Managing Reviews on OTA Platforms: A Practical Guide for Operators

Managing reviews on OTA platforms comes down to running a system, not reacting to whatever lands. Ask every guest at the right moment, send them to the right platform, reply within each platform’s rules, use what reviews tell you to fix the product, and stay well inside the rules on incentives.

The numbers make the case better than any argument. GetYourGuide’s own data shows that taking a new activity from zero to 15 reviews brings around 10 times the page views and 4.5 times the bookings. Few other changes you can make to a listing come close.

You already know reviews matter. What most operators don’t have is a routine for them. Reviews get asked for when someone remembers, replied to in a batch once a month, and dealt with emotionally when a one-star lands at 11pm. This guide sets out the routine: how to generate more reviews, where each guest should leave one, how to respond (especially to the bad ones), what you can’t do, and what can actually be removed.

Key Takeaways

• GetYourGuide’s data shows going from zero to 15 reviews brings around 10 times the page views and 4.5 times the bookings, with the gains flattening after about 30 reviews.
• Send each guest to the platform that can accept their review: GetYourGuide only accepts reviews from its own verified bookers, while TripAdvisor reviews feed into your Viator listing.
• GetYourGuide replies are one shot: reviews from the last 30 days only, no edits, and more than 10 words to show publicly.
• On incentives, the platforms are stricter than the law: GetYourGuide says offering discounts or freebies for reviews can lead to account suspension, and TripAdvisor bans offering anything for a review, whatever the rating.
• Most bad reviews can’t be removed. A calm, specific public reply is written for the next hundred travellers, not the person who complained.

Why Reviews Matter More on OTAs Than Anywhere Else

On your own website, reviews are reassurance and part of your reputation. On an OTA, they are also part of how the platform decides whether to show you at all.

The OTA review impact on ranking

GetYourGuide says plainly that recent reviews count more towards your overall rating, and that they affect how its algorithm ranks your activity in search. A listing with a strong average but nothing recent is drifting. We cover the mechanics in how OTA ranking algorithms work, but the practical point is simple: volume and recency count together, and a star average earned two seasons ago won’t hold your position.

New listings feel this most. GetYourGuide reports that just three reviews can triple a new activity’s conversion rate, and that the effect of each extra review shrinks after about 30. The first 15 to 30 reviews are worth more than any other listing work you do in a product’s first season.

There’s a longer-term payoff too. GetYourGuide shows your overall rating on new activity pages if you average 4.0 or above across your existing activities. Good review management on today’s products gives tomorrow’s launches a head start.

How to Manage Reviews on OTA Platforms: The Five-Part System

Managing reviews on OTA platforms works best as five habits, run every week:

1. Ask every guest, at the right moment. In person, at a high point, not in a rushed goodbye.
2. Send them to the right platform. Where a guest can leave a review depends on how they booked.
3. Reply inside each platform’s rules. Some reply windows close, and some replies can’t be edited.
4. Treat reviews as operational data. Recurring complaints are listing problems or training problems.
5. Know what can be removed, and what can’t. Report what breaks the rules, and answer everything else in public.

The rest of this guide takes each one in turn.

How to Generate More OTA Reviews

Most guests who enjoyed an experience will happily leave a review. They just don’t think of it on their own. The job is to make the ask at the right moment and make it effortless.

Ask in person, at a high point

GetYourGuide’s advice to operators is to ask at peak moments (the view, the tasting, the photo stop), not during the final goodbye when people are already thinking about lunch. It also recommends owning the last five minutes: recap the highlights, make a personal ask, and have the review link ready.

Timing depends on the experience. GetYourGuide’s own suggestions include asking in person at the end of walking tours, using exit signage at museums, asking at the final tasting on food tours, and waiting two to four hours after adventure activities. By then, people have dried off and looked at their photos.

Make it one tap

The GetYourGuide Supplier Portal provides review QR codes. Put them on a pocket card, the back of a ticket, a clipboard or a sign at the exit. Every step between “I’ll do that” and the review page loses people.

How to get more reviews on GetYourGuide

GetYourGuide already sends each customer an invitation to review, followed by two reminders. That’s the baseline every operator gets. The operators with more reviews aren’t using a secret tool. They add a genuine in-person ask on top of those emails, consistently, on every departure.

GetYourGuide also suggests asking specific questions (“what did you think of the view from the tower?”) because they prompt fuller, more persuasive reviews than “please leave us five stars”.

Orla’s numbers show the difference (a hypothetical example). She runs a harbour walking tour in Cobh and launched it on GetYourGuide in May. Relying on the platform’s emails alone, she had six reviews by the end of June.

In July she printed QR cards, and her guides started asking at the viewpoint over the harbour, 20 minutes before the end. She had 31 reviews by the end of August, and her conversion rate climbed with them, on much the same number of page views.

Send each guest to the right platform

This is where most review advice stops short. Not every guest can review you on every platform.

How the guest booked	Where to ask for a review	Why
GetYourGuide	GetYourGuide	Only verified customers who booked and completed the activity through GetYourGuide can review it there
Viator	Viator	Viator collects reviews from its own bookers
Direct (your website), walk-up or phone	TripAdvisor or Google	TripAdvisor reviews feed into your Viator listing; Google supports your direct search presence
Travel trade or cruise groups	TripAdvisor or Google	These guests usually can’t review on the OTA

The TripAdvisor link matters more than many operators realise. Viator says that once you list with it, your TripAdvisor business reviews feed directly into your Viator listing. A direct or walk-up guest asked to review you on TripAdvisor is helping your Viator listing too.

A former colleague of mine ran visitor operations at a heritage house and gardens in County Wicklow. When she pulled a season’s ticket data apart, around half of visitors had bought at the gate or come in on coach tours, and not one of them had ever been asked for a review. The OTA bookers got the platforms’ emails. Everyone else simply left.

The fix cost almost nothing. Front-of-house staff started mentioning TripAdvisor at the café till and the exit, and a small sign with a QR code went up by the gift shop door. New reviews on TripAdvisor went from a trickle to a steady few every week through the summer, and because TripAdvisor reviews feed into Viator, the Viator listing picked up the same fresh reviews without anyone touching it.

What You Can’t Do: Incentives, Gating and the Law

Before scaling up review requests, know where the lines are. They’re closer than many operators think.

Can you offer incentives for OTA reviews?

No. GetYourGuide says offering discounts or freebies for reviews goes against its policy and can lead to account suspension. TripAdvisor’s incentives policy bans offering or promising anything in exchange for a review, whatever the rating: discounts, free drinks, prize draws or charity donations in a guest’s name.

TripAdvisor also bans rewarding staff for being named in reviews, such as bonuses or quotas for mentions. That catches a lot of well-meaning guide incentive schemes.

Review gating

Review gating means surveying guests first and then only asking the happy ones to post a public review. It’s common, often automated through booking-system or email tools, and it’s against TripAdvisor’s rules: every guest must have an equal chance to leave feedback.

If your post-visit email says “loved it? review us here; had a problem? tell us privately”, check whether it works as a gate.

What the law says

The law now backs the platforms up in the UK and US.

• UK: since 6 April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act bans fake reviews, concealed incentivised reviews and misleading presentation of review information such as star ratings. The Competition and Markets Authority can fine businesses up to 10% of global turnover, and its fake reviews guidance says businesses that publish reviews, including on their own websites, must take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent fake and concealed incentivised reviews, including having a clear policy against fake reviews.
• US: the Federal Trade Commission’s rule on reviews and testimonials, announced in August 2024, bans fake reviews (including AI-generated ones), incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment, undisclosed reviews by staff or managers, and suppressing negative reviews through threats.

The practical rule: on incentives, the platform rules are stricter than the law, so follow the platforms. The law adds duties of its own, especially for any reviews you show on your own website. (This is a summary for operators, not legal advice.)

How to Respond to Negative Reviews

A negative review stings, especially when it’s unfair. The reply isn’t for the reviewer, though. It’s for every future traveller who reads the review and then reads your answer before deciding whether to book.

Know the GetYourGuide reply rules

GetYourGuide added review replies to its Supplier Portal in 2025, and the rules are strict (as of December 2025):

• You can only reply to reviews posted in the last 30 days.
• One reply per review, and it can’t be edited after you send it.
• Replies need more than 10 words to appear on the activity page. Shorter ones only reach the customer by email.
• No more than five emojis, and no replies to star-only reviews.
• Templated or promotional replies, or unnecessary mentions of GetYourGuide, may be filtered out.
• Replies are translated automatically into the traveller’s language.

Two consequences follow. Batching replies once a month means some reviews age out before you get to them. And because you get one attempt, never reply while you’re still angry.

A structure that works

Every reply to a negative review can follow the same five steps:

1. Thank them for taking the time, briefly and without sarcasm.
2. Acknowledge the specific issue. Name it, so readers can see you actually read it.
3. Add context once, if it’s needed, without arguing or blaming the guest.
4. Say what has changed, if anything has.
5. Close with an invitation, written for future readers as much as the reviewer.

A worked example

Here’s a two-star review of a hypothetical Belfast walking tour:

“Guide was knowledgeable but we couldn’t find the meeting point and missed the first 15 minutes. Nobody answered the phone. Disappointing.”

A weak reply defends: “Our meeting point is clearly listed. We can’t be responsible for guests arriving late.” It may be accurate. It still tells every future reader that finding the start is hard and the operator doesn’t care.

A strong reply fixes: “Thank you for joining us, and I’m sorry the start went wrong. You’re right that the meeting point at City Hall wasn’t clear enough, since there are two entrances. We’ve updated our listing with a photo of the east gate and our guide now holds a green flag. Glad you enjoyed the rest of the tour, and we hope to show you the part you missed next time.”

It’s specific, it takes responsibility for what the operator controls, and it tells readers the problem is solved. It also sends the operator back to the listing, which is where the real fix happens.

Replying to good reviews

Positive reviews deserve a reply too, but keep it short and specific: mention the guide, the detail they enjoyed, the weather they put up with. Copy-paste thank-yous read as spam to travellers, and GetYourGuide may filter templated replies. Our review response templates for operators give you fill-in structures for positive, negative and mixed reviews that still read as personal.

Reviews as Operational Data

Every review is free feedback from someone who paid to use your product. Most operators read them for the score, but the useful part of managing reviews on OTA platforms is spotting the pattern.

GetYourGuide gives you structure to work with. Guests can add optional ratings for service quality, organisation, value for money and safety, and the platform produces AI summaries of what travellers praise and criticise, refreshed monthly. Read those monthly, not just the individual reviews.

Recurring complaints usually point to one of two fixes:

• A listing problem. Complaints about the meeting point, what was included or how long it lasted usually mean the listing set the wrong expectation. Fix the listing, as covered in our guide to how to optimise your OTA listing.
• An operations problem. Complaints about a particular guide, rushed timing or group size are training and scheduling issues, and no listing edit will fix them.

A former colleague of mine ran boat trips along the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland. For most of one summer, the same complaint kept turning up in reviews: the trip felt rushed, and the guide hurried everyone back to the harbour. He assumed it was a guide problem and spent weeks coaching his crew to slow down. Nothing changed.

The problem was one line on the listing. It said “2 hours”, but that included boarding and the safety briefing, so the time actually on the water was closer to 90 minutes. Guests were timing it. Once the listing said “90 minutes on the water, around 2 hours in total”, the rushed comments stopped within a few weeks, with the same crew running the same route.

Getting Unfair Reviews Removed

Most negative reviews can’t be removed, and chasing removal usually wastes time you could spend on a good public reply. Some can, though, and it’s worth knowing which.

GetYourGuide says it will remove a review only in specific cases:

• the guest didn’t take part (under certain conditions)
• inaccurate information
• inappropriate content
• a comment that doesn’t match the star rating
• complaints about the booking process rather than the activity
• promotional content
• conflicts of interest
• legal issues

If a review falls clearly into one of those, report it. If it’s simply harsh, reply to it.

On TripAdvisor, reports go through your business account and are judged against TripAdvisor’s own guidelines. The same principle applies: report genuine breaches, and answer the rest in public.

Never contact a reviewer to pressure them into changing or removing a review. It risks breaching platform rules, and in the US, using threats to suppress negative reviews is one of the practices the FTC rule bans.

GetYourGuide vs Viator and TripAdvisor: Review Rules at a Glance

Managing reviews across several OTAs is easier with the rules side by side.

Rule	GetYourGuide	Viator / TripAdvisor
Who can review	Verified customers who booked and completed the activity	Viator bookers on Viator; anyone who visited on TripAdvisor
Review requests	Invitation email plus two reminders, sent automatically	Check your Supplier Center for current settings
Reply window	Last 30 days only	No public window documented
Editing replies	Not possible; one reply per review	Check your management account
Public reply threshold	More than 10 words	Not documented
Incentives	Banned; can lead to suspension	Banned by TripAdvisor, whatever the rating
Review gating	GetYourGuide invites every customer itself	Banned by TripAdvisor
Cross-platform	No sharing with other platforms documented	TripAdvisor reviews feed into your Viator listing

(As of September 2026. Check each platform’s supplier help centre for current rules.)

For platform setup and how each one ranks, see our GetYourGuide operator guide and Viator supplier guide, and our comparison of Viator vs GetYourGuide for how their audiences differ.

Common Review Mistakes

• Batching replies monthly. On GetYourGuide, reviews older than 30 days can’t be answered.
• Copy-paste replies. Travellers spot them, and GetYourGuide may filter them.
• Arguing in public. Even when you’re right, a defensive reply costs more bookings than the review did.
• Gating through your booking system. Check what your post-visit emails actually do.
• Offering anything for a review. A free coffee is enough to break GetYourGuide’s and TripAdvisor’s rules.
• Ignoring four-star reviews. They often contain the most useful criticism, politely put.
• Sending guests to the wrong platform. A walk-up guest can’t review you on GetYourGuide, which only accepts reviews from its own bookers.

Make Reviews Part of the Operation

Managing reviews on OTA platforms isn’t a marketing task you get to when there’s time. It’s part of running the experience. Ask every guest at a good moment, point them to the platform that can take their review, reply within each platform’s rules, and use the patterns to fix the product.

The operators with hundreds of recent reviews aren’t lucky. They ask every time, reply every week, and fix whatever the reviews keep telling them.

One thing to do today: open your GetYourGuide Supplier Portal, go to your reviews, and reply to every comment from the last 30 days before the window closes. It’ll take less than an hour, and every reply will be read by future travellers.

Platform rules quoted are from GetYourGuide’s supply partner help centre and published guidance, Viator’s partner resources and TripAdvisor’s published policies, as of September 2026. Legal summaries are for general information only; check the CMA and FTC guidance, or take advice, for your own situation.