share of every campaign budget buys impressions and clicks generated by bots, click farms and ad-arbitrage operations. They sit inside the same auctions legitimate businesses pay into. The euro is spent; the customer was never real.

You pay to recover customers fraud got to first. A traveller who lands on a fake site arrives at the real business with friction, mistrust, or a chargeback already moving. Winning that customer back — when it's possible at all — is on the legitimate operator.

These costs compound. And they fall hardest on the operators and cultural sites without a fraud team — the ones absorbing the loss as a "cost of doing digital business."

It hits the whole sector

This isn't a small-operator problem or a big-platform problem. Impersonators bidding on brand names, bots draining budgets, fake sites intercepting travellers — it raises the cost of acquiring a customer for everyone working honestly: operators, attractions, OTAs and distribution platforms alike.

The European Commission's 2025 Consumer Conditions Scoreboard found 45% of consumers encountered an online scam in the past year. Nearly one in two — meeting exactly the kind of activity the Alliance documented at the gates.

The pseudo-pages paper showed where this ends: at four of Europe's most iconic sites, access rules, booking procedures and on-site staffing have all been changed in response to it.

The alliance position

Every actor in the experience economy delivers something real to the traveller. And every one of them pays when bad-faith players raise the cost of doing business honestly.

The real cost of a booking is rarely the headline cost. It includes brand-defence spend, money lost to fake traffic, and the drag from travellers who arrive via a fake site first. Few operators can see all three at once — which means the sector is making decisions about its marketing economics with an incomplete number.

The experience economy is paying, every day, for costs that benefit no one. Naming them, layer by layer, is where the marketing-math series begins.

Next in the series: the cost of a click - why the same ad euro buys different results across European markets and what fragmentation in digital policy has to do with it.