Don’t get taken advantage of when taking a Yoga Teacher Training

TLDR; Booking platforms charge a lot for very little. The best deal is always to book directly. Yoga schools give discounts for direct bookings instead of going through a booking platform as it save them heaps.

Finally taking the leap to becoming a yoga instructor is an exciting if sometimes intimidating moment in a nascent yogi’s life. Much has been written on how to choose the best course for you, but once that choice is made the next decision is where to book it.

Not too long ago there was only the option of booking directly, but in recent years a number of booking platforms have popped up, offering a convenient all-stop-shop that is not only easy, but actually hard to avoid now. Let me explain.

These platforms are running the classic middle man scheme, in which they charge high commissions to the facilitators, much of which gets invested in marketing that automatically drives customers to the platforms instead of the websites of the schools themselves. Making a pretty profit without doing much at all.

So these booking platforms cleverly force themselves between teachers and students, which drives up prices of courses to cover the commissions.

Facilitators are not allowed to offer better prices on their own websites without losing the listing on the platforms. A nifty business model that serves the platforms much more than the students or schools, the opposite of which is often propagated, of course.

In fact, the platforms are rarely even directly related to yoga, the biggest one, for instance, was started by a Dutch travel agency that saw additional profit opportunities in ‘specialty tourism’, which includes also motorbike journeys, martial arts trips etc. and they simply bought a specific web domain for each while running all of them out of their travel office.

By now the schools’ own websites are harder to find, because the entire first page of search results is littered with (indirect/paid) offers from these platforms.

So what can you do about this as a yoga student?

If you don’t have a particular school picked out yet, using a platform to research what’s available is almost unavoidable by now.

However, once you find your course of choice, look for the website of the actual school on the web. If you search for their exact name you should be able to find them and contact them directly. If not their website you might just find their social media accounts.

Tell them you found them on a platform, but would be interested to book directly in exchange for a discount or other perks. Instead of discounts they might also offer other valuable direct booking perks.

This way you can get the best deal for yourself while restoring a bit of fairness to a field that should not be exploited by opportunistic business folks, but facilitate personal development and happiness for as many people as possible.