Should Tour Operators Be on OTAs? What Marketing Science Actually Says

A new walking tour operator recently asked us a question we hear constantly: "Should I delay listing on OTAs like Viator and GetYourGuide while I build direct bookings and establish my brand?" It is a fair question, and the instinct behind it is a responsible one. Protect your margins, own your customer, build the brand first. Plenty of smart, experienced marketers reach the same conclusion. But the research on how brands actually grow points the other way, and it is worth understanding why before leaving the biggest marketplaces in the category off your launch plan.

TL;DR

• OTAs captured 37% of global tour and activity bookings in 2025, up from 33% in 2024, while operator website bookings declined. Skipping OTAs means skipping the fastest growing shelf in your category.
• Byron Sharp's research in How Brands Grow shows that brands grow through penetration, meaning reaching more buyers, rather than through loyalty. OTAs are the widest reach mechanism available to a tour operator.
• Small brands suffer from double jeopardy: fewer buyers who are also slightly less loyal. The fix is availability, and delaying OTAs makes the problem worse.
• OTA commissions of 20 to 30% are paid only when a tour sells. Paid search charges you for clicks whether anyone books or not, which makes OTAs the lower risk channel for a new operator.
• Every OTA booking generates review velocity, and reviews build the mental availability that eventually drives direct bookings.
• The goal is to use OTAs as a performance channel while building direct booking infrastructure in parallel, so distribution works for you rather than owning you.

The Instinct to Delay OTAs (and Why It Feels Right)

The "brand first, OTAs later" logic usually rests on three beliefs. OTAs take a 20 to 30% commission. OTAs bid on your keywords and compete with you in search. And OTA customers belong to the platform rather than to you. All three are true. None of them lead to the conclusion that a new operator should stay off the platforms.

There is another factor worth weighing, though: brand visibility, or what marketing researchers call mental availability. Mental availability is the likelihood that your brand comes to mind, or gets noticed, when a buyer is in a buying situation. Someone standing on the boardwalk asking "what should we do tomorrow" can only choose from the options they think of or encounter in that moment.

Visibility is built through repeated exposure across the places buyers already look, which is why established operators seem to get bookings without trying: they have spent years accumulating listings, reviews, search presence, and word of mouth that put them inside the consideration set by default. A brand-new tour starts with very little of it. Few people in your destination are searching for your company by name yet, your website is still earning domain authority, and a handful of early reviews sits next to competitors with hundreds or thousands.

When one operator we spoke with ran a $500 Google Ads test on his newly launched tour, he got a few hundred visitors and mostly one and two ticket bookings. He concluded paid search was not viable for his niche, and at his price point he may be right. When the average order is one or two tickets on a modestly priced tour, there is often not enough margin between the click cost and the revenue to make CPC economics work, even with a well-tuned landing page. That constraint points somewhere useful, though. If paying for traffic that might convert does not pencil out, the channels that make the most sense are the ones where you pay only when a booking happens, and where buyers are already shopping.

What How Brands Grow Actually Says

Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, published How Brands Grow in 2010 as a summary of decades of empirical research on how buyers actually behave. Two of its findings apply directly to the OTA question.

Growth Comes From Penetration, Not Loyalty

Sharp's data across categories shows that big brands and small brands have similar repeat purchase rates. What separates them is the number of buyers. Brands grow by acquiring more customers, most of whom are light, infrequent buyers, rather than by squeezing more purchases out of a loyal core. Source: Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, Oxford University Press.

Now apply that to tours. Most of your buyers are visitors who come to your city once, book one tour, and may not return for years, if ever. Locals are a real segment too, booking for visiting friends and family, date nights, gifts, and special occasions, and they are worth cultivating because they can repeat and refer. Even so, the category skews heavily toward light, infrequent buyers. A strategy built primarily on loyalty, brand affinity, and repeat direct bookings leans on a behavior most tour buyers never get the chance to exhibit. Penetration carries most of the weight, and penetration is a function of how many potential buyers can find you at the moment they are deciding what to do.

Double Jeopardy: Small Brands Get Hit Twice

Sharp's double jeopardy law shows that small brands suffer twice. They have fewer buyers, and those buyers are slightly less loyal. The prescription is straightforward: fix the size problem through reach and availability, because loyalty follows penetration rather than the other way around. A new tour operator who avoids the largest marketplaces in the category is voluntarily choosing the small-brand side of the double jeopardy curve and then trying to out-loyalty their way off of it. The research says that does not work.

OTAs Are Physical Availability, and Physical Availability Is Shelf Space

Sharp's framework says brands grow on two assets: mental availability, meaning being thought of in buying situations, and physical availability, meaning being easy to find and easy to buy wherever buyers shop. In consumer goods, physical availability means supermarket shelf space. In tours, it means Viator, GetYourGuide, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Airbnb Experiences, and Google Things to do. It also means Google Search and Google Maps, where your Business Profile and reviews determine whether you show up for "things to do near me," and social media, where travelers increasingly discover and shortlist experiences before they ever hit a search bar. AI assistants and answer engines are an emerging layer on top of all of it, recommending tours based on the listings, reviews, and content already published about you across these platforms.

The shelf keeps getting bigger. According to Arival's Global Operator Landscape research, OTAs captured 37% of tour and activity bookings in 2025, up from 33% in 2024 and 24% in 2019, while operator website bookings fell from 29% to 25% over the same period. Source: Arival, Global Operator Landscape, 4th Edition. A packaged goods brand that refused placement in a channel selling more than a third of the category would be making an obvious mistake.

Refusing the shelf does not stop the shelf from existing. Your competitors are on it, the traveler comparing options at 9pm in their hotel room is on it, and your absence simply hands that comparison to someone else.

Reviews: How OTA Sales Build Mental Availability

The delay-OTAs argument treats platform sales and brand building as competing goals. In practice, OTA sales are one of the fastest brand-building mechanisms a small operator has, because every booking can generate a review.

Reviews do the work that advertising does for bigger brands. They create trust for buyers who have never heard of you, they improve your ranking inside the OTA marketplaces, and they compound. An operator with five reviews is functionally invisible next to a competitor with a thousand, no matter how good the product is. Booking platforms accelerate this loop: FareHarbor's TripAdvisor integration, for example, surfaces review prompts at checkout, so distribution and reputation grow together. The operator who waits six months to list has not protected the brand. He has delayed the review engine that makes the brand findable.

The Commission Objection, Answered

A 20 to 30% commission sounds painful until you compare it with the alternatives on a risk basis.

The commission is not a fee on revenue you would have earned anyway. For a new operator, it is the acquisition cost of a customer you had no other efficient way to reach, paid only on success. Compare that with the $500 paid search test that produced a handful of low-ticket bookings. The OTA takes a cut of real revenue. The ad platform takes the money up front and wishes you luck.

How to Use OTAs Without Becoming Dependent on Them

None of this means handing your business to the platforms. Arival's own guidance is to treat OTAs strictly as performance marketing channels that must deliver profitable sales. Here is how that looks in practice:

1. List on the major OTAs early, connected through your booking software so availability syncs automatically and you avoid double bookings.
2. Price with your commission in mind so OTA bookings remain profitable at your capacity levels, and know your break-even before you list.
3. Turn every OTA guest into a direct-channel asset. Deliver a great tour, capture the review, and make your website, referral offer, and gift options visible so the guest's network books direct.
4. Build direct infrastructure in parallel. A clear homepage that states exactly what the tour is, its duration, and its price will convert both direct traffic and the OTA browsers who Google you before booking.
5. Watch the mix. When direct bookings grow, OTAs shrink as a percentage without you cutting them. That is the healthy version of independence.

FAQ

Do OTAs compete with tour operators on their own branded keywords?

Often, yes. OTAs bid aggressively on tour-related terms, sometimes including operator names. For a new operator with no branded search volume, this costs almost nothing, because there is no branded demand to cannibalize yet. It becomes a real consideration later, when brand searches grow, and it is managed with pricing, direct booking incentives, and your own branded campaigns.

What commission do OTAs charge tour operators?

Typically 20 to 30%, varying by platform, product type, and volume. The commission is charged only on completed bookings.

Which OTAs should a small tour operator list on first?

Start with the platforms your booking software connects to natively and where your category has proven demand: Viator, GetYourGuide, and TripAdvisor for most walking and cultural tours, plus Airbnb Experiences and Google Things to do. Connectivity matters as much as reach, because manual availability management breaks quickly.

When should an operator start shifting bookings from OTAs to direct?

Immediately, and continuously. Direct and OTA are parallel tracks rather than sequential phases. The mistake is treating direct as a prerequisite for OTAs. The correct model runs both from day one and lets the direct share grow as reviews, content, and search visibility compound.

The Bottom Line

The instinct to delay OTAs until the brand is established gets the causality backwards. Availability builds the brand. Sharp's research shows growth comes from reaching more buyers, small brands cannot loyalty their way to scale, and physical availability is a prerequisite for mental availability rather than a threat to it. In a category where OTAs now sell 37% of everything and where nearly every buyer is a first-time buyer, the platforms are the shelf. Get on the shelf, capture the reviews, keep your direct channel sharp, and let the mix shift toward direct as your brand earns the searches. That is how tour brands grow.

Ready to build a distribution strategy that balances OTA reach with direct booking growth? BeaconPoint works exclusively with tour and activity operators. Visit beaconpointhq.com to get started.