How to Optimise Your OTA Listing: A Practical Guide for Operators

How to optimise your OTA listing comes down to working in the right order. First, check the settings that can switch a listing off or cap its visibility: availability, booking cutoff and cancellations. Then fix the search result card that wins the click. Then fix the product page that wins the booking.

Change one thing at a time, and measure each change before you touch the next.

Your listing looks fine. The photos are decent. You have reviews. So why isn’t it converting?

Most operators answer that question by rewriting the description, because it’s the part they can see. In practice, the description is rarely the problem. The listing either isn’t getting clicked in search results, or it’s getting clicked and then losing the booking on the page, or a setting in the extranet is quietly holding it back. Each of those has a different fix.

This guide gives you the order to work in, the rules Viator and GetYourGuide actually publish, and a simple way to tell whether a change worked. Most listing problems are fixable. Most operators just don’t know where to look.

Key Takeaways

• A listing does two jobs: the search card (title, first photo, price, rating) wins the click, and the product page wins the booking. Find out which one is failing before you edit anything.
• Settings often matter more than copy. GetYourGuide can temporarily remove activities that consistently exceed a 1.0% supplier cancellation rate or a 0.2% no-show rate, measured over 90 days.
• GetYourGuide requires titles to start with the location and to name the category, with no prices, discounts or all-caps text.
• Fewer, better choices convert: GetYourGuide recommends two to four options and seven to 10 or more photos, and reports a 2.7% conversion uplift from better images alone.
• Change one element at a time, date it, and compare three to four weeks before and after against the same period last year.

What OTA Listing Optimisation Actually Means

OTA listing optimisation is the work of making a listing more likely to be clicked, more likely to be booked, and more likely to be shown. Those are three different problems, and they live in three different places.

The search card is what travellers see in a list of results: the title, the first photo, the price, the star rating, the duration and badges like free cancellation. Its only job is to win the click.

The product page is what they see after clicking: the photo gallery, highlights, description, inclusions, meeting point, options and reviews. Its job is to turn a curious visitor into a booking.

The settings layer sits in your extranet, not on the page: availability, booking cutoff, confirmation type, cancellation policy and your operational record. Travellers never see most of it. The platform sees all of it.

Ranking follows conversion. Platforms show the listings they predict will sell, so a listing that converts better tends to be shown more. We explain the mechanics in how OTA ranking algorithms work. This guide is about what to change.

Diagnose Before You Edit: Is It the Click or the Booking?

Before you optimise your OTA listing, look at your numbers. Every major extranet shows some version of three figures: how often your listing appears in results (impressions or views), how often people open it (clicks or page views), and how many book. The labels differ by platform, so check your own dashboard for the exact names. Our guide to what each OTA dashboard actually shows covers GetYourGuide’s and Viator’s supplier analytics.

Read them as a funnel:

• Plenty of impressions, few clicks. The search card is the problem. Travellers see you and choose someone else. Fix the title, first photo and price presentation.
• Plenty of clicks, few bookings. The page is the problem. People are interested, then something puts them off. Fix the gallery, inclusions, options and meeting point.
• Both fine, but falling. Look at settings, review recency and what competitors have changed. Something moved around you.
• Few impressions at all. You’re not being shown. Check your category, availability window and cancellation record first.

Skipping this step is the most expensive mistake in listing work. An operator with a card problem who rewrites the description spends a day on a page most travellers never reach.

How to Optimise Your OTA Listing: The Audit Order

To optimise your OTA listing properly, work through these eight steps in order. The early ones can switch a listing off or cap its visibility, so fix them before polishing copy.

1. Settings that can switch you off: supplier cancellations, no-shows and availability gaps.
2. Availability window and booking cutoff: how far ahead and how late travellers can book.
3. Title: the single line that decides most clicks.
4. First photo, then photos two to four: the card image and the start of the gallery.
5. Price and options: what the card shows, and how many choices the page offers.
6. Highlights, inclusions and short description: the first things read on the page.
7. Full description, itinerary and meeting point: what reduces doubt and no-shows.
8. Reviews: volume, recency and how you reply.

Steps one and two are mostly one-off switches in your extranet, covered in the settings section further down. Check them first. The card and the page take more work, so the next two sections start there.

Fix the Search Card

Titles that work

GetYourGuide publishes clear rules for titles in its activity quality guidelines (last updated July 2025). A title must start with the location: the attraction’s name for entry tickets, or the city for everything else. It must say what the activity is, including the category, such as “Walking Tour” or “Entry Ticket”. It can’t contain prices or discounts, and it can’t be written in all capitals (known acronyms such as NYC aside).

GetYourGuide’s own optimisation advice recommends keeping titles to 60 characters or fewer, and suggests including the experience type, duration and one selling point. Viator’s guidance points the same way: a short title that leads with the destination or attraction, then the type of tour.

A hypothetical example shows the difference. A distillery in Dublin lists its tour as “AMAZING Irish Whiskey Experience – Best Value!!”. It doesn’t start with the location (“Irish” isn’t a place, Dublin is), it doesn’t name a category, and “Best Value!!” is a price claim of the kind GetYourGuide keeps out of titles. It also tells a traveller almost nothing. Rewritten as “Dublin: Distillery Tour with Three-Whiskey Tasting”, it leads with the city, names the category, and gives one concrete reason to click, in 50 characters.

What to leave out of titles: prices, discount claims, strings of keywords, and anything the card already shows, like the star rating. Platforms display those separately, and repeating them wastes the most valuable line on the page.

The first photo

The first photo does more work than any other image because it appears on the card. GetYourGuide’s photo guidance recommends a wider shot that shows the experience itself, and advises against close-up detail shots or posed people in that first slot.

A simple test: could a traveller tell what the experience is from the first photo alone, at thumbnail size on a phone? A close-up of a whiskey glass could be any bar in the world. The copper stills with a small group gathered round them could only be a distillery tour.

Price, duration and badges

The card also shows price, duration and badges such as free cancellation or instant confirmation. You control more of these than you might think. The badges usually come from your settings, not your copy. If a competitor’s card shows free cancellation and instant confirmation and yours doesn’t, that’s a settings fix, covered below.

On price, the card usually shows your lowest option. If your cheapest option is a stripped-back version that few people actually buy, the card may be advertising a price that disappoints travellers when they click through.

Then Fix the Page That Converts

Once the card earns the click, the page has to earn the booking. This is where you improve OTA listing conversion: the gallery, the description, the inclusions and the options.

Photos two to 10

Once someone clicks, the gallery carries the story. GetYourGuide singles out the first four images as the ones doing the heavy lifting, and recommends seven to 10 or more photos in total, with no duplicates. Authentic images beat heavily edited ones, and stock photos that misrepresent the experience are against its rules.

A useful rule of thumb from guest-experience consultant Kelsey Tonner, quoted by Arival: about half your images should show smiling guests and smiling guides. People book an experience, not a location. They want to see themselves in it.

Set your expectations honestly. GetYourGuide reports a 2.7% uplift in booking conversions from improved images alone. That’s not a dramatic jump. On a listing taking 300 bookings a month, it’s eight more, every month, for a one-off piece of work.

OTA product description best practices

Travellers read the top of the page and skim the rest. Structure it that way.

• Short description: two to three sentences that say what the experience is and why it’s worth doing. GetYourGuide recommends this length.
• Highlights: three to five bullet points, each starting with a verb, each a concrete reason to book.
• Full description: the detail for people who want it. Write it as an experience, not a timetable.

Write original text for each platform. GetYourGuide’s guidelines require descriptions to be original, and a description written for one platform’s layout rarely suits another’s anyway. Klook is the clearest case: most of its customers are in Asia-Pacific and many read English as a second language, so see our advice on writing Klook listings for Asia-Pacific travellers. Leave out phone numbers, emails and website links: GetYourGuide bans contact details in free-text fields.

Inclusions, exclusions and the meeting point

This is the least glamorous part of the page and the one that causes the most damage. Unclear inclusions produce bad reviews (“I didn’t know lunch wasn’t included”). Unclear meeting points produce no-shows.

No-shows matter more than most operators realise. GetYourGuide’s performance quality standards set a no-show rate of 0.2% or lower, where a no-show means a full refund issued because the customer says the operator wasn’t at the meeting point. That’s two in every 1,000 bookings, measured on a rolling 90 days.

Hannah’s experience shows how that happens (a hypothetical example). She runs sea kayak trips from a harbour in Cork, and her listing said “meet at the harbour”. The harbour has three slipways.

Over a busy July, 11 groups waited at the wrong one, missed the launch and claimed refunds. Her no-show rate on 1,400 bookings was nearly 0.8%, four times GetYourGuide’s threshold.

Rewriting the meeting point with the slipway name, a photo of the sign and a description of her orange van cut the problem to zero the following month.

Give the meeting point a landmark, directions, a photo if the platform allows it, and a description of what your guide or staff look like.

Options: fewer is better

More options feel like more choice. On an OTA page they usually mean more confusion. GetYourGuide recommends two to four options, and separates options (variations of the core experience, such as a morning or evening slot) from add-ons (extras, such as a souvenir photo).

If your listing has seven options, look at which ones actually sell. Merge or remove the rest. Each option you remove makes the ones that remain easier to compare.

The Settings the Platforms Reward

Settings are where listing optimisation stops being about writing. These are the controls in your extranet that travellers rarely notice and platforms always do.

Availability window. GetYourGuide advises making activities bookable at least a year in advance, and as close to the start time as possible. Gaps in your calendar look, to the platform, like a product that can’t be sold.

Booking cutoff. GetYourGuide caps cutoffs at 10 hours before the start. Viator’s framework goes further. Under the quality levels it introduced in 2020, its “Excellent” level requires either a booking cutoff of four hours or connectivity to your reservation system, along with mobile tickets. Viator has said Excellent listings get more visibility. If you’re managing inventory by hand, a live connection through your booking system is usually what makes shorter cutoffs safe (see our comparison of Bokun vs FareHarbor vs Rezdy).

Confirmation and tickets. Instant confirmation and mobile tickets remove friction for the traveller and earn badges on the card. Manual confirmation makes people wait, and waiting travellers book something else.

Group minimums. A minimum of four for confirmation filters out couples and solo travellers. GetYourGuide requires minimums of five or fewer. Our ranking guide covers why group-size minimums cost you conversions.

Cancellations. This is the setting that can switch a listing off. GetYourGuide expects a supplier cancellation rate of 1.0% or lower, and can temporarily remove activities that consistently miss it. Viator’s published product standards (2022) set a ceiling of 15% supplier-driven cancellations to stay listed, and its standard policy gives travellers a full refund up to 24 hours before. The thresholds for its quality levels are stricter than that and have changed over time, so check your current rating in the Supplier Center.

A former colleague of mine ran evening food tours and couldn’t work out why his listing converted so poorly, even though it was clearly getting traffic. He assumed the content was the problem, so he paid for new photography and had the whole listing rewritten, from the title to the itinerary to the FAQs. The new version looked far better, but bookings barely moved over the following month. It was only when he checked his settings that he found the booking cutoff was still at 48 hours, a leftover from when he first set up the account and bought ingredients days ahead. Most people searching for a food tour were deciding on the day or the night before, and they were landing on his page to find nothing they could book. He cut the cutoff to three hours, and same-day bookings started coming through that week. He said the rewrite wasn’t wasted, but he wished he had spent ten minutes in his settings before spending money on anything else.

Viator vs GetYourGuide Listing Rules at a Glance

Both platforms publish standards, but in different places and at different levels of detail. This table summarises what each says (as of September 2026; check each platform’s supplier help centre for current rules).

Listing element	GetYourGuide	Viator
Title	Must start with the location and name the category; no prices, discounts or capitals; about 60 characters recommended	Short, leading with the destination or attraction, then tour type
Photos	7 to 10+ recommended; first image must be high quality and relevant; no misleading stock	Minimum count applies; well above minimum recommended; photos count towards quality level
Options	2 to 4 recommended	No public number; the same logic applies
Booking cutoff	Maximum 10 hours before start	Four hours (or connectivity) needed for “Excellent” level
Cancellation standard	Supplier cancellations 1.0% or lower, 90-day rolling	Below 15% to stay listed (2022 standards); stricter for quality levels
No-shows	0.2% or lower, 90-day rolling	No public threshold found
Quality levels	Activity quality guidelines plus performance standards	“Good” to stay listed; “Excellent” earns more visibility (framework introduced 2020)
Contact details in text	Not allowed	Check your contract
Duplicate listings	Not allowed	Check your contract

Viator’s exact photo minimum and “Excellent” thresholds are shown in your Supplier Center, and they’ve changed over time, so check your current quality level there. For platform-specific setup, see our Viator supplier guide and GetYourGuide operator guide, and our comparison of Viator vs GetYourGuide for how their audiences differ.

Reviews: The Part of the Listing You Don’t Write

Reviews appear on the card as a score and a count, and on the page as the thing many travellers read before anything else. Recency matters as much as volume: platforms weight recent reviews, and a listing whose last review was four months ago looks like a listing that stopped selling.

What you can do within platform rules (our guide to managing reviews on OTA platforms covers each step in detail):

• Ask at the right moment. The end of the experience, while the guide is still with the group, gets far more reviews than an email three days later.
• Reply to reviews, especially critical ones. A calm, specific reply is read by every future traveller who sees the complaint. These review response templates cover the complaints operators see most.
• Fix what reviews tell you. Three reviews mentioning the same confusing meeting point are a listing problem, not a customer problem.

How to Tell If a Change Worked

Every change you make to optimise your OTA listing is a test. Treat them that way, or you’ll never know which change did anything.

• Change one thing at a time. Change the title and the first photo on the same day, and you won’t know which one moved the numbers.
• Write down the date. A simple log of what changed and when is enough.
• Wait three to four weeks. Short periods are noisy, especially for smaller listings.
• Compare like with like. Compare against the same weeks last year as well as the weeks before, because seasonality moves every listing.

Luca’s test shows the method (a hypothetical example). He runs a food tour in Bologna selling about 120 bookings a month on GetYourGuide. His numbers showed plenty of impressions but few clicks from search results, a card problem.

On 1 March he replaced his first photo, a close-up of tortellini, with a wide shot of his group at a market stall. He changed nothing else for four weeks.

Clicks from search rose, and bookings reached 124 in March against 118 the previous March. That’s a modest gain, in line with what better photos usually deliver, and he kept the new photo. Then he moved on to the title.

The seasonal point matters for a second reason. Platforms look at recent performance, so a listing that goes quiet in the off-season can lose position just when you’d like to test changes.

Common OTA Listing Mistakes

Most OTA listing optimisation tips tell you what to add. These are the things to stop doing.

• Copy-pasting one listing across every OTA. Each platform has its own title rules and layout, and GetYourGuide requires descriptions to be original, not copied from other listings.
• Keyword-stuffed or capitalised titles. They break GetYourGuide’s rules and read as spam to travellers.
• Stock or drone-only galleries. They look like every other listing and don’t show people enjoying the experience.
• Too many options. Seven variations of the same tour make travellers compare instead of book.
• Vague meeting points. They produce no-shows, refunds and one-star reviews.
• Using commission to fix a listing problem. Paying more for visibility doesn’t fix a page that doesn’t convert. We cover the trade-off in our guide to Viator’s commission rate and its Accelerate programme.
• Editing everything at once. You’ll never know what worked.

A former colleague of mine ran a walking tour of an old town. Over one summer she started getting a run of one-star reviews and refund requests, all saying the same thing: the guide never showed up. The guide had been there every time, standing exactly where the listing said to meet, at “the main entrance to the cathedral”. The problem was that the cathedral had two entrances, and the one most visitors thought of as the main entrance was on the opposite side of the square from where her guide actually waited. Groups were splitting in two, and the guests on the wrong side assumed they’d been stood up and left. She changed that one line to name the exact door, the café beside it and what the guide would be holding. The complaints stopped within a fortnight. She said the reviews hurt, but what bothered her most was how many of those guests had walked away from a tour that was running fifty metres from them.

Start With the Card

Knowing how to optimise your OTA listing comes down to working in the right order. Check the settings that can switch you off. Then fix the search card that wins the click, then the page that wins the booking, one change at a time, measured against the same period last year.

None of this needs an agency or a new booking system. It needs an honest look at your listing the way a traveller sees it, and the patience to test one thing at a time. If the bigger question is how to get more bookings on OTAs overall, start with which platforms deserve the effort at all: our guide to OTA distribution strategy covers that.

One thing to do today: search for your experience on your phone, as a traveller would, on the platform that sends you the most bookings. Put your card next to the top three results. Compare the title, first photo, price and badges. Whatever is weakest is where you start.

Platform rules and thresholds quoted are from GetYourGuide’s supply partner help centre and Viator’s published product standards, as of September 2026. Both platforms update their guidelines; check your supplier dashboard for the current rules on your listings.