What is an OTA? Online travel agencies explained for outdoor operators
If you run a rafting company, fishing charter, or kayak rental and a traveler books your $89 half-day trip through Viator, you just paid roughly $18 for that single booking. Do that 500 times a season and you’ve handed over $9,000 to a platform that did little more than list your trip on a search result page.
That platform is an OTA. Understanding what OTAs are, how they work, and when they help or hurt your business is one of the most consequential decisions an outdoor operator can make.
What OTA actually means
OTA stands for online travel agency. It’s a website or app that sells travel experiences from multiple providers in one place. Travelers search, compare, and book without ever visiting your website.
For hotels, the big names are Booking.com and Expedia. For outdoor recreation operators, the OTAs that matter are different. Viator (owned by Tripadvisor) lists over 300,000 experiences across 2,500 destinations. GetYourGuide has 140,000-plus tours in more than 10,000 cities. Airbnb Experiences, Klook, and Headout round out the field, each with its own geographic strength.
The model is the same across all of them: you list your trip, a traveler books it, and the OTA takes a commission before sending you what’s left.
How OTA commissions work for outdoor operators
Commission rates vary by platform, but they cluster in a tight and expensive range.
Viator charges 20-25% per booking. GetYourGuide takes 20-30%, depending on your location and activity type. Airbnb Experiences sits at a flat 20%. Expedia’s range is 15-30%, usually negotiable based on volume. Klook charges 15-25%, mostly relevant if you attract Asia-Pacific travelers.
Compare that to what you’d pay processing a direct booking through your own website. Platforms like FareHarbor, Peek, or Rezdy charge between 1% and 8%. On that same $89 rafting trip, a direct booking costs you roughly $2.67 through FareHarbor. Through Viator, it costs $17.80. The gap is $15.13 per booking, and it adds up fast.
We’ve watched operators lose thousands per season to commissions they didn’t fully understand when they first signed up.
The OTA market is growing whether you like it or not
The experiences sector hit $271 billion globally in 2025, according to Arival and Phocuswright research. It’s projected to reach $342 billion by 2029. OTAs are grabbing a growing slice of that pie. In 2023, OTAs accounted for 28% of experience bookings. By 2025, that jumped to 37%.
Meanwhile, direct website bookings for operators dropped from 29% to 25% in a single year.
This doesn’t mean you should panic. It means OTAs aren’t going away, and pretending they don’t exist isn’t a strategy. The outdoor recreation sector is still significantly under-digitized – only 33% of bookings happen online, compared to 64% for the travel industry overall. That gap is closing, and OTAs are one of the forces closing it.
When listing on an OTA makes sense
OTAs work best as a visibility tool, not your primary revenue channel. They make sense when you’re a newer operator with no search rankings and few reviews. A Viator listing puts you in front of millions of travelers immediately, with zero upfront cost.
They also make sense for filling shoulder-season gaps. If your August trips are already at capacity from repeat customers and word-of-mouth, you probably don’t need Viator’s help for August. But if your October calendar looks empty, an OTA listing can move those unsold seats.
Operators in heavy tourist destinations benefit too. A snorkeling tour in Maui or a zip-line operation near Gatlinburg competes with dozens of similar options. OTAs aggregate that competition and give travelers a way to compare, which can work in your favor if your reviews are strong and your pricing is competitive.
When OTAs cost more than they’re worth
The trouble starts when OTA bookings become your majority channel. If 60% or more of your revenue flows through Viator or GetYourGuide, you’ve built your business on rented ground. Commission rates can change. Algorithms can shift your listing down the page. A competing operator can undercut your price by $5 and steal your placement.
You also lose the customer relationship. When someone books through an OTA, the OTA owns that customer’s email and booking data. You can’t send a follow-up email six months later when next season opens. You can’t build a referral program. You can’t ask them to rebook directly. Every season, you’re starting from scratch.
Most outdoor operators who’ve been in the game for a few years know this instinctively. The ones who thrive long-term treat OTAs as a supplement to their own direct booking strategy, not a replacement for it.
The billboard effect and how to use it
There’s a concept called the billboard effect that changes how you should think about OTAs. It works like this: a traveler finds your kayak tour on GetYourGuide. Instead of booking there, they Google your company name, land on your website, and book directly. You got the visibility from the OTA without paying the commission.
Research from the hotel industry first documented this pattern, but it applies to outdoor operators too. The key is making sure your own website is ready to capture that traffic. If someone Googles your business name after seeing you on Viator and finds a slow website with no online booking option, you’ve wasted the billboard effect entirely.
This is where your own SEO and website become critical. A listing on Viator gets you seen. A well-built website with its own search rankings converts that awareness into commission-free bookings.
Building an OTA strategy that doesn’t eat your margins
Start by calculating your actual OTA cost. Take last season’s OTA bookings, multiply by the commission rate, and look at the total. If you ran the OTA commission calculator and the number doesn’t bother you, your volume is probably low enough that OTAs are still a net positive.
If the number stings, here’s a practical approach. Keep your OTA listings active but invest in reducing your dependence over time. Build an email list from every guest interaction. Offer a small incentive for direct rebooking. Optimize your website for the searches travelers actually make – things like “rafting near Asheville” or “fishing charters Key West” – so you show up in Google alongside the OTA listings, not just inside them.
One safari operator cut OTA dependence from 65% of bookings to 38% in two years. Their tactics were specific: requiring email capture before sharing detailed itineraries, offering 5% off for direct bookings paid upfront, and creating exclusive add-on experiences only available through their own site.
You can do the same. The goal isn’t to abandon OTAs. It’s to make sure they work for you on your terms, bringing in new customers while you build the direct channel that keeps them coming back without the 20% tax.
