How to Write an OTA Product Description That Gets Booked
To write an OTA product description, work field by field and give each field one job. The short description says what the experience is. The highlights give three to five reasons to book. The full description sets honest expectations. Inclusions and important information match your settings exactly.
Write it from a fact sheet, not your website, and check it against the platform’s rules before you submit.
Most operators write their listing once, in a hurry, during sign-up, then never touch it again. It shows.
Copy from a website gets pasted into a field built for something else. The cancellation wording in the text disagrees with the policy in the settings. And “skip the line” promises a queue that visitors still stand in.
If travellers aren’t clicking your listing at all, the description isn’t your problem. Fix the search card first, as our guide to optimising your OTA listing explains. This guide is for the next stage: travellers click, read and don’t book, or book and then complain. It covers each field in turn, what attractions need that tours don’t, the platform rules worth checking, a before-and-after rewrite and a fact sheet you can reuse for every platform.
Key Takeaways
- Write each field for a different reader: GetYourGuide’s own supplier advice says most customers won’t read the full description, so the short description and highlights do most of the selling
- Build highlights from your five-star reviews, in your guests’ words, not from your marketing copy
- Entry ticket listings need different content from tours: exactly what the ticket covers, what “skip the line” skips, and what isn’t included
- GetYourGuide’s quality guidelines restrict “Half-Day”, “Small Group”, contact details and cancellation wording, so check every description against them before submitting
- Keep one master fact sheet and adapt it per platform; the rule is that copy must be your own work, not that every platform needs different facts
How to Write an OTA Product Description in 7 Steps
- Start from a fact sheet, not your website copy.
- Write the short description for the traveller who won’t scroll.
- Turn your best review themes into three to five highlights.
- Use the full description to set expectations, then add the story.
- Make inclusions, exclusions and important information match your settings exactly.
- Remove anything the platform bans: contact details, “book direct” lines, and prices or discounts in titles.
- Adapt the copy for each platform instead of pasting it across unchanged.
The sections below take each step in turn. Steps 1, 3 and 5 are where most listings fall down.
Start From a Fact Sheet, Not Your Website
Website copy is written to sell your business. An OTA product description has to sell one experience to someone comparing it with dozens of others on the same screen. As Kate Cornell, who previously worked at Viator, told Arival, “people don’t care necessarily who the operator is on an OTA site, they care about the experience they’re gonna get.” Your founding story, awards and years in business mostly belong on your own site.
Before you write a word, put the facts in one document:
- Duration, and how long people actually spend if it’s self-guided
- Exactly what’s included and what isn’t
- Group size, languages and guide or audio guide arrangements
- Where it starts, how to get there and what to look for on arrival
- Physical demands: steps, walking distance, uneven ground, heat or cold
- Who it isn’t suitable for
- What to bring and what’s not allowed
- The three things guests praise most, and the one thing they complain about
That last line comes from your reviews, and it’s the most useful line on the sheet. The rest of this guide draws on it.
The fact sheet also makes GetYourGuide’s AI Content Creator worth using. It’s built into product creation in the supplier portal and fills 13 listing fields from whatever you paste in.
GetYourGuide says it works best with at least 700 characters of input, and claims listings built with it see up to 28% higher conversion rates (its own figure as of October 2026, with no method published). Feed it the fact sheet rather than your homepage text, then check every factual claim it produces. A wrong duration or inclusion written by the tool still becomes your complaint.
OTA Product Description Best Practices, Field by Field
Each field has one job. Most weak listings use every field for the same job, selling, and leave travellers without the answers they need to book.
Short description: for the traveller who won’t scroll
GetYourGuide’s own supplier advice is blunt: most customers won’t read the full description. The short description is the part that gets read. Give it two or three sentences that say what the experience is, where it happens and why it’s worth doing.
Lead with the experience, not the adjective. “Climb the 128 steps of a 14th-century tower for the only rooftop view over the old town” beats “Enjoy an unforgettable and magical experience”. The first could only be about one place. The second could be about anything.
Highlights: borrow your guests’ words
Highlights are three to five short bullet points, each starting with a verb. The best source for them is your reviews.
Read your last 30 five-star reviews and note what guests mention without being prompted. If 12 of them mention the guide’s stories about the prison cells, that’s a highlight. If nobody mentions the gift shop, it isn’t, however proud of it you are. Cornell’s advice in the same interview was to “use your reviews as source of truth”, and it works because guests describe what they valued in the words the next traveller is looking for.
Full description: set expectations, then add the story
The full description is read by fewer people, but they tend to be the careful ones: families, older travellers, anyone with a reason to worry.
Answer their questions first. How much walking? How many steps? Is it indoors? What happens in rain? Then add the narrative.
This is also where you prevent bad reviews. Many complaints come from a gap between what a listing promised and what happened. Photos make promises too: a sunset or a live guide in the gallery is something guests expect to get, which is why our guide to choosing photos for your OTA listing says to check every image against your description.
If there are 200 steps and no lift, say so here. You’ll lose a few bookings from people who couldn’t manage them anyway, and avoid the one-star reviews they’d have left. Our guide to managing reviews on OTA platforms covers what happens after the review lands. Better copy means fewer of them to manage.
Inclusions, exclusions and important information: match your settings
Use the structured fields as they’re meant to be used. Inclusions and exclusions are short, factual lists: “Entry ticket”, “Audio guide in 8 languages”, “Not included: special exhibitions”. Important information covers access, age limits, what to bring and arrival times.
Whatever you write in free text has to agree with your settings. GetYourGuide’s Activity Quality Guidelines state that cancellation information in free-text fields must be consistent with the cancellation policy configured for the product. “Full refund up to 48 hours before” in the description, alongside a 24-hour policy in the settings, is a breach, and the kind of mismatch that turns into a dispute. Our guide to handling OTA cancellations covers setting that policy in the first place.
Titles follow their own rules. The listing optimisation guide covers them, so they’re not repeated here.
How to Write a Tour Description vs an Attraction Ticket Description
Almost every guide to writing a tour description assumes a tour, with a guide, an itinerary and stops. A museum, castle, zoo or observation deck sells something different, and its listing needs to answer different questions:
- What exactly does the ticket get me? Which buildings, floors, galleries or areas, and which ones need a separate ticket.
- Is entry timed, and how strict is the slot? Can I arrive 30 minutes late?
- What does “skip the line” actually skip? The ticket desk queue, the entry queue or the security check. Name it.
- How long do people usually spend here? A range is fine: “most visitors spend two to three hours”.
- What isn’t included? Special exhibitions, audio guides, parking, the café.
- What’s the access like? Lifts, step-free routes, buggy parking, whether wheelchairs can reach every area.
“Skip the line” causes more trouble than any other phrase on ticket listings.
I once worked with a historic attraction whose OTA listings all promised skip-the-line entry. The ticket did skip the ticket desk. It didn’t skip the security check, which was where the queue actually formed in summer, sometimes for 40 minutes. The reviews that August were almost all about queuing, from people who felt they’d been misled.
Changing the wording to “skip the ticket desk queue (security check still applies)” cost nothing, and the complaints stopped within a month.
Before and After: One Listing Rewritten
Here’s how that looks in a real OTA product description, using a hypothetical example: a medieval castle on the English coast, selling a £16 adult entry ticket on GetYourGuide.
| Field | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Short description | Discover our amazing castle, voted one of the best days out in the region! Family-run for generations, we offer a truly unforgettable experience for all ages. | Explore a 14th-century coastal fortress, from the great hall to the battlements above the North Sea. Your ticket includes the keep, the dungeons and the walled gardens. |
| Highlights | Amazing views; Great for families; Gift shop and café | Walk the battlements for views along 20 miles of coastline · Step into the dungeons where smugglers were held in 1745 · Try on armour in the hands-on family room |
| Important information | Please contact us at bookings@ with any questions. | The keep has 160 steps and no lift; the gardens and great hall are step-free. Most visitors spend two to three hours. Dogs on leads are welcome in the gardens only. |
The before version sells the business, repeats claims the traveller can’t check and puts an email address in a field where GetYourGuide prohibits contact details. The after version could only describe this castle. It answers the questions a parent with a buggy or an older visitor would ask, and the highlights read like something a guest might say in a review.
GetYourGuide Listing Tips: The Rules to Check Before You Submit
GetYourGuide publishes the clearest written rules of the major platforms. Even if you’re not on GetYourGuide, they’re a good standard to write to. These come from its Activity Quality Guidelines (last updated July 2025; check the supplier help centre for current wording).
| Rule | What it means for your copy |
|---|---|
| “Half-Day” and “Full-Day” | Use “Half-Day” only for 4 to 7 hours, “Full-Day” only for 8 hours or more |
| “Small Group” | Only for 10 people or fewer on standard activities, 15 or fewer on day trips, 18 or fewer on multi-day tours |
| Listing language | Write in the language selected for the listing (local place names and brand names are fine) |
| Original work | No copying from other listings or generic sources |
| Contact details | No phone numbers, emails, website URLs or social handles in free text; essential operational contacts go in Voucher Info only |
| Booking direct | Don’t encourage travellers to book with you directly |
| Cancellation wording | Must match the cancellation policy configured for the product |
| Accuracy | Descriptive text “must be accurate, comprehensive, and free of major inconsistencies” |
| Duplicates | No separate listings for near-identical activities; durations and languages become options |
The “book direct” rule catches more operators than you’d expect, usually through text pasted from their own website. It’s also bad strategy, as our guide to direct bookings vs OTA explains: the place to win those customers back is on the day, not in the listing.
We couldn’t find an equivalent public rulebook from Viator, but its 2022 quality standards require product content to “accurately represent what is included in the price and what type of activity is offered”. Your Viator description also travels further than you might think. Since Viator’s August 2026 supplier agreement, its content can appear through partners including Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb, so write it to stand on its own without your branding around it.
One Description, Several Platforms
Operators on three or four OTAs often ask whether they need completely different text for each one. They don’t. GetYourGuide’s rule is that content must be your original work and not copied from other listings or generic sources. Reusing your own copy is a different thing.
What does differ is the layout. Each platform has its own fields, character counts and ordering. A highlight list that works on GetYourGuide may need to become part of an overview on Viator.
So keep one master fact sheet, and adapt the wording to each platform’s fields and audience. Cornell’s advice was to stay “as uniform and structured with that content as you can”. When your opening hours or inclusions change, you update the fact sheet first and every listing from it, and none of them drifts out of date.
Our platform guides for GetYourGuide and Viator cover each portal’s set-up in detail.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Pasting website copy. It sells the business, not the experience, and often includes links or “book direct” lines the platform bans.
- Vague superlatives. “Unforgettable”, “amazing” and “best in town” give travellers nothing to compare.
- Hiding the awkward facts. Steps, queues and weather exposure left out of the description turn up in reviews instead.
- Settings and text that disagree. Duration, cancellation policy and inclusions must match everywhere.
- Misusing protected labels. “Small Group” for 25 people or “Half-Day” for a 3-hour trip breaks GetYourGuide’s rules.
- Writing once and never updating. Prices, opening times and inclusions change. Listings often don’t, and outdated details lead to the complaints and cancellations that OTA ranking algorithms penalise.
Start With Your Reviews
A good OTA product description isn’t clever writing. It’s accurate, specific and organised so travellers find the answer they need in the field they expect it in. The short description and highlights sell the experience, the full description and important information protect your reviews, and the rules keep the listing out of trouble.
One thing to do today: read your last 30 reviews on your busiest platform. Write down the three things guests praise and the one thing they complain about. Then check that your highlights mention the first three, and that your important information prepares people for the fourth. If either is missing, that’s your first edit.
OTA Product Description FAQ
How long should an OTA product description be?
Long enough to answer a careful traveller’s questions, and no longer. Keep the short description to two or three sentences and the highlights to three to five bullets. The full description can run to several short paragraphs, as long as the practical information comes first.
Can I use the same description on GetYourGuide and Viator?
You can reuse your own facts and much of your own wording. GetYourGuide’s rule is against copying other people’s listings or generic text, not against using your own copy elsewhere. Adapt it to each platform’s fields so it reads naturally in their layout.
Should I use GetYourGuide’s AI Content Creator?
It’s a reasonable starting point if you give it a detailed fact sheet of at least 700 characters. Check every fact it produces before submitting. Errors in durations or inclusions become complaints, whoever wrote them.
Can I include my website or phone number in an OTA listing?
Not on GetYourGuide. Its guidelines ban phone numbers, emails, website URLs and social media handles in free-text fields, along with any encouragement to book direct. Essential operational contact details belong in the Voucher Info section only.
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