Viator Badge of Excellence: What It Takes and Why It Matters
The Viator Badge of Excellence is a free badge that Viator adds automatically to products that reach its “Excellent” quality level. To qualify, a product needs a supplier cancellation rate below 2%, at least 15 reviews averaging 4.5 stars or higher, six or more quality photos, mobile tickets, Viator’s standard cancellation policy, and either a connection to booking software or a booking cutoff under four hours.
Most operators assume the badge is a reward for running a brilliant tour. It isn’t, quite. Four of those six requirements are settings in your Supplier Management Center, and you can change them in an afternoon. The other two, reviews and cancellations, are numbers you’re probably watching already.
This guide covers how to get the badge: what each requirement costs you, how to keep the badge once you have it, and when it isn’t worth chasing. For the wider picture of selling on Viator, start with our Viator supplier guide.
Key Takeaways
- The Viator Badge of Excellence is free and automatic. It appears within 48 hours once a product meets every “Excellent” criterion, and it applies per product, not per operator.
- The six requirements: under 2% supplier cancellations, 15+ reviews averaging 4.5 stars or higher, 6+ photos, mobile tickets, the standard cancellation policy, and either booking-software connectivity or a cutoff under four hours.
- Photos, mobile tickets, cancellation policy and connectivity or cutoff are settings you can change this week. Reviews and cancellations take time.
- Cancellations are measured over a rolling 90 days, so a product with 40 bookings in that window loses the badge with a single operator cancellation (2.5%).
- Viator says “Excellent” products can get up to 3x more bookings. That’s Viator’s own 2020 figure with no method published, so treat it as a ceiling, not a forecast.
What Is the Viator Badge of Excellence?
The Viator Badge of Excellence marks products that have reached the top of Viator’s two quality levels. Viator introduced the levels, “Good” and “Excellent”, in June 2020. Good keeps you listed. Excellent earns the badge, and Viator says it gives those products more visibility on the site.
- It’s free. Viator’s own badge page is blunt about it: operators don’t pay, and every experience that meets the standards gets it.
- It’s automatic. There’s no application. Viator says the badge appears within 48 hours of the product meeting all the criteria.
- It’s per product. You can hold the badge on your sunset cruise and not on your harbour tour.
Viator also added a Badge of Excellence filter to its search. If your competitors have the badge and you don’t, travellers using that filter won’t see you at all.
Viator Badge of Excellence Requirements
The six requirements are a supplier cancellation rate below 2%, 15 or more reviews averaging 4.5 stars or higher, six or more quality photos, mobile tickets, the standard cancellation policy, and either booking-software connectivity or a cutoff under four hours.
Viator doesn’t publish a single checklist for operators; its own pages describe the standards in general terms. The most complete public list is in Bókun’s guide to selling on Viator (updated March 2026). Bókun is a booking system owned by TripAdvisor, like Viator.
Here’s how Viator’s Good vs Excellent levels compare (as of October 2026; check your Supplier Management Center for your product’s current level):
| Requirement | Good (to stay listed) | Excellent (the badge) |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier cancellation rate (rolling 90 days) | Below 5% | Below 2% |
| Reviews | No minimum published | 15 or more |
| Rating (part of the reviews requirement) | 3+ stars average | 4.5+ average |
| Photos | 2 minimum | 6 or more, quality images |
| Tickets | Any format | Mobile tickets |
| Cancellation policy | Any | Viator’s standard policy |
| Confirmation | Not required | Booking-software connectivity (instant confirmation) or a cutoff under four hours |
Below both levels is a hard floor: Viator’s 2022 product standards say supplier-driven cancellations must stay below 15% for a product to remain on the site at all.
The useful way to read this table is by how long each row takes to fix.
The Four You Can Fix This Week
Six or more photos
This is the easiest of the six. Viator’s 2020 data found products with 10 photos got nearly 160% more bookings than those with one, so going past six is worth doing anyway. Our guide to OTA listing photos has a full shot list.
Mobile tickets
If your product still requires a printed voucher, switch it to accept mobile tickets. For most tours this costs nothing: the guide checks a phone screen instead of a piece of paper. The exception is a venue whose gate system can’t validate a phone, and that fix sits with your ticketing provider, not Viator.
The standard cancellation policy
This is the first requirement with a real cost. Viator’s standard policy gives travellers a full refund up to 24 hours before the start, and no refund inside 24 hours. Viator says about 85% of its products already use it.
If you’re on a Custom policy (tiered partial refunds) or All Sales Final, the badge means giving that up. For a walking tour that refills easily, that’s a small trade. For a private charter with fixed costs per departure, a late cancellation can cost more than the badge brings in. Do the sum on last season’s cancellations before you switch, and see our guide to handling OTA cancellations for how those costs add up.
Connectivity or a cutoff under four hours
This one catches the most operators. You need either a live connection between Viator and your booking software (so bookings confirm instantly) or a booking cutoff under four hours.
Note the “or”. A connected product doesn’t need the short cutoff, which matters for anything with prep time. When Viator launched the standards in 2020, food tour and adventure operators told Arival that a four-hour cutoff didn’t work for them. Connectivity is the route that does.
Take Marta (a hypothetical example). She runs a pasta-making class in Bologna for up to 10 people, with a 24-hour cutoff because she buys fresh ingredients the morning before each class.
A cutoff under four hours would mean over-buying every day. So she connects Viator through her booking software instead. Her bookings confirm instantly, her 24-hour cutoff stays, and the requirement is met.
A live sync also stops the double bookings that become operator cancellations. Our comparison of Bokun vs FareHarbor vs Rezdy covers how each connects to Viator.
If your product can take late bookings safely, a short cutoff helps on its own too. Viator’s 2020 data found products with a cutoff under two hours converted 50% better than those with a 25 to 48-hour cutoff.
The Two That Take Time
15 reviews
You can’t switch this on, and you can’t shortcut it: buying, incentivising or seeding reviews breaks both Viator’s and TripAdvisor’s rules. Viator sends its own review requests after each booking, and your job is to make sure guests act on them. Our guide on how to get more reviews on Viator and GetYourGuide covers the asks that work.
The reviews also need to average 4.5 stars or higher. Viator’s own operator page on reviews (March 2022) puts the bar at “at least 15 reviews with an average star rating of 4.5”. A product sitting at 4.3 can tick every other box and still miss the badge. If that’s you, our guide on how to improve your Viator rating works out how many new reviews it takes to get back to 4.5.
For a new product, this is usually the requirement that holds the badge back longest. At 10 bookings a week, with one guest in eight leaving a review, you’ll reach 15 in roughly 12 weeks.
Cancellations under 2%
This is the requirement most likely to take the badge away once you have it. The rate is measured over a rolling 90 days, and at low volumes the maths is unforgiving.
| Bookings in the last 90 days | One operator cancellation | Two operator cancellations |
|---|---|---|
| 40 | 2.5% (badge lost) | 5.0% (fails Good) |
| 60 | 1.7% (badge kept) | 3.3% (badge lost) |
| 150 | 0.7% (badge kept) | 1.3% (badge kept) |
In practice, a small product in its quiet season can’t afford a single cancellation. Two things help.
First, weather. Viator excludes cancellations caused by adverse weather, significant global events, and cases where the customer asks you to cancel for them. The weather exclusion only works if you’ve enabled the “Bad weather” option under the other post-booking policies in your product setup. Do it now, before the next storm.
Second, overbookings. Most avoidable operator cancellations come from selling the same seat twice across platforms, which is exactly what connectivity prevents.
I learned the weather lesson the hard way with a coastal kayak operator I worked with. They’d held the badge on their main trip for over a year when an autumn storm forced them to cancel two departures in one week. They’d never turned on the “Bad weather” setting, and with fewer than 50 bookings in the window, that took them over 4%.
The badge disappeared, and so did their place near the top of the page, right as the late-season bookings came in. The setting took two minutes to enable. The rate took nearly three months to recover.
How to Check (and Keep) Your Quality Level
Your product’s quality level sits in the Viator Supplier Management Center, alongside its listing, with suggestions for moving from Good to Excellent (Bókun describes this as an “Improve” button). If you can’t find it, ask Viator’s supplier support which criterion your product is missing. Check each product separately. Quality level is one of the few figures every supplier sees; our guide to Viator analytics covers the rest of the dashboard.
The Viator Badge of Excellence isn’t permanent. It goes as soon as any criterion slips, most often because of:
- A policy change. Switching to a Custom cancellation policy for peak season removes it.
- Lost connectivity. If the connection breaks and your cutoff is four hours or more, you no longer qualify.
- Cancellation creep. One or two operator cancellations on a low-volume product (see the table above).
It comes back the same way it arrived, within 48 hours of the product meeting every criterion again. Settings fixes are near-instant. A cancellation problem lasts until the bad cancellations roll out of the 90-day window.
Our free OTA listing audit has a Badge of Excellence panel. Enter your last 90 days’ bookings, cancellations and reviews, and it shows which requirements you meet and how many cancellations you can absorb before losing the badge.
Is the Badge Worth Chasing?
Viator’s operator resources say products categorised as “Excellent” “can receive up to 3x more bookings”. That figure dates from 2020, and Viator hasn’t published how it was measured. It almost certainly compares Excellent products with all others, which mixes up cause and effect: products that already sell well are the ones with the reviews and low cancellations the badge requires.
So don’t plan around tripling your bookings. A better reason to chase the badge is that the work pays off either way. Reviews, cancellation rate, photos and instant confirmation all feed Viator’s ranking, as our guide to how OTA ranking algorithms work explains.
There’s one case where I’d say no. A private yacht charter that loses a full day’s revenue on every late cancellation is better off on a Custom policy without the badge. The badge is a means to more bookings. It isn’t worth paying for with margin.
Questions About the Viator Badge of Excellence
Do I need the Badge of Excellence to join Viator Accelerate?
No. Accelerate, Viator’s opt-in programme that trades extra commission for extra visibility, was open to products at either the “Good” or “Excellent” level when it launched in 2023. Our breakdown of the Viator commission rate covers what Accelerate costs.
Is the Badge of Excellence the same as a TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice award?
No. Travelers’ Choice is a TripAdvisor award based on reviews. The Badge of Excellence comes from Viator’s own quality levels and depends on settings and cancellations as well as reviews. A product can hold one without the other.
Why hasn’t my badge appeared?
If a week has passed since you made your changes, one criterion is still missing. The most common culprits are a cancellation still inside the 90-day window, or a product with fewer than 15 reviews or an average below 4.5 stars. Check the product in your Supplier Management Center or ask Viator’s supplier support.
Start With Your Best Seller
Open your Supplier Management Center today and check your best-selling product against the six Badge of Excellence requirements. Fix the settings first: photos, mobile tickets, the cancellation policy (if the sums work) and either connectivity or the cutoff. Turn on the “Bad weather” setting while you’re there. Then let reviews and the 90-day cancellation rate do the rest.
If the badge appears within 48 hours, move on to your next product. If it doesn’t, you know which of the two slow requirements you’re waiting on.
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