Measuring OTA Performance: A Practical Guide for Attraction Operators
Measuring OTA performance means tracking three things every month, for every platform you sell on. The first is the funnel: how many people see you, open your listing and book. The second is the money: what each ticket actually leaves you after commission and promotions. The third is the health checks: cancellations, no-shows, reviews and how dependent you’ve become on one platform.
Every OTA dashboard tells you how much you sold through that platform. None of them tells you what you kept, or how that platform compares with your other channels. That’s the gap. And it’s a common one: Arival’s research, as reported by automate.travel, found that 22% of operators can’t state their own profit margins, and 41% don’t track their marketing spend at all.
If you look at bookings in each extranet and stop there, you’re in good company. This guide shows you what each platform’s dashboard actually gives you, what you have to calculate yourself, which numbers can get a listing switched off, and how to pull it all into one scorecard you can fill in in 30 minutes on the first working day of each month.
Key Takeaways
- Measure in three layers: the funnel the platforms show you, the net money they don’t, and the health checks that can cost you a listing.
- Judge channels on net revenue per ticket after commission and funded promotions, not on gross bookings or revenue at retail price.
- There’s no reliable public benchmark for OTA conversion rates, and when Arival reviewed GetYourGuide’s operator analytics in 2024 they didn’t include competitor benchmarks. Compare against your own past performance instead.
- Put GetYourGuide’s thresholds on your scorecard as red lines: supplier cancellations at 1.0% or lower and no-shows at 0.2% or lower, over a rolling 90 days.
- Compare the same weeks year on year. Month-on-month comparisons mislead attractions with seasonal demand.
What Measuring OTA Performance Actually Means
Measuring OTA performance means tracking, for each platform you sell on, how efficiently it turns visibility into bookings, how much each booking is worth to you after costs, and whether anything is putting the listing at risk. It’s a monthly habit, not a one-off report, and it covers every channel side by side.
Think of it in three layers:
| Layer | What it answers | Where the data comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Funnel | Are people finding and booking the listing? | The OTA’s own dashboard |
| Money | What does each booking leave you? | Your own calculation, using the OTA’s statements and your booking system |
| Health | Is anything putting the listing at risk? | Both: platform thresholds plus your own records |
Platform dashboards are good at the first layer and useless for the other two. They report revenue at the price the traveller paid, one platform at a time, using definitions that suit the platform. Your accountant cares about the second layer. Your long-term position depends on the third.
The Funnel: What the Platforms Show You
The funnel is the part the platforms measure for you. Impressions or visitors at the top, listing page views in the middle, bookings at the bottom. Conversion rate is bookings divided by visitors, or by page views, depending on how the platform defines it.
The GetYourGuide analytics dashboard
GetYourGuide gives operators more funnel data than most platforms. When it launched its GetYourGuide Unlocked features in March 2024, Arival reported that operators could now see revenue, bookings, conversion rates, tickets sold, customer ratings and cancellations, filter by date or product, compare year on year, and download reports, with data updated daily. Our GetYourGuide operator guide covers the rest of the supplier portal.
In April 2026, GetYourGuide added a Performance section to its supplier portal. It lets you see all your experiences at once, sort them by revenue or conversion, and open each one to see its metrics and trends alongside suggested next steps, some written by AI and some by GetYourGuide’s experts.
Use those suggestions as prompts, not instructions. They’re designed to raise conversion on GetYourGuide, which is usually good for you too, but not always. A suggestion to add a discount may lift conversion and lower what each ticket leaves you.
Viator performance metrics
Viator’s Supplier Center reports your bookings and revenue. Check whether yours also shows visitor numbers and conversion rates: Arival reported in 2024 that Viator’s operator analytics stopped short of conversion rates, while GetYourGuide’s included them. Platforms update their dashboards often, so look at what your account shows today.
Our Viator supplier guide covers the rest of the Supplier Center.
One trap to avoid: Viator also has a “Performance Trends” dashboard with visitors, bookings, conversion rate and commission. That dashboard is for affiliate partners, the websites that earn commission by sending travellers to Viator. Some guides online present its metrics as operator analytics. They aren’t, so don’t use them as a guide to what your own account should show.
Reading the funnel
Once you have the numbers, read them as a funnel. Plenty of visitors but few bookings points to the listing page. Plenty of impressions but few clicks points to your search card. Few impressions at all points to your category, availability or cancellation record. We set out the four patterns and what to fix for each in our guide to optimising your OTA listing.
Platforms also use this funnel data themselves. Recent conversion and booking performance feeds into how they rank you, which is why a quiet month can cost you visibility the month after. Our guide to how OTA ranking algorithms work covers the mechanics.
The Money: What You Have to Calculate Yourself
This is the layer no OTA dashboard gives you, and the one that decides whether a channel is worth its place.
Net revenue per ticket
Net revenue per ticket is what one ticket sold through a channel leaves you, after commission, any discounts or promotions you funded, and payment costs. It’s the single most useful number for comparing channels. Our guide to calculating your true OTA margin takes it one step further, subtracting the cost of delivering the experience.
Effective commission rate
Your headline commission rate is rarely what you actually pay. Effective commission rate is everything a channel costs you (commission plus funded promotions, plus any programme fees) divided by the gross revenue it brought in. If you opted into a visibility programme or ran a platform discount, your effective rate will be higher than your contract rate. Our guide to OTA commission models explains how the different structures work.
Channel share of revenue
Measure each platform’s share of your revenue, not your bookings. A platform that sends lots of cheap child tickets can look big on bookings and small on revenue.
Payout timing
When the money actually arrives matters as much as how much there is. A channel that pays monthly in arrears ties up cash in peak season, when you need it for staff and stock. Our guide to OTA payment terms and cash flow compares the major platforms.
A worked example
Here’s how the money layer can reverse what the dashboards say (a hypothetical example). A heritage attraction in Dublin sells a €30 adult ticket on three OTAs. In August:
| Platform A | Platform B | Platform C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tickets sold | 1,400 | 900 | 500 |
| Gross revenue at full price | €42,000 | €27,000 | €15,000 |
| Commission rate | 30% | 25% | 20% |
| Funded promotion | None | None | 10% off all month |
| Net revenue | €29,400 | €20,250 | €10,800 |
| Net per ticket | €21.00 | €22.50 | €21.60 |
| Effective commission | 30% | 25% | 28% |
On the dashboards, Platform A is the star: most tickets, most revenue. Per ticket, it’s the weakest channel. Platform C looks cheapest on contract rate, but the promotion it ran all month pushed its effective cost to 28%. Platform B, the quiet middle one, earns the most per ticket.
None of that means dropping Platform A, which still brings in the most net money in total. It means knowing what each channel is for, which is the subject of our guide to OTA distribution strategy.
The Health Checks: Red Lines and Early Warnings
The third layer catches problems before they cost you a listing or a season.
Cancellations and no-shows
These are the numbers that can switch you off. GetYourGuide’s performance quality standards set a supplier cancellation rate of 1.0% or lower and a no-show rate of 0.2% or lower, both measured over a rolling 90 days. Here a no-show means a refund issued because the customer says you weren’t at the meeting point, not a guest who simply didn’t turn up. Activities that consistently miss them can be temporarily removed. Viator’s published product standards (2022) set a ceiling of 15% supplier-driven cancellations to stay listed, with stricter thresholds for its quality levels.
Put both on your scorecard as red lines. At 0.2%, two no-shows in 1,000 bookings is the limit, and a vague meeting point on a busy weekend can use that up fast.
Review volume and recency
Recent reviews feed ranking on the major platforms, so a month with no new reviews is an early warning even if your average still looks healthy. Track new reviews per platform per month, not just the star rating. Our guide to managing reviews on OTA platforms covers how to keep them coming.
Concentration
Track your largest single platform’s share of revenue every month. In our view, anything above roughly a third deserves close attention, because a ranking or commission change on that one platform would hit a big share of your income at once. The distribution strategy guide covers why concentration matters and where that rule of thumb comes from.
What Is a Good OTA Conversion Rate?
There’s no reliable public benchmark for OTA conversion rates in tours, activities and attractions. GetYourGuide’s analytics show your own conversion rate, and when Arival reviewed them in 2024 they didn’t show competitors’, and the “average conversion rate” figures you’ll find on vendor blogs rarely say where they came from. Compare against yourself instead.
Searching for OTA conversion rate benchmarks mostly turns up figures without a method, and that’s a problem in itself. Conversion depends on your category, price point, destination, season and how travellers reach your listing. A food tour in Edinburgh in August and a museum ticket in Galway in February aren’t comparable, whatever a benchmark says.
The comparisons that do tell you something:
- The same weeks last year. The cleanest test of whether a listing is improving.
- Product against product. If one of your experiences converts at twice the rate of another, find out why.
- Platform against platform. The same product converting very differently on two OTAs usually points to a listing, price or audience difference.
- Before and after each change. Date every listing change, and compare the three or four weeks either side.
Your Monthly OTA Scorecard
Pull your OTA performance metrics into one table, one row per channel, on the first working day of each month. It takes about 30 minutes once it’s set up, using each extranet’s export and your booking system.
- Visitors or page views (where the platform shows them)
- Bookings and tickets sold
- Conversion rate (bookings divided by visitors)
- Gross revenue
- Commission and funded promotions
- Net revenue per ticket
- Share of total revenue
- Cancellation rate and no-show rate (against each platform’s thresholds)
- New reviews this month
- Largest single-platform share (for the whole business, against your concentration limit)
- Direct share trend (read alongside net revenue per ticket, never on its own)
Laid out as a table, it looks like this:
| Channel | Visitors | Bookings | Tickets | Conversion | Gross revenue | Commission + promotions | Net per ticket | Share of revenue | Cancellations | No-shows | New reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OTA 1 | |||||||||||
| OTA 2 | |||||||||||
| OTA 3 | |||||||||||
| Direct website | |||||||||||
| Box office |
The last two numbers apply to the whole business rather than a single row, so note them under the table. They’re the same monthly checks set out in our OTA distribution strategy guide.
Add your direct website and box office as rows too, so the OTAs are measured against something. The aim isn’t to fill in every cell perfectly. It’s to look at the same numbers, the same way, every month, so changes stand out.
Siobhan’s scorecard shows why it’s worth the half hour (a hypothetical example). She manages a castle attraction in County Antrim and had always judged her OTAs on the revenue figure each dashboard showed.
Her first scorecard, built from August’s statements, showed her busiest OTA bringing in 40% of her OTA revenue but the lowest net revenue per ticket, because of a visibility programme she’d forgotten she’d opted into the previous spring. Opting out cost her some September volume, but each ticket from that channel was worth more.
A former colleague of mine ran commercial for a family attraction near Edinburgh. One OTA was everyone’s favourite: it had the highest conversion rate of any channel, and the team quoted it in every monthly meeting. When she built a proper scorecard and broke the tickets down by type, the picture changed. Most of that channel’s bookings were family tickets with two or three children, so its revenue per ticket was the lowest of any channel, well below what the same OTA’s conversion rate suggested.
Nothing was wrong with the channel. It was simply doing a different job: filling family days in the school holidays. Once the team saw that, they stopped comparing it with the channels selling adult tickets to international visitors, and started judging each one against the job it was actually doing.
Seasonality: Comparing the Right Periods
For most attractions, month-on-month comparisons are close to useless. September will almost always look worse than August. A drop that looks alarming next to last month may be perfectly normal next to the same month last year.
Compare like with like:
- This month against the same month last year, adjusted for Easter and bank holidays moving between months.
- Rolling 12 months for the overall trend, which smooths out one-off events.
- Week-by-week year on year if you’re testing a listing change in peak season.
Seasonality also shapes pricing, and most operators don’t use it. Arival’s research, as reported by automate.travel, found that 69% of operators charge the same price all year, 25% vary prices by season or day, and only 6% use algorithmic dynamic pricing. Yield management and seasonal pricing are big enough topics for their own guides. For measurement, the point is simpler: if your prices change by season, compare net revenue per ticket, not just bookings.
A former colleague of mine managed a visitor attraction in Kilkenny. One April, the board saw OTA bookings down by more than a quarter on March and asked what had gone wrong. Nothing had. Easter had fallen in March that year and in April the year before, so the month-on-month comparison set a holiday month against a normal one.
Compared with the same weeks the previous year, Easter week against Easter week, bookings were up slightly. Her report the following month showed the year-on-year figures first, and the question didn’t come up again.
Common Measurement Mistakes
- Judging channels on gross revenue. It flatters platforms with high commission and funded promotions.
- Reading conversion rates without volume. A 10% conversion rate on 40 visitors tells you very little.
- Comparing July with November. Seasonality makes month-on-month comparisons misleading for attractions.
- Following AI suggestions blindly. Suggested actions in platform dashboards aim to raise conversion on that platform, which isn’t always the same as raising your margin.
- Confusing affiliate and operator dashboards. Viator’s Performance Trends is for affiliates, not operators.
- Counting bookings instead of tickets. One family booking of five tickets and one solo booking are not the same.
- Making changes without a baseline. If you don’t record the numbers before a change, you can’t measure its effect.
Start With Last Month
Measuring OTA performance doesn’t need an analytics team or new software. It needs the same handful of numbers, collected the same way, every month: the funnel each platform shows you, the net money you work out yourself, and the health checks that keep your listings safe.
The platforms will always show you how much you sold through them. Only you can work out what each of them is worth to you.
One thing to do today: export last month’s figures from each OTA you sell on, put them in one table with your direct sales, and work out net revenue per ticket for each channel. If the channel you thought was your best isn’t at the top, that’s the first thing your scorecard has taught you.
Platform features and thresholds described are as of October 2026, from GetYourGuide’s supply partner help centre and press releases, Viator’s published product standards, and Arival’s reporting. Dashboards change often; check your own supplier portals for what they currently show.
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