How to Rank Higher on Viator and GetYourGuide
One of them publishes its ranking factors. What it says about availability surprises most operators.
Most writing about OTA ranking is guesswork dressed up as insight. There is a better starting point available, and hardly anyone uses it: GetYourGuide publishes its ranking guidance in its own supplier help centre, updated as recently as April 2026.
Viator does not publish an equivalent. So this page starts with what one platform states outright, then covers what the other signals, and is explicit about which is which — because the difference between documented and inferred matters when you are deciding where to spend a week's effort.
What GetYourGuide publishes
GetYourGuide's supplier documentation describes an algorithm that weighs traveller preferences, market behaviour and your activity's performance — and notes that the weight of each element can vary. It then names three areas to focus on:
- Activity performance, measured as revenue and conversion rate — bookings relative to page views.
- Availability, on the basis that more bookable dates means more traveller searches your activity can match.
- Customer review score, with recent reviews counting for more than older ones.
Three things, stated by the platform itself. That is a considerably firmer foundation than the ranking folklore that circulates in operator groups, and the second one is where most operators are leaving the most on the table.
What Viator signals
No comparable published document exists for Viator, so anyone stating its ranking factors with confidence is inferring. What can be said is what the platform surfaces and what operators consistently report.
- The Management Center shows a quality score alongside cancellations and performance trends. A platform that displays a metric to you is telling you something about what it measures.
- Review response rate and speed are widely reported by operators as mattering — a reasonable inference given reviews drive conversion, though not documented policy.
- Cancellations appear on that same dashboard, which is consistent with reliability being weighed.
The practical conclusion is reassuring: the levers are broadly the same on both platforms. Conversion, reviews, availability and reliability. You are not running two different optimisation projects — the platforms differ commercially far more than they differ here.
Availability depth: the underrated lever
This is the section worth reading twice, because GetYourGuide is unusually specific and most operators are failing both halves of it.
GetYourGuide asks for long-term availability — your activity bookable at least a year in advance — and last-minute availability, ideally bookable right up until the start time. The logic is simple: every date you are not bookable is a search you cannot appear in.
Read that second requirement again, because it is a platform telling operators their cut-off should be close to zero. A twenty-four hour cut-off does not just lose you late bookings — on a platform that treats last-minute bookability as a ranking input, it costs you visibility on everything else too.
Most operators set a conservative cut-off during setup and never revisit it. Working it back from actual preparation time is a twenty-minute exercise, and on this evidence it is one of the highest-return twenty minutes available to you.
The year-ahead requirement is easier and just as neglected. Calendars that run out three months forward silently remove you from every search beyond that horizon — and nobody tells you it happened.
Conversion, and what actually moves it
GetYourGuide measures performance as revenue and conversion rate, and recommends enriching your page with clear descriptions, strong images and transparent pricing. That makes listing quality a ranking input rather than only a sales one — a listing that converts gets shown more, which produces more bookings, which improves the signal further.
- Titles that describe rather than sell. A traveller scanning twenty results wants to know what this is, where it goes and how long it takes.
- Photographs of the experience, with people in them, taken on the tour rather than sourced from the destination's tourist board.
- Inclusions and exclusions stated plainly. Ambiguity here produces both abandoned bookings and complaints from the ones who proceed.
- An itinerary with real timings, so somebody fitting your tour around a flight can tell whether it works.
- Transparent pricing, named explicitly in GetYourGuide's guidance — surprises at the final step are among the most reliable ways to lose a booking.
Writing descriptions that sell covers the craft. The point specific to ranking is that this work compounds: better copy lifts conversion, and conversion lifts placement.
Reviews, and why recency matters
Review volume and score are described across platforms as the heaviest single factor, and GetYourGuide adds a detail that changes how you should work at it: recent reviews count for more.
Which makes this an operational habit rather than a campaign. A strong rating earned two seasons ago is worth less than a steady flow of current feedback, so the goal is a continuous trickle rather than an annual push.
Both platforms already solicit reviews automatically from people who booked through them, so the work is not building a request — it is making sure that when the request lands, the guest already intends to write something. Getting more reviews on Viator and GetYourGuide covers that properly, including the platform rules on what you may and may not ask.
Reliability and response
The least glamorous lever and the one that undoes the others fastest.
- Cancellations by you. Both platforms surface them, and a cancellation caused by a stale availability count is entirely self-inflicted.
- Instant confirmation. A booking a traveller must wait for converts worse than one confirmed immediately, and conversion is a documented factor on GetYourGuide.
- Review responses, promptly and without argument. Other travellers read your reply to a bad review far more carefully than they read the review.
- Accepting bookings you can deliver. Overselling to appear busy is a short-term gain against a metric both platforms watch.
Overbookings are worth singling out because they hit two factors at once: the cancellation itself, and the review from the guest you turned away.
A 30-day checklist
Ordered by return on effort rather than by difficulty.
- Week 1 — extend your calendar a full year forward. The single cheapest fix on this list, and it takes minutes.
- Week 1 — recalculate your cut-off from real preparation time and shorten it as far as you honestly can.
- Week 1 — turn on instant confirmation wherever your operation genuinely supports it.
- Week 2 — rewrite your titles to say what the thing is, where and how long.
- Week 2 — replace your weakest five photographs with images of guests actually on the tour.
- Week 2 — rewrite inclusions and exclusions so nothing is ambiguous, and check your pricing displays with no surprises.
- Week 3 — start asking every guest for a review in person, the same way for everyone, at the end of every departure.
- Week 3 — respond to every outstanding review, oldest first, and set a rule for responding within a day from now on.
- Week 4 — audit your cancellations for the last season and find out how many were caused by availability errors rather than weather.
- Week 4 — check your quality score and performance trends, then re-check in a month to see which of the above moved them.
Do not expect an immediate jump. These are compounding signals, and the platforms are measuring performance over time rather than reacting to an edit.
Where sync genuinely comes in
To be precise about a claim that gets overstated: no platform ranks you for the software you use. Connecting a channel manager does not improve your placement.
The connection is real but indirect. GetYourGuide asks for deep, long-horizon, last-minute-bookable availability. Offering that across several channels at once is only safe if your availability is accurate everywhere in real time — otherwise a short cut-off and a wide calendar is a recipe for selling the same place twice. The sync does not lift your ranking; it makes the behaviour that does lift your ranking survivable.
That is what Travelity is for: availability held once and shared across the channels you sell through and your own booking widget, with every reservation arriving in one place. Trials run 21 days without a card.
Frequently asked questions
What are the ranking factors on GetYourGuide?
GetYourGuide publishes three areas in its supplier help centre: activity performance measured as revenue and conversion rate, availability depth, and customer review score. It also states that the algorithm weighs traveller preferences and market behaviour, and that the weight of each element can vary.
How do I rank higher on Viator?
Viator does not publish its ranking factors, but the same levers apply as on comparable platforms — reviews, conversion rate, availability and reliability. Its Management Center surfaces a quality score alongside cancellations and performance trends, which is the closest thing to a stated signal of what the platform is measuring.
Does availability affect OTA ranking?
On GetYourGuide, explicitly yes. Its documentation asks that activities be bookable at least a year ahead and ideally right up until the start time, on the basis that more available dates means more traveller searches your activity can match. Thin or short-horizon calendars remove you from results you would otherwise appear in.
Do recent reviews matter more than old ones?
On GetYourGuide, yes — its guidance states that recent reviews count for more toward an activity rating. That makes review collection an ongoing operational habit rather than a one-off push, since a strong score earned two seasons ago carries less weight than a steady flow of current feedback.
Does using a channel manager improve OTA ranking?
Not directly — no platform ranks you for the software you use. The connection is indirect but real: availability depth and last-minute bookability are ranking factors, and offering both safely across several channels requires availability that updates in real time. The sync makes the ranking behaviour possible rather than causing it.
Bottom line
Start with the two availability fixes, because they are documented, cheap and almost universally neglected: extend your calendar a full year forward, and shorten your cut-off toward the start time. GetYourGuide asks for both in writing, and most operators are doing neither.
Then work the compounding pair — listing quality lifting conversion, and a steady flow of recent reviews. Everything else on this page is secondary to those four things, and none of it survives an operator who cancels bookings they should not have accepted.
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