Part 3: The Real Challenges Nobody Warns You About: OTAs and Adventure Businesses

If you are coming here after reading Part 1 and Part 2, I want to make something clear. I’m not here to bash online travel agencies. Viator, GetYourGuide, and Airbnb Experiences have brought us customers we never would have reached otherwise. But after running SURFIT USA for over 13 years and talking to dozens of other adventure business owners, I wish someone had given me the real talk about what to expect operationally – and how to handle it.

These platforms can absolutely work for adventure businesses, but they come with challenges that don’t seem to get mentioned at the outset.

Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way and how we have structured our business to make things work better for us.

OTA Payment Schedules: Managing Cash Flow Challenges

The Challenge: Every OTA has its own payment schedule and paperwork style that can wreak havoc on cash flow.

– Airbnb Experiences: Pays the day after the activity has occurred.
– Viator: Weekly payments
– GetYourGuide: Monthly payments (tough for cash flow)

What Has Worked For Us:
– Set up separate tracking for each platform in your accounting system
– Build a cash flow buffer to handle GetYourGuide’s monthly delays
– Create a simple spreadsheet to reconcile payments against bookings weekly
– Factor these payment delays into your pricing strategy

Booking System Integration Issues with OTAs

The Challenge: Each OTA sends booking data differently to platforms like Fareharbor, creating messy manifests with incomplete information, timing delays, and formatting inconsistencies.

What Has Worked For Us:
– Build a daily routine to cross-check bookings across platforms
– Create a simple checklist for incomplete bookings (missing phone numbers, partial names)
– Use your booking system’s notes feature to track which platform each booking came from
– Don’t rely solely on automated integration – always have a backup verification process

Legal Waiver Challenges When Using OTAs

The Challenge: OTA emails can’t include your specific waiver links, leaving you scrambling to get waivers signed.

What Has Worked For Us:
– Use your booking system (like Fareharbor) to send follow-up texts with waiver links. I am creating a video on exactly how to automate this. Stand by for that!
– Always have paper waivers as backup for on-site signing
– Create a simple check-in process that prioritizes waiver completion
– Consider building an automation that can help with this
– Consider this in your arrival time recommendations (build in extra time for paperwork)

Customer Communication Limits on OTA Platforms

The Challenge: Some platforms (like Viator) don’t provide customer email addresses, cutting you off from direct communication.

What Has Worked For Us:
– Use text messaging strategically for essential trip information. (I am working on a video series to teach you how to do this. Sign up for the newsletter so you know when it completed!)
– Capture emails through your waiver process when possible
– Create detailed, clear information in your OTA listings to reduce the need for back-and-forth
– Build relationships through exceptional on-site service since pre-trip communication is limited

OTA Cancellation Policies: Impact on Adventure Businesses

The Challenge: Generous OTA cancellation policies can lead to last-minute cancellations that hurt businesses with significant prep requirements.

What Has Worked For Us:
– Factor potential cancellations into pricing
– Overbook slightly if your business model allows it
– Use weather-dependent language in your listings to set expectations
– For high-prep activities (like overnight trips and trips with lots of gear), consider whether OTAs are worth the cancellation risk.

Key Takeaways for Adventure Business Owners

The bottom line? These challenges are manageable when you know they’re coming. We still use OTAs because the customer acquisition benefits outweigh the operational complexity – but only because we’ve built systems to handle these issues. In the next part of this series, we’ll dive into the technical setup process and share the specific workarounds that actually work in the real world…

Are there other challenges that you are facing related to OTA’s? Please let us know. We would love to work together to make things easier.