Which OTA Should You Start With?

You’ve read about the marketing power, the real costs, and the operational headaches. Now the practical question: which OTA should you actually sign up for first?

The answer depends on your specific situation. After years of running tours on all three major platforms, here’s our honest recommendation.

Start With Airbnb Experiences If…

You’re brand new to OTAs and want to test the waters with the lowest risk
Cash flow is tight — Airbnb pays the day after the experience, which is unbeatable
Your tours appeal to leisure travelers and locals — Airbnb’s audience skews casual and experience-curious
You want the simplest setup — the listing process and management dashboard are the most straightforward

Airbnb Experiences is the training wheels of OTAs, and we mean that as a compliment. The communication tools are better, the payment is faster, and the customers tend to be more flexible and engaged. It’s the lowest-stress way to learn how OTAs work before scaling to bigger platforms.

Start With Viator If…

You need international reach now — Viator’s TripAdvisor connection puts you in front of global travelers immediately
Cruise ship traffic matters to you — Viator is the dominant platform for cruise excursion bookings
You can handle the weekly payment cycle — it’s not instant, but it’s predictable
You’re willing to invest time in optimization — Viator rewards listings with great photos, detailed descriptions, and strong reviews

Viator is where the volume is. If your adventure business is in a major tourist destination, this is probably where you’ll eventually get the most OTA bookings. But it’s also more competitive and more complex to manage than Airbnb Experiences.

Save GetYourGuide for Later

We love GetYourGuide for the European travelers it brings in, but we wouldn’t recommend starting here. The monthly payment cycle is brutal when you’re figuring things out. The booking system requirements are more complex. And you’ll get reviews in languages you probably don’t speak — which makes it harder to respond thoughtfully and maintain your rating.

Add GetYourGuide once you’ve got the operational kinks worked out on Airbnb or Viator. By then you’ll have systems for waivers, communication, and inventory management that can absorb another platform.

What About Booking.com?

Booking.com has been expanding into experiences, and we’ve been watching closely. We haven’t listed there yet, but their hotel customer base is massive. If they figure out the experiences side, it could be a serious player. We’ll update this series when we have hands-on experience to share.

Our Recommendation

For most adventure businesses just getting started with OTAs, we recommend this order:

Airbnb Experiences — learn the ropes, get fast payments, build confidence
Viator — scale up your reach once your operations are dialed in
GetYourGuide — add the European market when you’re ready for the complexity

Don’t try to launch on all three simultaneously. Each platform has its own quirks, and you need time to learn them without burning out your team or delivering a bad customer experience.

Final post: How to set up your first OTA without the expensive mistakes — including the $10,000 integration disaster we learned from.