OTA Operational Headaches: Waivers, Bookings & Communication

By now you know the marketing upside and the financial costs of OTAs. But there’s a third category that nobody talks about enough: the day-to-day operational friction of actually running tours through these platforms.

These are the things that don’t show up in any OTA’s sales pitch, but they’ll eat hours of your time every week if you’re not ready for them.

The Waiver Problem

Every adventure business needs liability waivers. Kayaking, surfing, hiking, climbing — if there’s risk involved, you need a signed waiver before anyone gets in the water or on the trail.

Here’s the problem: OTAs don’t handle waivers. At all. The customer books through Viator, shows up at your dock, and you have to somehow get them to sign a waiver before the tour starts. Some solutions we’ve tried:

  • Email waivers in advance: This requires getting the customer’s email from the OTA, which some platforms make difficult. GetYourGuide in particular limits pre-tour communication.
  • Digital waivers on-site: Works, but adds 5-10 minutes to check-in. When you have a group of 8 all arriving at once, that’s a bottleneck.
  • Paper waivers: Old school but reliable. Except now you’re managing paper files for every OTA booking separately from your direct bookings.

We ended up using a digital waiver system that sends an automatic email the day before the tour. It works about 70% of the time — the rest sign on-site on a tablet. Not perfect, but manageable.

Booking System Integration Nightmares

If you use any booking software (FareHarbor, Peek, Rezdy, Checkfront), getting it to sync with OTAs is critical — and often painful. The integration is supposed to prevent double bookings and keep your availability accurate across platforms.

In theory, a customer books on Viator, it syncs to your booking system, and the seat is removed from availability everywhere. In practice? We’ve seen sync delays of 15-30 minutes. On a busy Saturday, that’s long enough for two customers to book the last two spots on the same tour through different platforms — leaving you overbooked.

The fix is to always hold back a few spots as a buffer. If your tour takes 8 people, only list 6 on OTAs. It means slightly lower OTA revenue, but it prevents the nightmare of turning customers away at the dock.

Customer Communication Limits

This is the one that frustrates us the most. OTAs want to own the customer relationship. That means your ability to communicate with bookers is severely limited:

  • Viator: You can message customers through their platform, but you can’t easily share your own email or phone number in pre-tour communications.
  • GetYourGuide: Communication is very restricted. You often can’t reach the customer until very close to the tour date.
  • Airbnb Experiences: Actually the best here — the messaging system is more open and customers tend to be more engaged.

For adventure businesses, this is a real problem. You often need to communicate meeting points, what to wear, fitness requirements, and weather-related changes. When you can’t easily reach your customers, you end up with people showing up in flip-flops for a hiking tour.

The Review Double Standard

OTA reviews can make or break your listing. But here’s what’s frustrating: customers who have a great time often forget to leave a review on the OTA platform (they might review you on Google instead). Meanwhile, the one customer who was upset about weather — something completely outside your control — leaves a 1-star review on Viator that tanks your rating.

And with GetYourGuide, reviews sometimes come in languages you don’t speak. We’ve had to use Google Translate to figure out what a German reviewer was unhappy about.

Build a system for requesting OTA-specific reviews from happy customers. A quick “If you enjoyed today, we’d really appreciate a review on Viator” goes a long way.

OK, enough about the challenges. In Part 5, we’ll help you figure out which OTA to start with based on your specific situation.

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