Viator and GetYourGuide Commission vs Your Own Site

Name: Web60
Address: Block B, Maynooth Business Campus, Straffan Rd, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, W23 W5X7, IE
Price range: €60/year

If most of your tour bookings come through Viator or GetYourGuide, you do not own a tour business. You run a subcontracting arm for two booking platforms, and they set the rate.

That sounds harsh. It is meant to. I have spent twenty years watching small operators hand control of their customers to whichever platform happened to be loudest that decade, and the activity sector is in the middle of that cycle right now. The marketplaces are useful. I will say exactly where they earn their money further down. But the commission they charge is not a marketing budget you chose. It is rent on a shop you will never own, and the landlord can change the terms with a fortnight's notice.

The numbers operators are actually paying

Start with what the platforms take, because most operators I speak to underestimate it.

Airbnb is the only one of the three that publishes a clear figure. Its own service fees help page says that for experience reservations it typically charges a 20% service fee, paid by the host. That is a fifth of every ticket, before your guide's wages, your insurance or your diesel.

GetYourGuide does not publish a standard rate, and that alone tells you something. Arival, the research body that covers the tours and activities trade, reported that in June 2025 an undisclosed number of GetYourGuide suppliers were told their commission was rising, with one moving from 20% to 30%, effective a month later. Some operators got the increase reversed by complaining. Others did not. GetYourGuide's own supplier help centre also confirms that choosing bi-weekly payouts instead of monthly adds two percentage points on top of your contractual rate. Want your own money sooner? Pay for the privilege.

Viator is the hardest to pin down. Its rates are negotiated rather than published, and one Budapest operator quoted by Arival put the basic rate at 27%. Treat that as one operator's experience, not a price list. Then there is Viator Accelerate, which the company describes on its supplier site as a way to boost a product's visibility, provided your commission is equal to or higher than the programme's minimum rate. In plain terms: pay a higher cut, rank higher in the listings.

So the honest range for a small operator is somewhere between a fifth and roughly a third of every booking, depending on platform, destination and how much visibility you are willing to buy. Some will pay less. Some, in crowded categories, will pay noticeably more.

Channel	What it costs you	Who holds the customer	Where your reviews live
Airbnb Experiences	Typically 20% of each booking, per Airbnb	Airbnb	Airbnb
GetYourGuide	Negotiated, commonly 20% to 30%, plus 2 points for faster payouts	GetYourGuide	GetYourGuide
Viator	Negotiated, operators report mid-twenties and higher with Accelerate	Viator	Viator and Tripadvisor
Your own website	Hosting and a booking tool, no per-ticket cut to a marketplace	You	Your site and Google

Commission is the smaller cost

The percentage gets all the attention. It is not the expensive part.

The expensive part is that the customer never becomes yours. GetYourGuide's supplier guidance is unusually candid about this. When someone books you through the platform, you get a temporary email address on the @reply.getyourguide.com domain, and you can contact that customer for up to seven days after the activity. Then the address goes dead. The same guidance states that you cannot ask customers for reviews on other sites.

Think about what that means across a season. A family from Lyon takes your sea-cliff walk, loves it, and wants to bring their in-laws next summer. They do not have your email. They do not remember your business name, because the confirmation came from GetYourGuide. Next June they open the app again, search the same town, and the platform shows them whoever is paying the highest visibility rate that week. Maybe that is you. Maybe it is the operator two piers down. You paid commission to acquire that family once, and you will pay it again to acquire them a second time, if you are lucky enough to win the auction.

Viator and Airbnb work on the same principle, even if the exact rules differ. It is the same trap sellers walk into when renting a marketplace shop instead of owning their website, just with a guided walk instead of a product. The marketplace's business model depends on being the place the customer returns to. Your repeat customer is their repeat customer. Every five-star review you earn builds their page, not yours.

The reviews you earned live on someone else's server

Reviews deserve their own section, because this is where operators get genuinely angry once they see it.

A tour business lives on reviews. A walking guide with four hundred glowing reviews on a marketplace has built something real. But those reviews are stored by the platform, displayed by the platform, and tied to a listing the platform controls. If you leave, they stay. If your listing gets suspended over a dispute, they disappear from public view with it.

Your own website and your Google Business Profile are the two places where your reputation is attached to your name rather than to a marketplace's brand. Google reviews follow your business. A testimonials page on your own site is yours to keep, back up and move. Neither replaces a marketplace's review volume overnight, but they are the only reviews that survive you changing distribution strategy.

Every booking that starts on your own site is a customer relationship you keep.

The share is moving the wrong way

None of this would matter much if marketplaces were a small slice of the trade. They are not, and the slice is growing.

Arival's Global Operator Landscape research, built on a survey of more than seven thousand operators worldwide, found that online travel agencies took roughly a third of bookings in tours, activities and attractions in 2024, up from about a quarter in 2019. Survey data of that kind varies a lot by country and activity type, and an Irish walking guide is not a Barcelona food-tour company. The direction is still the point. More of the sector's customers now arrive through a platform that takes a cut and keeps the relationship.

Then there is the rulebook. Under the EU's platform-to-business regulation, Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, a marketplace has to give business users at least 15 days' notice of changes to its terms, and has to describe any way that paying it, directly or indirectly, can influence your ranking. That protection is real and worth knowing about. It is also a notice period, not a veto. Fifteen days is enough time to read the email and decide whether you can afford to walk away. For an operator with no direct channel, the honest answer is usually no. Accommodation owners have been through this exact cycle, and the arithmetic B&Bs are now redoing on Booking.com commission applies almost line for line to tours.

What a proper direct channel actually needs

Before any platform name comes into it, here is the standard a direct booking channel has to meet to be worth having.

It takes the booking without a phone call. A tourist planning tomorrow from a hotel room at 10pm will not ring you. If the site cannot take a date, a headcount and a payment, they go back to the app.
It works on a phone over patchy coastal signal. Most activity bookings happen on mobile, often in the place itself. A page that crawls on a weak connection loses the booking to a marketplace app that has already cached its listing.
It is yours to change. Prices, departure times, a weather cancellation notice. You should be able to update them yourself in minutes, not raise a ticket with a developer.
It survives a bad day. If a plugin update breaks the booking calendar in July, you need to roll back to yesterday's working version in minutes, not rebuild it.
It belongs to you. The domain, the content, the customer list and the reviews you collect should all be portable if you ever change provider.

That is the bar. A free page on a website builder that cannot take bookings fails at point one. A €4,000 agency build that locks you out of your own pricing fails at point three, and you will pay €75 to €150 an hour every time a departure time changes.

WordPress clears all five, which is part of why it runs roughly four in ten websites worldwide, according to W3Techs. It has a mature ecosystem of booking and calendar plugins built for exactly this kind of business, and you keep full control of the content.

What it needs underneath is hosting that is actually managed. That is where Web60's €60/year all-inclusive WordPress hosting fits: you describe your business, the AI builder produces a working WordPress site in under a minute, and the hosting, SSL, nightly backups with one-click restore, and security hardening come included. The Nginx and Redis caching stack keeps pages quick on a mobile connection, which in practice means the tourist standing in a car park on one bar of signal actually sees your departure times before they give up and open the app.

The built-in analytics are privacy-first and do not need cookie consent, so you can see which pages direct bookers come through without putting a consent banner in front of someone who is trying to pay you. And the nightly backups are the point-four safety net: if the calendar breaks mid-season, you restore last night's copy rather than taking bookings by text message for a week.

Where the marketplaces genuinely earn their cut

I said I would be fair, so here it is.

If you are launching a brand new tour with no reviews and no search presence, a marketplace listing is probably the fastest way to get your first season of customers. Nobody is searching for your name yet. The platforms have the audience, the trust and the translation into a dozen languages, and they bring you visitors who would never have found you. The same goes if a large share of your customers are cruise passengers deciding what to do in the hour after they step off the ship. They are in the app. You should be too.

Some operators in that position will never build a meaningful direct channel, and for them paying a fifth to a third of revenue to a marketplace may simply be the cost of being in business. That is a legitimate choice, as long as it is a choice.

The mistake is treating the marketplace as the whole strategy rather than the top of the funnel. Use it to find customers. Use your own website to keep them.

What your own website cannot do

A direct channel has a real limitation, and you should know it before you start.

Your website will not bring you strangers on its own. A marketplace puts your tour in front of people who have never heard of your town. Your own site mostly converts people who already know your name, found you on Google Maps, saw your van, or were recommended by their B&B host. Building a website and delisting from every platform in the same week is how operators lose a season.

Google's Things to do programme narrows that gap a little. According to Google's own help documentation, attractions, tour operators and activity providers can surface their inventory through free listings in Search, but Google asks them to take part through their booking technology provider. In other words, the free "book on the official site" route depends on your booking system being connected to Google, and not every booking plugin offers that. Verify it with your booking tool before you count on it.

Marketplaces bring the first visit. Your own site is where the next one should land.

A Clare walking guide doing the sums

Consider a hypothetical but typical case: a guide running small-group walks on the Burren in north Clare, selling mostly through two marketplaces. Each summer they pay a fifth to a third of their ticket revenue in commission, and every returning walker comes back through the app at full commission again.

The sensible move is not to delist. It is to make every marketplace customer a candidate for the direct channel next time, within the platform rules. A business card in the hand at the end of the walk with the website address. A Google Business Profile that ranks for the guide's own name. A website that takes the booking when the B&B owner down the road recommends them to a guest. The marketplace still fills the quiet midweek slots. The repeat walkers, the referrals and the people who search the guide's name book direct, and keep the cut in the business.

Nothing about that requires a big budget. It requires owning one channel where the rules are yours.

Conclusion

The tour marketplaces are a fine place to be found and a poor place to be dependent. Their commission is visible, but the larger cost is that each customer you serve through them stays theirs, along with the reviews you worked for. Keep the listings that bring you new people. Put the same effort into a website that takes a booking on a phone at 10pm and belongs to you. Then decide, season by season, how much of your revenue you are happy to keep paying in rent.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much commission does Viator charge tour operators?

Viator negotiates rates rather than publishing a standard figure. Operators commonly report base rates in the mid-twenties per cent, and Viator's Accelerate programme lets you raise your commission above its minimum rate in exchange for more visibility, so the effective rate can climb well beyond that in competitive categories.

What commission does GetYourGuide take?

GetYourGuide's rate is also set per supplier and varies by destination and activity. Industry reporting puts it in the 20% to 30% range, and in mid-2025 some suppliers were told their rate was rising from 20% to 30%. Choosing bi-weekly payouts instead of monthly adds two percentage points, according to GetYourGuide's supplier help centre.

Can I contact GetYourGuide customers to get them to book direct next time?

Not through the platform. GetYourGuide gives you a temporary email address for each booking, usable for up to seven days after the activity, and its terms restrict communication to facilitating that booking. Marketing to those customers or asking for reviews on other sites breaches the supplier rules. Making your business name and website easy to remember in person is a different matter.

Should I come off Viator and GetYourGuide completely?

For most small operators, no. The marketplaces bring visitors who have never heard of you, which your own website cannot do on its own. The aim is to stop depending on them for repeat customers, referrals and people who already know your name, not to switch off a source of new business.

Can my own website appear in Google Things to do for free?

Google offers free listings for tours and activities, but it asks operators to take part through their booking technology provider. Whether your website can appear depends on your booking system being connected to Google, so verify that with your booking tool before planning around it.

Viator and GetYourGuide Commission Is Rent, Not Marketing