How to Handle OTA Cancellations: A Practical Guide for Operators

How to handle OTA cancellations comes down to separating two problems. Customer cancellations cost you a seat, and you manage them through the cancellation policy you choose and how you set capacity. Your own cancellations cost you money and standing. Unless the cause is force majeure, GetYourGuide charges you 25% of the ticket price. Both GetYourGuide and Viator count your cancellations against you, and both can pull your listing if they pile up.

Most operators worry about the first problem. The second is the one that does the damage. A guest cancelling inside the free window is annoying. Cancelling a fully booked departure yourself, for the wrong reason or with the wrong reason code, can cost you a quarter of the revenue and push you toward a platform’s limits in the same afternoon.

This guide covers both, platform by platform: what to set before cancellations happen, what each platform charges when you cancel, how to log weather properly, and how to get paid for no-shows.

Key Takeaways

• If you cancel a GetYourGuide booking yourself for anything other than force majeure, GetYourGuide deducts 25% of the retail price on your invoice. It also counts the cancellation against a 1.0% limit, measured over a rolling 90 days.
• Viator needs supplier cancellations below 15% to keep you listed, below 5% for its “Good” quality level and below 2% for “Excellent”.
• Weather cancellations don’t count against you on either platform if you log them correctly. On GetYourGuide, choose the force majeure reason. On Viator, turn on the “Bad weather” policy in product setup before you need it.
• Asking a customer to cancel still counts as your cancellation on GetYourGuide.
• Report customer no-shows. GetYourGuide gives you 24 hours after the activity ends, and Viator reports that operators using its no-show tool win 73% of chargeback disputes.

How to Handle OTA Cancellations: The Short Version

1. Set your cancellation policy per product, not by default. Match it to what a late cancellation actually costs you.
2. Prevent your own cancellations in your settings. Get capacity, blocked dates, cut-off times and minimum numbers right before anything is booked.
3. If you have to cancel, log the real reason. Weather and force majeure are treated differently from operational problems.
4. Offer a new date before a refund, where the platform lets you.
5. Report every customer no-show inside the platform’s window.
6. Track your cancellation and no-show rates monthly against each platform’s limits.

The rest of this guide takes each step in turn.

Customer Cancellations: Choose the Policy Before They Happen

When a traveller books through an OTA, the OTA cancellation policy on that product applies, not the one on your website. You don’t handle the refund. The customer cancels through the platform and the platform refunds them. What you control is which policy the product is sold under.

GetYourGuide and Viator cancellation policies

Your Viator cancellation policy can be one of three types. Viator’s partner glossary describes them like this (as of October 2026):

Viator policy	What the traveller gets	Share of Viator products
Standard	Full refund up to 24 hours before. Inside 24 hours, a 100% penalty applies	About 85%
Custom	Whatever you design, usually partial refunds on a sliding scale	Not stated
All Sales Final	No refund, no amendments	About 10%

The default GetYourGuide cancellation policy is the same shape as Viator’s Standard policy: a full refund more than 24 hours before the start, and no refund inside 24 hours or for a no-show, unless you’ve set different conditions for the product. One rule catches people out. GetYourGuide doesn’t allow cancellation wording in your description that conflicts with the policy configured on the product. If your text says “48 hours’ notice” and the product is set to 24, fix the setting, not the text.

Which policy suits which product

Free cancellation sells. It also shows on your search card as a badge, which our guide to optimising your OTA listing covers. So the question isn’t “should I offer it?” but “what does a late cancellation actually cost me on this product?”

• Low fixed cost per seat (walking tours, museum entry, open-group tours with spare capacity): use the standard 24-hour policy. A lost seat costs you little, and the conversion boost is worth it.
• High fixed cost per booking (private boat charters, small-group trips with pre-bought tickets, transfers): consider a longer window through a custom policy. You’ll convert slightly worse, but you won’t be paying for fuel, guides or tickets nobody used.
• Fixed-date, limited-capacity events: All Sales Final can make sense on Viator, but expect it to convert noticeably worse.

Whichever you choose, price the risk in. Our GetYourGuide operator guide works through what three late cancellations do to a six-seat boat trip, and our guide to OTA commission models shows how cancellations push your effective commission rate above the contract rate.

When You Have to Cancel: What It Costs on Each Platform

This is the part of how to handle OTA cancellations that most guides skip, and it’s where most of the money is lost. Customer cancellations cost you a seat. Your own cancellations cost you a seat, a fee and some of your standing on the platform.

GetYourGuide: the 25% charge and the 1.0% limit

If you cancel a GetYourGuide booking yourself, and it isn’t force majeure, GetYourGuide deducts 25% of the retail price on your invoice. Its help centre guide to invoices describes this as “supply partner cancellation compensation”: the booking shows a “negative commission adjustment, representing 25% of the retail price.” The customer gets a full refund. According to summaries of GetYourGuide’s supplier terms, the charge doesn’t apply when a cancellation is the direct result of force majeure.

The cancellation also counts toward your supplier cancellation rate. GetYourGuide’s performance quality standards set a limit of 1.0% or lower, measured over a rolling 90 days. Activities that consistently miss it can be temporarily removed.

GetYourGuide’s examples of what counts include “lack of availability, vehicle issues, or requesting the traveler to cancel”. Bad weather, natural disasters, war, strikes and government actions are excluded.

Put those together and one bad day adds up quickly. Take a kayak operator in Galway (a hypothetical example) with 900 GetYourGuide bookings in a 90-day period. Their 1.0% limit is nine operator cancellations.

A storm closes the bay on a Saturday with 18 bookings at €60. If they cancel under “ordinary operational reasons”, that’s 18 cancellations against a limit of nine, plus €270 deducted from their invoice. If they log the same cancellation under “force majeure reasons”, with a link to the Met Éireann warning, it shouldn’t count against their rate at all.

Viator: 15% to stay listed, 5% for “Good”

Viator’s 2022 product standards say a listing’s supplier-driven cancellation rate must be below 15% for it to stay on Viator. Its Operator Resource Center sets higher bars for quality: below 5% for the “Good” level and below 2% for “Excellent”, on a rolling 90-day rate. Our Viator supplier guide covers what those quality levels affect.

Viator excludes cancellations due to adverse weather, significant global events, and cases where the customer asks you to cancel for them. That last exclusion doesn’t work the other way round: if you’re the one who wants the booking gone, it’s your cancellation.

“Just ask the customer to cancel”

It’s tempting to message a guest and ask them to cancel, so the cancellation shows up as theirs. On GetYourGuide, that’s listed explicitly as a supplier cancellation: “requesting the traveler to cancel” is one of GetYourGuide’s own examples. It also tends to produce exactly the kind of review you don’t want.

Take a food tour in Lisbon (another hypothetical). Only two people booked a Tuesday tour, and the owner asked both to cancel because the tour needs six to break even. Both cancelled, and both cancellations counted against the operator’s rate. The better fix is in the settings, not a message. GetYourGuide’s own guidance suggests setting a minimum number of participants, but check how that setting works on each platform before relying on it. The other fix is to stop selling departures that rarely reach six.

GetYourGuide vs Viator at a glance

	GetYourGuide	Viator
Default customer policy	Full refund up to 24h before	Standard: full refund up to 24h before (about 85% of products)
Other policy options	Product-specific conditions	Custom, All Sales Final
Your cancellation limit	1.0% (rolling 90 days); can lead to temporary removal	Below 15% to stay listed; below 5% “Good”; below 2% “Excellent”
Charge when you cancel	25% of retail price, deducted on your invoice (not for force majeure)	None published; it shows up in your rate and quality level
Weather	Excluded if logged as force majeure	Excluded; enable “Bad weather” in product setup
Customer no-shows	Report within 24h after the activity ends	No Show reporting tool in the Supplier Management Center

Figures as of October 2026. Check each platform’s supplier portal for current terms.

Weather and Force Majeure: Log It Correctly

For outdoor operators, weather is usually the main reason to cancel, and both platforms will leave it out of your rate. But only if you tell them it was the weather.

On GetYourGuide, cancelling a booking asks you to choose between three reasons: “Ordinary operational reasons”, “Force majeure reasons” and “Customer cancellation requests”. For weather, choose force majeure. Then write a short explanation and add a link to an official forecast or warning.

GetYourGuide’s guide to cancelling bookings explicitly suggests weather reports, news articles or government notices. Customers may be offered a new date. If they choose a refund or don’t answer within two days, the booking is cancelled automatically.

On Viator, the setting has to be in place before the weather arrives. In product setup, select “Bad weather” under “Other post-booking policies”. Do it now for every outdoor product, not on the morning of a storm.

Keep a simple record for every weather cancellation: the date, the warning or forecast you relied on, and the bookings affected. If a platform queries your cancellation rate later, that record is your evidence.

A former colleague of mine ran coastal boat trips, and she treated weather calls like a process, not a gut feeling. She checked the marine forecast at the same time every evening. If a warning covered the next morning’s departures, she made the call that night instead of waiting to see what the sky looked like at dawn.

Then she did the admin straight away. She cancelled every affected booking under the weather reason, pasted the forecast link into each one, and saved a screenshot of the warning in a folder named by date. Her logic was simple: a cancellation made at 7pm with the warning attached looks like what it is. One made at 9am the next day, with nothing attached, looks like an operator who didn’t fancy going out.

It cost her a few trips that would probably have run. But at the end of a stormy season, her cancellation rate on both platforms only showed the cancellations that were genuinely hers.

No-Shows: Get Paid for the Ones That Are Theirs

No-shows on OTAs come in two kinds. A no-show where the customer didn’t turn up is revenue you’ve earned, so make sure you collect it.

On GetYourGuide, report it in the Supplier Portal (Bookings, then Show Details, then “Report no-show customer(s)”) within 24 hours after the end of the activity. A report can’t be undone, so check before you submit. Under GetYourGuide’s terms, a customer no-show is treated as a completed booking for payment, though GetYourGuide can still refund in extenuating circumstances.

On Viator, use the No Show reporting tool in the Supplier Management Center once the start time has passed and you’re sure the traveller isn’t coming. Viator says operators who use it win 73% of chargeback disputes.

There’s a second kind of “no-show”, and it works against you. On GetYourGuide, the no-show rate counts bookings refunded because the customer says you weren’t at the meeting point. The limit is 0.2%: two in every 1,000 bookings.

A meeting point that’s easy to misread uses that up fast. Our guide to measuring OTA performance explains how to track it, and the listing guide covers how to write a meeting point nobody can get wrong.

Prevent Cancellations in Your Settings

GetYourGuide’s guidance to operators is blunt: “Cancellations of confirmed bookings should not happen, regardless of the number of participants booked.” Its own list of fixes is mostly settings:

• Block dates you can’t run: public holidays, staff leave, private hires.
• Set capacity to what you can actually deliver, not your best-case number.
• Set a minimum number of participants if a departure doesn’t work below a certain size (check how each platform applies it).
• Check your booking cut-off time, so last-minute bookings don’t land after you’ve stood the guide down.
• Connect your booking system so availability updates in real time across every channel.

Overbooking across channels is the classic cause of avoidable operator cancellations. If you’re still updating availability by hand on two or three portals, that’s the first thing to fix. Our comparison of Bókun vs FareHarbor vs Rezdy covers which booking systems connect to which OTAs.

Track OTA Cancellations Monthly

Put four numbers on your monthly scorecard for each platform:

• Your supplier cancellation rate, against 1.0% on GetYourGuide and 5% (and 15%) on Viator.
• Your no-show rate, against 0.2% on GetYourGuide.
• Customer cancellations by product and by how far ahead they booked, so you can see where a stricter policy would pay off.
• No-shows reported versus no-shows that happened, so none go unclaimed.

Check the rolling 90-day figures in each supplier portal at the start of the month. A storm week or a staffing problem can push you over a limit quickly, and it’s much easier to recover if you spot it early.

Where to Start

How to handle OTA cancellations well comes down to preparation. Choose each product’s policy deliberately, set capacity and minimums so you never have to cancel for operational reasons, and log weather as force majeure every time. On GetYourGuide, the difference between the right reason and the wrong one is 25% of the ticket price and a hit to your cancellation rate.

One thing to do today: open your Viator products and check that “Bad weather” is switched on for everything that runs outdoors. Then save a short template for GetYourGuide force majeure cancellations, with a space for the forecast link, so the right reason is the easy one to pick on a bad morning.