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 more of your available 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 booking was only just getting started, and the Viator of those days obviously had little in common with the site it is today.Viator was the very first website to offer activity bookings, from museum entrance tickets to day trips and guided tours. The site grew very quickly, offering a wide range of activities all around the world.
In the 2010s, it rode the smartphone boom and the rise of online travel agencies, enough to attract the attention of a major internet player... In 2014, Viator was acquired by Tripadvisor for approximately $200 million. The site was then offering more than 20,000 activities across more than 1,500 destinations.
Backed by Tripadvisor, Viator accelerated its growth and maintained its position among the world's largest online travel agencies. Viator now offers more than 140,000 activities across more than 2,500 destinations, and claims over 455 million unique visitors per month. An audience 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 reinforced this approach even further. Tripadvisor's goal is to gather reviews on every hotel, but also on every activity available around the world, and, in turn, to generate revenue by making them all bookable. Viator effectively acts as Tripadvisor's online booking agency. Activities and tours listed on Viator are naturally also 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 provider sign-up section. You'll see that Viator already has more than 65,000 providers worldwide, and the site has no intention of stopping there!
Fill in the registration form, describing your activities and the details of your offerings. Be as precise as possible and work through it step by step. Viator's team will approve your registration quickly, so you'll be able to start selling your first activities on Viator very soon. A word of caution, however: you will need to keep track of your availability day by day, to ensure that the slots shown on Viator are accurate. If you also sell your activities through your own website and on other platforms, you will need to adjust available capacity and pricing on a daily basis, an update process that is obviously very time-consuming but essential. Fortunately, Explorates has the solution!
Our booking system also includes a Channel Management feature that lets you manage the availability and pricing shown on Viator from a single, centralized place. In other words, you won't need to log into the Viator provider portal, because everything is handled automatically through Explorates. Here's a concrete example: if you sell 4 spots for a guided tour on August 20 via your own website, those 4 spots are immediately deducted from the total available that day on your site and on Viator. Equally, if you cancel 2 spots, those 2 spots go back on sale on your site and on Viator. A great way to save a lot of time on unnecessary admin!
How much does it cost to sell on Viator?
Viator charges 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 to put your offering on sale. It is a one-off 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 you make each year: the more you sell, the lower the commission.
Have questions? Don't hesitate to contact the Viator team, available 24/7 by chat, email or phone. And if you have questions about setting up Explorates and how it can help you manage your listings on Viator, use our contact form.