Travel Trade vs OTA: Which Channel Earns Its Commission?

In the travel trade vs OTA decision, commission is rarely what separates the two. An inbound tour operator typically buys at 20 to 30% below your public price. GetYourGuide’s default commission is 30%, and Viator’s base is 20%. The real differences are when the booking arrives, when you get paid, who controls the price, and what it costs you to keep each channel running.

Most “OTA vs” advice compares OTAs with direct bookings. That makes sense for a walking-tour company. For an attraction, the older comparison matters just as much, because coach groups, overseas tour operators and destination management companies still bring in volume that no OTA can replicate.

You probably already sell through both, and you probably inherited the split rather than chose it. This article compares the two channels side by side and shows the hidden costs on each side. It also gives you a simple way to decide how much capacity each one gets. It sits under our OTA distribution strategy guide, which covers the full OTA channel mix.

Key Takeaways

• Headline commission is similar: inbound tour operators buy at around 20 to 30% off, while OTAs take 20 to 30% (Viator 20% base, GetYourGuide 30% default, as of October 2026).
• Trade wants rates 12 to 18 months ahead and usually pays on invoice after the visit. OTAs sell close to the date and pay per booking on the platform’s cycle.
• The hidden costs differ: free places, fam trips and credit risk on the trade side; platform-funded discounts, ranking work and review management on the OTA side.
• The most common conflict is price: an OTA promotion can undercut the rate your trade partner printed a year earlier.
• Give each channel a job: contracted trade allocations for peak dates and groups, OTAs for shoulder season, last-minute demand and markets trade can’t reach.

Travel Trade vs OTA: The Short Answer

Travel trade means business-to-business resellers who buy your tickets at a net rate, usually months ahead, and package them for groups or independent travellers. OTAs are consumer-facing marketplaces that sell your tickets one booking at a time, close to the visit date, and deduct a commission. Trade gives you planned volume. OTAs give you flexible volume.

What travel trade means for attractions

The term covers several types of business, and they don’t all work the same way:

• Inbound tour operators (also called ground handlers, receptive operators or destination management companies, DMCs): based in your country, they build itineraries for overseas partners and handle bookings and payments.
• Overseas wholesalers and tour operators: based in the visitor’s home market, they package your attraction into holidays sold through agents or direct.
• Group travel organisers: clubs, societies and coach-tour planners who bring domestic groups.
• Retail travel agents: sell packages built by the others, usually for a smaller commission.

Trade partners sell to two kinds of customer: groups, and fully independent travellers (FIT) who book a package through an agent but travel on their own.

VisitBritain says around one in three inbound visitors to Britain book their trip as a package, and long-haul travellers are particularly likely to book this way. If your attraction is on the long-haul itinerary circuit, much of that demand reaches you through trade, not through an OTA.

Who counts as an OTA

Viator, GetYourGuide, Klook, Civitatis and Booking.com Attractions are the main ones. They sell to individual travellers, show live availability through your booking system, and take a commission on each sale. Arival’s 2025 research found OTAs now take 37% of all experience bookings, and their share of attraction bookings tripled from 8% in 2019 to 24% in 2025. Walk-ups are still the largest single channel for attractions, at 28%.

Travel Trade vs OTA Side by Side

Factor	Travel trade	OTAs
Margin given up	~20 to 30% (net rate), more through a chain	~20 to 30% commission (platform-dependent)
Rate model	Net rate, partner sets the selling price	Commission on your retail price
Booking window	Rates 12 to 18 months ahead; groups 6+ months out	Mostly days or weeks before the visit
Inventory	Contracted allocation or free sale on request	Live availability from your booking system
Payment	Invoice, usually after the visit, on credit terms	Per booking, on the platform’s payout cycle
Customer	Groups and packaged independent travellers	Individual travellers, often international
Effort to run	Relationships, contracts, rate sheets, fam trips	Listings, rankings, reviews, promotions
Price control	Fixed for the contract year	Flexible, but the platform pushes discounts

Each row is worth a closer look, starting with the one most operators get wrong.

Commission: Closer Than Most Operators Think

The old rule of thumb says OTAs are cheap and trade is expensive. Tourism Australia’s widely shared distribution guide still lists OTAs at 10 to 15%, against 30% for inbound tour operators and 20% for wholesalers. For experiences, that OTA figure is years out of date.

Arival’s guide to setting net rates (May 2023) gives more realistic bands:

• Inbound tour operators and receptives: 25 to 30%
• Wholesalers and OTAs: 20 to 25%
• Travel agents: 10 to 15%
• Attractions selling to tour operators that distribute through an inbound operator: 30 to 35%

That last line matters. Trade commission often passes down a chain, with the inbound operator keeping 7 to 10% and passing another 7 to 10% to the agent or reseller who made the sale. The longer the chain, the more margin you need to leave in your net rate.

On the OTA side, Viator’s base commission is 20% and GetYourGuide’s default is 30%, as of October 2026. Our comparison of OTA commission rates covers the rest, including how promotional programmes push the effective rate higher.

The difference in mechanics catches operators out. Trade buys at a net rate; OTAs deduct commission from your retail price. Enter the same number in both systems and you’ll earn different amounts per ticket. Our guide to net rate vs gross rate shows how to set rates that work across both.

Cash Flow and Credit Risk

This is where the two channels really part company.

Trade buyers prefer credit. A trade speaker at a 2022 Business Wales travel trade webinar put it bluntly: “Pre-payments are a nightmare to manage and where two options exist we always take the one that can offer credit and invoice after use.” In practice, that means you deliver the visit, invoice the inbound operator, and wait for payment on their terms. Some pay promptly. Some don’t.

OTAs pay per booking, but on their schedule, not yours. Some pay monthly after the visit, some faster, and the timing differs a lot between platforms. Our guide to OTA payment terms and cash flow compares them platform by platform.

What this means for operators: trade revenue needs credit control. Someone has to chase invoices, check a new partner’s payment history, and decide what happens when a partner goes quiet. OTA revenue needs reconciliation, because payouts arrive net of commission and adjustments, often in a different currency.

Hypothetical example. A heritage attraction near York signs a new inbound operator in January, with an allocation of 40 tickets a day from April to October. By September, the operator owes £18,000 on 60-day terms and has paid nothing since June. Their emails have slowed down. The attraction has two choices: keep honouring the allocation and grow the debt, or suspend it mid-season and damage the relationship. A credit check and a credit limit at contract stage would have made the decision for them.

I heard a version of this for real at an industry conference last year. Over coffee, the commercial manager of a mid-sized heritage attraction told me about a small inbound operator they’d worked with for three seasons without a problem. Then it went into administration in October, owing them every invoice from July onwards. They recovered a few pence in the pound, months later.

What stuck with me was what she said she’d changed afterwards: every trade partner now has a credit limit, new partners prepay for their first season, and anyone more than 30 days overdue loses their allocation until they’re up to date. “It felt rude at first,” she said. “Nobody’s ever complained.”

Booking Window, Pricing and the Parity Problem

Trade works on a long calendar. The Business Wales webinar advised attractions to supply pricing “preferably 12-18 months in advance as that follows typical hotel contracting,” and noted that groups usually book at least six months ahead. Many overseas operators contract for a full season or tourism year and print or load your rate once.

OTAs work on a short calendar. Most bookings arrive in the days and weeks before the visit, against live availability, and you can change the price whenever you like.

The two calendars collide on price. Suppose you agreed a trade rate in spring 2025 for the 2026 season. In summer 2026, you join an OTA promotion that knocks 15% off the public price. The overseas customer who paid full price through a tour operator can now see your ticket cheaper online. Your trade partner sees it too.

The Business Wales material also points out that customers buying through international tour operators pay your full rate, because they don’t get access to your online deals. That only holds while your OTA promotions don’t publicly undercut the trade price. Before you opt into any OTA discount, check what it does to the rates you’ve contracted with trade partners.

At the same conference, I met the sales lead for a large visitor attraction who’d been caught by exactly this. Their biggest overseas wholesaler sent over a screenshot: a 20% OTA flash sale that put the online price below what the wholesaler’s customers had paid in a brochure package. The wholesaler wasn’t threatening to walk away, but it wanted to know why it should keep featuring the attraction.

The fix was dull and effective. The attraction set a floor for any OTA promotion, never below the trade selling price, and started telling its main trade partners about planned promotions a month in advance. “We’d been running the OTA side and the trade side from two different desks,” he told me. “They’d never compared notes.”

The Hidden Costs on Each Side

Headline commission is only part of the cost. Both channels carry costs that don’t show up on the rate sheet.

Travel trade

• Free places. Group travel organisers expect free entry for themselves and the coach driver. On a coach of 30, that’s two extra visitors at no revenue.
• Fam trips. Trade buyers need to see your attraction before selling it. Hosting them costs staff time, free tickets and often hospitality.
• Trade shows and missions. Stand fees, travel and staff time for events such as World Travel Market or VisitBritain’s trade missions.
• Rate sheets and contracts. A rate sheet in the right format for each partner, child and cancellation policies, and contract negotiation, often on the partner’s paperwork.
• Bad debt. Covered above. One partner that doesn’t pay can wipe out a season’s margin from several that do.

OTAs

• Platform-funded discounts. Promotions and “special offers” usually come out of your margin, not the platform’s.
• Ranking work. Listings need constant attention (photos, descriptions, pricing, response times) to stay visible.
• Review management. Every OTA booking can generate a public review that affects your ranking.
• Cancellation exposure. Flexible cancellation policies drive conversion, but you carry the cost of late cancellations.

A worked comparison: trade vs OTA on one ticket

Here is how the costs might add up for one £20 adult ticket. This is a hypothetical example.

Per £20 ticket	Trade (inbound operator, 20% off)	Viator (20% base, before Accelerate)	GetYourGuide (30% default)
Public price	£20.00	£20.00	£20.00
Revenue to you	£16.00	£16.00	£14.00
Hidden cost (estimate)	Free places and fam trips: ~£0.70	Promotion at 10% off: ~£1.60	Promotion at 10% off: ~£1.40
Effective revenue	~£15.30	~£14.40	~£12.60
When the cash arrives	30 to 60 days after invoice	Platform cycle	Platform cycle

Change the assumptions and the order changes too. A trade chain that needs 30 to 35% puts trade at the bottom of the table. An attraction that never discounts on OTAs keeps the full £16 or £14. That’s the point: you can only rank your channels on your own numbers.

Which Attractions Lean Trade, and Which Lean OTA

Travel trade for attractions works best when the product suits planned, group-friendly visits. Some attractions are natural trade products and some aren’t.

Lean trade if:

• you can handle groups (coach parking, a group entrance, a predictable visit length)
• you’re on the long-haul itinerary circuit, such as a gateway-city icon or a major heritage site
• you need volume in low season, when OTA demand is thin
• you can offer net rates that differ from your public price and offer credit

Lean OTA if:

• most of your visitors are independent travellers who decide late
• you sell timed slots with live availability
• you want to reach international markets where you have no trade relationships
• you’re small enough that trade admin would cost more than it brings in

Most mid-sized and large attractions need both. The question is what job each one does, which leads to capacity.

Hypothetical example. A Northern Ireland visitor centre sells 60% of its summer tickets through four inbound operators and two overseas wholesalers, mostly to coach tours from Dublin. In shoulder season, those coaches thin out. It lists on Viator and GetYourGuide for April, May, September and October only, and OTA bookings fill around a third of the gap left by trade. The commission is higher than its trade rate, but those tickets would otherwise go unsold.

How to Split Capacity Between Trade and OTAs

Seasonality gives you a starting framework, consistent with the seasonal split in our distribution strategy guide:

Season	Trade	OTAs	Direct
Peak	Contracted allocation	Limited	Priority
Shoulder	Open	Fully open	Open
Low	Groups and FIT on request	Open	Open

Three rules make this work in practice:

1. Set release dates on every trade allocation. If a partner hasn’t used its allocation seven, 14 or 30 days before the date (whatever you agree), the tickets go back into general sale.
2. Run everything from one booking system. Trade, OTA and direct sales should all draw on the same inventory, so released trade tickets appear on OTAs automatically. Check that your system can handle trade accounts, allocations and invoicing before you sign a trade contract.
3. Review the split every season. Compare net revenue per ticket by channel, not booking volume.

Is Your Attraction Trade-Ready?

Before you approach the travel trade, check you can offer what buyers expect:

• [ ] Net or commissionable rates that differ from your public price, for both groups and independent travellers
• [ ] Rates, child policy and cancellation policy available 12 to 18 months ahead
• [ ] The ability to invoice and offer credit, with a credit-control process
• [ ] A voucher or booking-reference redemption process staff at the gate understand
• [ ] A group handling policy: entrance, arrival times, free places for the organiser and driver
• [ ] A trade information sheet with images, visit length, accessibility and directions for coaches
• [ ] Connectivity, so trade partners can check availability without emailing you

If several boxes are unticked, you’re not trade-ready yet, and OTAs are the quicker channel to switch on. Trade takes longer to build, but once it’s working it’s much harder for a competitor to take away.

Hypothetical example. A family-run castle in Wales gets a request from a Dutch coach operator for a 2027 rate. The owner sends the public price, because there’s no trade rate. The operator needs a margin and books a competitor instead. The next year, the castle publishes a trade rate at 20% below public, roughly what it already charges for school groups, and picks up two coach programmes.

Start With Net Revenue per Ticket

The travel trade vs OTA question doesn’t have one answer for every attraction. Commission is similar on both sides. Cash flow, booking windows, price control and hidden costs aren’t, and they decide which channel earns its place in your mix.

One thing to do this week: pull last year’s bookings by channel and calculate the net revenue per ticket for trade and for each OTA, after commission, discounts and free places. Our guide to calculating your true OTA margin walks through the method. The result will tell you more about your channel mix than any rule of thumb.

Commission and channel figures are from Arival (May 2023 and the 2025 Global Operator Landscape survey), Tourism Australia, VisitBritain and a 2022 Business Wales travel trade webinar, as of October 2026. Trade terms vary by partner and market; OTA rates change, so check current terms with each platform.