How to Improve Your Viator or GetYourGuide Rating After Bad Reviews
To improve your Viator rating or your GetYourGuide rating after a run of bad reviews, fix whatever caused them first, then add enough good reviews to outweigh them. How many you need depends on one number: how many reviews you already have. At 100 reviews averaging 4.3, getting back to 4.5 takes 40 five-star reviews in a row.
That’s the part nobody tells you. You fixed the problem in June. You replaced the guide, moved the meeting point or sorted the overbooking. It’s October and the listing still says 4.2, because the reviews from the bad month are still sitting in the average.
Recovery is possible, and it’s faster than the simple maths suggests, because both platforms give recent reviews more weight. But it takes a plan, and the quick fixes most operators reach for in a panic are the ones that get them penalised.
Below: what a bad run costs you on each platform, how many reviews it takes to climb back, which reviews can come down, and a 90-day plan. For the wider system, see our pillar guide to managing reviews on OTA platforms. Platform rules are as of October 2026.
Key Takeaways
- Fix the cause before you chase reviews. New reviews from an unfixed product only add to the damage.
- The more reviews you already have, the slower a bad run washes out. At 100 reviews, 4.3 to 4.5 takes 40 straight five-star reviews, or 67 if your new reviews average 4.8.
- Recency works in your favour. GetYourGuide says recent reviews count more toward your rating, so travellers see the recovery before the average fully catches up.
- Viator needs a 3-star average to keep a product listed and 15+ reviews averaging 4.5 for the Badge of Excellence. GetYourGuide reviews your reviews, cancellations and no-shows on a rolling 90 days.
- On GetYourGuide, a review from a guest who never turned up can only come down if you marked the no-show within 24 hours of the activity ending.
What a Run of Bad Reviews Costs You on Viator and GetYourGuide
A dropping average hurts conversion on every platform. But each platform also has its own lines, and crossing them costs more than a few bookings.
Viator: the 3-star floor and the Badge of Excellence
Viator sorts products into two quality levels, “Good” and “Excellent”. A product has to stay at least at Good to remain listed, and Good needs a 3-star average or better. Viator said in 2020 that it only enforces its minimum rating once a product has enough reviews to be “representative of the traveler experience”, so a new product with two bad reviews isn’t at risk. An established product sliding towards 3.0 is.
The higher line matters more for most operators. The Viator Badge of Excellence needs at least 15 reviews averaging 4.5 stars or higher, alongside settings like mobile tickets and a cancellation rate under 2%. Drop to 4.4 and the badge goes, along with your place in the search filter travellers use to find badge holders.
GetYourGuide: ranking, the 90-day review and every new launch
GetYourGuide is clear that your review score is a ranking factor, and that “recent reviews count more toward the overall activity rating”. A bad month hits your position faster on GetYourGuide than an average-based view would suggest.
GetYourGuide also checks every supplier on a rolling 90-day basis. Its performance quality standards list “traveler feedback (reflected in reviews)” alongside cancellations and no-shows, and activities that consistently underperform “may be deactivated”.
There’s a cost beyond the one product, too. Your GetYourGuide Provider Rating averages every activity you sell. Fall below 4.0 across the account and your next launch goes live with no rating on show.
Fix the Cause Before You Chase Reviews
The temptation after a bad run is to start asking every guest for a review straight away. Don’t, until you’re sure the problem is gone. If the cause is still there, you’re asking more people to write about it.
Start by reading the bad run as a pattern, not as individual complaints. On GetYourGuide, the Reviews tab now has AI summaries with suggested fixes, refreshed monthly. On Viator, read the reviews in your Supplier Management Center and sort them by what they complain about: timing, the guide, the meeting point, value, crowds.
Most patterns point to one of two things. Either the listing set the wrong expectation (a duration, an inclusion, a meeting point), or something went wrong on the day (a guide, a vehicle, group size).
Listing problems are fixed in an afternoon. Our guide to optimising your OTA listing covers how to diagnose them before you edit. Operational problems take longer, and no listing edit will hide them.
Only when the fix is in place does the next step start to work.
How Many Reviews It Takes to Improve Your Viator or GetYourGuide Rating
To work out how many reviews you need to raise your rating, multiply your current review count by the gap you want to close. Then divide by how far your new reviews will sit above the target. At 100 reviews averaging 4.3, reaching 4.5 takes 40 five-star reviews in a row, or 67 if your new reviews average 4.8.
Here’s the same sum for different starting points. It uses a simple average, which is the worst case (more on that below).
| Reviews you have now | 4.3 to 4.5 | 4.0 to 4.5 | 3.8 to 4.0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 8 (14) | 20 (34) | 4 (5) |
| 50 | 20 (34) | 50 (84) | 10 (13) |
| 100 | 40 (67) | 100 (167) | 20 (25) |
| 200 | 80 (134) | 200 (334) | 40 (50) |
First figure: new reviews needed if every one is five stars. In brackets: new reviews needed if they average 4.8. Our own calculation, October 2026.
Two things stand out. Nobody gets 40 five-star reviews in a row, so the bracketed figure is the realistic one.
And the bigger your review count, the slower the climb. A product with 200 reviews needs 134 good ones to undo a drop from 4.5 to 4.3. Your best seller recovers slowest, which is why it should be fixed first.
Turn reviews into weeks
The table gives you a number of reviews. Your review rate turns it into a date. Reviews per week is bookings per week multiplied by the share of guests who leave one. Our guide to getting more reviews on Viator and GetYourGuide explains how to track that rate.
Here’s a hypothetical. Tom runs a two-hour old town walking tour in York. By spring it had 120 reviews averaging 4.7.
Then a new guide spent the summer cutting the route short to fit in a second tour, and 60 reviews came in averaging 3.5. The listing dropped to 4.3.
Tom let the guide go in September. He takes about 25 bookings a week, and one guest in eight leaves a review, so about three reviews a week. Getting back to 4.5 at a 4.8 average needs 120 new reviews. That’s 40 weeks, nearly a full year.
So Tom works on the rate as well as the tour. With a review QR code on the guides’ lanyards and a clear ask at the end of the walk, one guest in five leaves a review. That’s five reviews a week, and about 24 weeks to recover on the simple average.
Why the real recovery is usually faster
The table is the worst case. GetYourGuide says recent reviews count more toward your activity rating, so Tom’s new reviews pull the GetYourGuide figure up faster than the sum suggests. GetYourGuide doesn’t publish the weighting, so you can’t calculate exactly how much faster.
Viator doesn’t say whether its average is weighted. Either way, recency matters for ranking on both platforms, as we cover in how OTA ranking algorithms work.
The bigger point is what travellers read. A traveller who opens the reviews sees the text, not just the number. Once the recent ones describe a tour that works, the listing reads as fixed, even while the average is still catching up.
Get the Reviews That Break the Rules Taken Down
Most bad reviews can’t be removed, and chasing removal is usually wasted time. The pillar guide covers getting unfair reviews removed, including GetYourGuide’s eight removal reasons. Three details matter during a recovery.
GetYourGuide no-show reviews have a 24-hour window. Under GetYourGuide’s review rules, a review from a guest who never turned up can be removed, but only if you marked the booking as a no-show in the Supplier Portal within 24 hours of the activity ending. There must also be no sign of a supplier-side problem, such as an unclear meeting point. Miss the 24 hours and the review stays.
Here’s another hypothetical. Ana runs a food tour in Krakow and marks no-shows “when she gets round to it”, usually at the end of the week.
Two guests who overslept leave one-star reviews complaining they didn’t get a refund. Because the no-shows were marked days late, neither review can come down. She now marks no-shows on her phone before she leaves the last stop.
Three stars isn’t negative. GetYourGuide removes reviews whose text doesn’t match the rating, such as glowing text with one star. Its rules say a 3-star rating “is not considered negative”, so a positive comment with three stars won’t qualify.
Supplier failures stay up. If the review says the guide didn’t show, or the meeting point was wrong, GetYourGuide keeps it published, even if the guest is exaggerating. On Viator, reviews have to meet TripAdvisor’s review guidelines, and TripAdvisor reviews are reported through the Management Center. On both platforms, removal is for rule breaches, not for unfairness.
Reply to the Bad Run in Public
A reply won’t change the star rating. It changes how the next traveller reads it. A one-star review about a rushed tour, followed by “We’ve changed guides and the route now runs the full two hours”, tells the traveller the problem belongs to last summer.
There’s some evidence that replies help the rating over time too. A study of TripAdvisor hotel reviews by Davide Proserpio and Georgios Zervas found that after hotels started replying, their ratings rose by about 0.12 stars and they got about 12% more reviews. Those were hotels, not tours, but we’d expect the same effect for anyone who replies well.
Work to GetYourGuide’s limits. You can only reply to reviews from the last 30 days, replies need more than 10 words to show on the activity page, and you get one reply per review with no edits. Reply to the bad run now, before it ages out of the window. Our review response templates cover the common complaints.
Name the fix in every reply. “We’re sorry you felt rushed” is a reply. “We’re sorry you felt rushed. We’ve changed the schedule so the walk now runs the full two hours” is a recovery.
Rebuild Volume From Your Best Days
You need more reviews, and you need them from guests who had the fixed version of the tour. Ask every guest, but put your effort where the experience is strongest: your best guide, your best time slot, your smaller groups. A QR code on the best guide’s lanyard and a confident ask at the high point of the tour will do more than a sign at the exit.
This isn’t the same as review gating. Gating means screening guests by how they felt and only asking the happy ones, which TripAdvisor bans and which GetYourGuide makes pointless by inviting every customer itself. Every guest still gets the platform’s own review emails. You’re only deciding where to spend your own time.
On Viator, there’s a second route. Reviews collected through the Request Reviews tool for your TripAdvisor product page “count towards your rating on Viator”, according to Viator’s own guide to review types. That means guests who booked direct or through another channel can help improve your Viator rating. Our reviews guide, linked above, covers how to set it up.
What Not to Do When Your Rating Is Falling
A falling rating makes operators do things they’d never do in a normal month. These are the ones that cost more than the bad reviews.
- Don’t offer anything for a review. Discounts, free drinks and prize draws are banned on GetYourGuide and TripAdvisor, whatever rating the guest gives. On GetYourGuide, it can lead to suspension.
- Don’t contact reviewers about their review. GetYourGuide doesn’t allow private contact with customers about a review. On any platform, asking someone to change or remove a review risks your account. In the US, using threats to suppress reviews is banned under the FTC’s rule on fake reviews.
- Don’t post reviews yourself. Reviews from staff, friends or family are removed by GetYourGuide as a conflict of interest, and they’re exactly what TripAdvisor’s fraud checks look for.
- Don’t delete and relist the product to escape its reviews. Neither platform publishes a rule on this that we’ve found. In our view, it’s still a bad idea. GetYourGuide requires activities to be unique, a relaunched product starts at zero reviews and converts badly, and you throw away every good review along with the bad ones.
- Don’t cut the price in a panic. If guests complain about value, find out what they expected to get. Usually the answer is an inclusion or a duration to fix on the listing, not a lower price.
A 90-Day Plan to Improve Your Viator Rating and GetYourGuide Rating
GetYourGuide assesses suppliers over a rolling 90 days, so 90 clean days is the platform’s own measure of a recovered product. It’s a sensible timescale for Viator too.
- Week 1: diagnose and fix. Group the bad reviews by cause, fix the operation or the listing, and update the listing so it matches the tour you now run. Start marking no-shows the same day. Report any review that clearly breaks a rule.
- Weeks 1 to 4: reply and restart the asks. Reply to every review from the bad run that’s still inside GetYourGuide’s 30-day window, and to the Viator ones, naming the fix. Put your review QR codes and links on your best departures.
- Weeks 4 to 12: track the numbers. Each week, note your reviews per week, the average of reviews since the fix, and the overall rating on each platform. On GetYourGuide, check the review score under Performance with the widest date range. On Viator, check the product’s quality level in the Supplier Management Center.
- Day 90: decide. If reviews since the fix average 4.8 or better, the recovery is on track, and the bracketed figures in the table tell you how long is left. If they average above your target but below 4.8, it’s working, just slower than the table shows. If they’re below your target, the fix didn’t work. Go back to step 1 before you ask for more reviews.
The average since the fix is the number to watch. The overall rating moves slowly by design. The new reviews tell you within a month whether the problem is really gone.
Reviews are only one part of what keeps a listing ranking. To check the rest, including the Badge of Excellence settings and your cancellation headroom on both platforms, run your product through our free OTA listing audit.
Questions About Recovering an OTA Rating
How long does it take to improve your Viator rating?
It depends on how many reviews you have and how fast new ones arrive. At 100 reviews, moving from 4.3 to 4.5 takes about 67 new reviews averaging 4.8.
At five reviews a week, that’s around three months. At 200 reviews it takes twice as long. Travellers who read the recent reviews will see the improvement before the average does.
Can GetYourGuide remove a bad review?
Only in specific cases, such as offensive content, inaccurate information, text that doesn’t match the star rating, or a guest who never took part. For a no-show, you must have marked the booking in the Supplier Portal within 24 hours of the activity ending. Reviews about supplier-side problems, like a missing guide, stay published.
Will Viator remove my product for a low rating?
It can. The Viator minimum rating is a 3-star average: products need it to stay at the “Good” quality level and remain listed. Viator says it only enforces the minimum rating once a product has enough reviews to be representative, so new products aren’t measured against it.
Do old bad reviews ever stop counting?
Not as far as either platform says. GetYourGuide says recent reviews count more toward the rating, but nothing says older ones drop out.
Don’t plan on waiting them out. Outweigh them.
Start With the Reviews You Can Still Reply To
To improve your Viator rating or your GetYourGuide rating, start with the fix, not the reviews. Then it’s a sum. Your review count tells you how far you have to climb, your review rate tells you how long it’ll take, and recency means travellers notice before the average does.
Today, open your GetYourGuide reviews and reply to every review from the bad run that’s still inside the 30-day window, naming what you’ve changed. Then work out your own number from the table, and put it next to your weekly review rate. That’s your recovery date, and you’ll know within a month whether you’re beating it.
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