What OTAs actually charge tour operators in 2026

If you sell tours through online travel agencies (OTAs), the biggest single line on your P&L isn’t fuel, isn’t insurance, and often isn’t staff. It’s commission.

The platforms publish their headline rates, but the headline rate is rarely the whole story. Here’s what the major experience-booking OTAs actually take in 2026, and how that compares with the cost of building a direct-booking channel.

The headline rates

Platform	Standard commission	Notes
Viator (TripAdvisor)	20%	Operators can opt into “boost” tiers that go to 25–30% in exchange for ranking visibility
GetYourGuide	20–30%	Tiered by category and supplier performance
Klook	20–25%	Higher in markets where Klook is the dominant channel (e.g. APAC)
Airbnb Experiences	n/a	Closed to new hosts in 2024; remaining hosts paid 20% until full sunset
Expedia / Hotels.com Activities	20–25%	Inherits the Expedia margin model

Commission is taken off the gross booking value before tax — so for a UK operator selling a £100 ticket through Viator at the standard 20% rate, Viator keeps £20 and you net £80 before VAT, payment fees and any “boost” uplift.

Sources: Each platform’s published “list with us” / supplier pages, plus reporting in Skift, Arival and PhocusWire. Rates change; always confirm with your account manager before relying on these for pricing decisions.

The hidden costs that don’t show up in the rate card

The headline percentage is the easy bit. Three things make the real number worse.

1. Boost / promoted listings

Both Viator and GetYourGuide operate optional “promotion” or “boost” programmes that increase your search visibility in exchange for a higher commission tier — typically 25% or 30%. In practice these are very hard to opt out of in competitive markets, because non-boosted listings get pushed below the fold.

2. The discounting expectation

OTAs run year-round promotional campaigns. Suppliers are usually expected to participate — sometimes contractually, often just by competitive pressure. A 15% promotional discount applied to a 25% commission rate means you’re netting 60p of every £1 of headline price.

3. Customer ownership

The commission is the cash cost. The strategic cost is that the customer belongs to the platform. You don’t get the email address, the marketing consent or — in most cases — the ability to ask for a review on your own platform. Every booking is a one-shot transaction with no follow-up.

A worked example

Take a small day-tour operator selling 1,000 tickets a year at £100:

Channel mix	Net revenue (after commission)
100% Viator at 20%	£80,000
100% Viator at 25% (boost)	£75,000
50/50 Viator (25%) and direct	£87,500
100% direct	£100,000

Even shifting half your volume from boosted Viator to your own website is worth £12,500 a year to that operator. That’s enough to fund a serious website investment several times over.

What it costs to build a direct channel

A meaningful direct-booking site for a tour operator is not a £30/month Squarespace template. The minimum viable stack is:

• A fast, SEO-optimised site built on a CMS the operator can update themselves
• A booking engine that can handle availability, deposits and cancellations
• Payment processing (Stripe or similar — typically 1.5% + 20p per UK card)
• Managed hosting with backups and uptime monitoring
• Ongoing local SEO work

Realistic monthly running cost for a small UK operator: £250–£500 all-in, depending on whether SEO is included.

For the operator above, that’s £3,000–£6,000 a year. Against £12,500 of recovered commission, the payback is under six months.

OTAs aren’t the enemy

A well-run tour business uses OTAs deliberately — for reach into markets they can’t economically advertise into, and for cold demand at the top of the funnel. The mistake is using them as the only channel, because then the platform owns the relationship and dictates the terms.

The goal isn’t zero OTA bookings. It’s a healthy mix where direct bookings cover your fixed costs and the OTA channel becomes pure incremental margin.

Where to start

If you’ve never had your own site audited against direct-booking conversion best practices, our free website audit is the cheapest first step. We look at speed, SEO, the booking flow and the conversion fundamentals, and you get the report whether or not you work with us.

If you’d rather just talk it through, drop us a message.