Do you offer guided tours, creative workshops, cooking classes or any other activity? List them on Viator, one of the world's largest activity booking platforms. Viator will help you reach a new audience and fill your remaining spots. How do you go about selling on Viator? Follow the guide!
What you need to know about Viator
Viator was founded in 1995 in Sydney by Rod Cuthbert. A true pioneer of the Web! Online travel sales were only just beginning, and the Viator of those days obviously bore no resemblance to the site it is today.Viator was the very first website to offer activity sales, whether museum entrance tickets, day trips or guided tours. The site grew very quickly, offering a wide range of activities all around the world.
In the 2010s, the site capitalised on the smartphone boom and the rise of online travel agencies — enough to catch the eye of a major internet player... In 2014, Viator was acquired by Tripadvisor for approximately $200 million. At the time, the site listed more than 20,000 activities across over 1,500 destinations.
Backed by Tripadvisor, Viator accelerated its growth and maintained its place among the world's largest online agencies. Viator now offers more than 140,000 activities across over 2,500 destinations, and boasts more than 455 million unique visitors per month. An audience that is just waiting to discover your activities and guided tours!
How do you list your activities on Viator?
Since its founding in 1995, Viator has always been proactive in attracting activity providers. The Tripadvisor acquisition further reinforced this approach. Tripadvisor's goal is to gather reviews on every hotel as well as every activity on offer around the world — and, to monetise the platform, Tripadvisor offers the ability to book them directly. Viator thus acts as Tripadvisor's online booking agency. Activities and tours listed on Viator are automatically featured on Tripadvisor. All the more reason to join Viator!To sell your activities and tours on Viator, you first need to register on the platform. Head to the dedicated supplier registration section. You'll see that Viator already has more than 65,000 suppliers worldwide — and the site has no intention of stopping there!
Fill in the registration form, describing your activities and the details of your offers. Be as precise as possible and work through it step by step. The Viator team will approve your registration quickly, so you'll be able to start selling your first activities on Viator very soon. One important note: you will need to monitor your availability on a daily basis to ensure that the availability shown on Viator is accurate. If you also sell your activities through your own website and other platforms, you will need to adjust available capacity and pricing every day. This is obviously very time-consuming, but essential. Fortunately, Explorates has a solution for you!
Our booking system also includes a Channel Management feature that lets you manage availability and pricing on Viator from a single, centralised place. In other words, you won't need to log into the Viator supplier portal, because everything happens automatically through Explorates. Here's a concrete example: if you sell 4 places for a guided tour on 20 August through your website, those 4 places will be immediately deducted from the total available for that date on your site and on Viator. Equally, if you cancel 2 places, those 2 places will go back on sale on your site and on Viator. A real time-saver when it comes to tedious manual management!
How much does it cost to sell on Viator?
The Viator platform generates revenue in two ways: a fixed fee and a commission. You will first need to pay a listing fee of $29 (or the equivalent in your local currency) for each activity or experience you wish to sell on Viator. This listing fee is charged solely for putting the offer up for sale. It is a one-time payment and is therefore not a subscription.Viator will then charge a commission of 20 to 30% on each sale. The commission rate depends on the number of sales made each year: the more you sell, the lower the commission.
Do you have questions? Don't hesitate to contact the Viator team, available 24/7. Support is also available in French, via chat, email or phone. And if you have questions about setting up Explorates and how it will help you manage your offers on Viator, fill in our contact form.