The short version
On a £100 booking, a tour and activity supplier keeps roughly £75 on Viator, £70 on GetYourGuide at the default new-supplier rate, £77.50 on Klook, £80 on Airbnb Experiences, and £98.30 selling direct on a UK card. The spread between the cheapest and most expensive channel is close to £28 per booking, or 28% of gross.
But the headline rate is the wrong number to compare, for three reasons. None of the major marketplaces publish their supplier rates, so you cannot verify what you are being charged against what anyone else pays. Payout terms differ by weeks, and one platform charges you two percentage points of gross permanently in exchange for being paid faster. And on Viator, commission above the base rate is not a distribution fee at all — it is an advertising bid, in Viator's own words.
Here is the arithmetic, with every figure sourced.
What does each channel actually cost per booking?
All figures are per £100 of gross booking value, before tax.
| Channel | Headline supplier rate | Other fees | You keep on £100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| GetYourGuide | 25–30%; 30% is the default for new suppliers (OTA Playbook) | 32% if you opt into bi-weekly payouts | £70.00 (£68.00 bi-weekly) |
| Viator | Not published. Industry-reported 20–30%, typically ~25% (Kong) | One-off USD $29 listing fee per experience (Kong, citing supplier.viator.com) | £75.00 |
| Tripadvisor Experiences | Sold through Viator, so the same commercial terms apply | As Viator | £75.00 |
| Klook | 15–35%, typically 20–25% in APAC, negotiated individually (Kong) | None reported | £77.50 at 22.5% |
| Airbnb Experiences | 20% service fee (Airbnb Help Centre) | None | £80.00 |
| Direct — own site, UK card | 1.5% + 20p (Stripe) | Fixed monthly platform fee | £98.30 |
| Direct — via Bókun START | Bókun 1.5% (Bókun) plus card fee | $49/month (Bókun) | £96.80 |
Two things stand out. Airbnb Experiences, at a published 20%, is now cheaper than GetYourGuide's default rate for a new supplier — and it tells you the number up front. And the direct channel's variable cost is not 5% or 10%; it is under 2%. The entire gap between £98.30 and £70.00 is what you are paying for demand.
Why is the headline rate the wrong number to compare?
Because most of these rates are not published. Viator does not disclose supplier commission; its sign-up page says only that rates "vary by location" (Kong, citing supplier.viator.com). Klook negotiates individually. GetYourGuide's supplier terms state that the commission is "a percentage of the Retail Price for a Booking, as specified in the Supplier Account" — a figure visible only once you are inside (GetYourGuide Supplier Terms). You are comparing your confidential rate against industry-reported ranges, which is not a comparison.
Because payout lag is a real cost. Viator settles monthly, roughly 21 business days after the close of the travel month (OTA Playbook) — a tour delivered in early March can be paid at the end of April. GetYourGuide pays on the fifth business day of the following month by default. Money you have earned but cannot use is working capital you are financing for someone else.
Because speed is explicitly priced. GetYourGuide offers bi-weekly payouts, and the switch adds two percentage points to your commission rate permanently, on all future bookings — 30% becomes 32% (OTA Playbook). At £150,000 of annual channel revenue, being paid twice a month rather than once costs £3,000 a year, for ever.
What does the commission above the base rate actually buy?
This is the part suppliers most often misread, and Viator answers it plainly on its own Accelerate page.
By increasing your product's commission, you'll get in front of more travelers with ad placements, further increasing your chances of bookings.
The higher you go the more travelers are likely to see your product. Even a 1% increase on the standard minimum commission rate can increase your exposure.
To get ad impressions, your product's commission rate must be higher than the Viator Accelerate minimum commission rate for your market.
All commission percentages will increase when you apply new commission rates, and the net rate per booking will decrease.
Source: Viator Accelerate.
Read that carefully. Anything you pay above the base rate is not buying distribution — it is buying ad impressions on Viator's own results pages. Viator states the mechanism, the trade-off, and the effect on your net rate without ambiguity.
That matters because of where those impressions render. A higher Accelerate bid moves you up inside Viator's search results. It does nothing anywhere else. When a traveller asks an AI assistant for a recommendation rather than browsing a marketplace, the page your bid bought is never drawn, and the bid buys nothing at all. We covered the structural argument, and the randomised research on how AI agents treat paid placement, in why commission models break when AI does the recommending.
At what volume does direct become cheaper than commission?
Commission scales with revenue. A fixed subscription does not. So the comparison is a break-even, not a rate.
Selling direct at £100 average order value costs about £1.70 in card fees, leaving roughly £23 to £28 per booking of commission avoided depending on the channel you are comparing against. A flat monthly platform fee is covered once you clear that many bookings.
At Tixxly's Pro tier of $199 a month, the break-even at £100 average order value against a 25% commission is around six bookings a month, at prevailing exchange rates. At the Growth tier of $99, it is roughly three. Every booking above that is margin you keep rather than commission you pay.
Run it on your own numbers before you believe it. If your average order value is £40 the break-even is materially higher; if you sell £400 multi-day trips, one booking a month covers the subscription.
Should you leave the OTAs, then?
No, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
Marketplace share of tours and activities bookings rose from 33% to 37% between 2024 and 2025, while direct bookings on suppliers' own websites fell from 29% to 25% — from Arival's Global Operator Landscape, based on 5,664 qualified supplier responses (Rise Strategic Consulting, citing PhocusWire). Dependence on the commission channel is rising, not falling. The marketplaces reach travellers you cannot reach alone, and that reach is worth paying for.
The argument is about mix, not exit. A supplier taking 100% of bookings through marketplaces at 25% has no pricing power, no customer relationship, and no channel whose cost falls as volume grows. A supplier taking 60% through marketplaces and 40% direct has all three. The direct share is also the only one where you own the data, set the cancellation terms, and can be found by an AI assistant on your own domain rather than on a marketplace's.
How to work out your real number
- Pull twelve months of settlement statements from each marketplace and total the commission actually deducted. Use that, not your headline rate.
- Add every per-product listing fee, including the $29 Viator charges on each new experience submitted.
- Check whether you are opted into Viator Accelerate above the market minimum, or GetYourGuide's bi-weekly payout uplift. Both raise your effective rate and neither is loud about it.
- Calculate your average payout lag in days. Multiply the average balance outstanding by your cost of borrowing. That is a real annual cost.
- Total the direct-channel alternative honestly: card processing, booking system fee, any subscription, plus the marketing you would need to generate that demand yourself.
- Divide your fixed monthly cost by the commission avoided per booking. That is your break-even in bookings per month.
- Set a target direct share for the next twelve months and measure it monthly. Without a number it will not move.
Where Tixxly fits
Tixxly charges zero commission. You pay a flat monthly fee — Free, Growth at $99, Pro at $199, or Infrastructure at $999 — and keep 100% of booking revenue less card processing. Checkout is embedded via Stripe Connect and you remain the Merchant of Record, so the money is yours from the moment it settles and the customer relationship is yours too.
Tixxly is not a marketplace and does not compete with your OTA listings. It is the infrastructure that makes your products readable to AI assistants and bookable on your own domain, so the direct share of your mix has somewhere to grow. Your storefront carries structured product data, availability and a Trust Score built from reputation sentiment, cancellation rate, booking success rate and response speed — the reliability signals an assistant needs before it will recommend you.
Connect once. Reach everywhere.