GetYourGuide.com is one of the most popular online travel agencies (OTAs) for tour operators to reach new travellers and grow their customer base. It has 20+ million monthly website visitors and is an invaluable addition to your distribution network.
Joining GetYourGuide (GYG) and listing experiences is simple — most tour operators can be up and running in a day. GetYourGuide offers a suite of tools to manage tour availability and bookings directly through their platform.
However, the challenge most tour operators face when selling across OTAs is keeping multiple calendars up-to-date and consistent.
GetYourGuide provides tools to manage bookings, but only for reservations made through their platform. If you also sell on your website or other OTAs (like Viator, Expedia, or Trip.com), you need to manually track each booking, consolidate them into a central calendar, and update availability across all platforms.
This process is time-consuming and may result in double bookings, staff overbooking, or missed reservations.
That’s why most tour operators use OTA booking management systems to connect and synchronise all sales channels. They’re convenient, time-saving, and prevent issues where you have to cancel or reschedule customers (and risk losing their business).
We’re a Tripadvisor brand and GetYourGuide connectivity partner, and our booking system, Bókun, provides channel management solutions for tour and activity operators to keep an organised, centralised calendar.
We’ve created this guide to discuss the best practices for managing GetYourGuide bookings and how our system supports booking management.
Best practices for managing GetYourGuide bookings
You can use GetYourGuide’s booking management tools to monitor reservations if it’s your only sales channel or if your travel distribution network is small.
Source: GetYourGuide Support
This management is fairly straightforward: Monitor your GetYourGuide supplier account for incoming bookings, view all new bookings in the Bookings tab, and then schedule tour guides for experiences.
If you also sell on your website or other channels, you’ll need to gather details from your GetYourGuide bookings, add them to your centralised calendar, and then proceed with scheduling guides.
Source: GetYourGuide Support
You can also sort GetYourGuide bookings by activity date or checkout date — to view them as a schedule or as a customer purchase history and see when bookings are made. You may also use GetYourGuide filters to view bookings by experience type or other criteria.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the Bookings dashboard shows the status and a basic overview of each booking, but you can also open reservations to view the full details.
Source: GetYourGuide Support
GetYourGuide’s reservation management tools let you:
- Edit reservation details (update attendee information or modify products)
- Create and assign tickets for travellers
- Request cancellations
- Reschedule customers
- Report no-shows
If you use GetYourGuide’s tools to manage bookings, we recommend:
- Setting booking cut-offs and monitoring availability to avoid double bookings or overbooking, and to keep all calendars consistent.
- Creating cancellation policies to prevent last-minute changes, which are easier for teams to miss or overlook.
- Turning on booking notifications to stay alerted of new reservations. That said, you should still check calendars daily to ensure they stay up-to-date.
However, even GetYourGuide recommends connecting with a channel manager to centralise bookings, keep availability current, and ensure the best booking experience for customers.
That’s why they partner and integrate with various OTA booking management software, allowing the systems to work in tandem.
Source: GetYourGuide Connectivity
In addition to Bókun, GetYourGuide partners with names like Rezdy, Ventrata, and Travelotopos. They also work with Regiondo, FareHarbor, Palisis, bookingkit, Experience Bank, and more.
They’ll even reward tour operators for connecting an OTA booking system by promoting their experiences more frequently or ranking them higher in results. GetYourGuide aims to provide its customers the best experiences from the most credible tour operators.
How Bókun lets you create & maintain a centralised, real-time booking calendar
Bókun is designed for tour and experience providers, with an array of tools to manage bookings, staff, and operations. You can centralise and organise bookings across all sales channels, set availability and automate updates, and oversee the entire customer experience from one hub.
We’re a leading tour operator software in the market because:
- Bókun provides a robust toolset to handle all areas of operations (e.g., bookings, availability, resources, staff, customer experiences, financial reporting, etc.).
- We’re connectivity partners with OTAs like GetYourGuide and Viator, meaning our platforms work seamlessly and have the strongest API performance. As a Tripadvisor brand, we also offer extra perks for tour operators selling on Viator, such as twelve free subscription checks every year.
- Tour operators can enjoy these benefits without breaking the bank. We charge a flat subscription cost of $49 and offer the lowest booking fees amongst competitors (1% to 1.5% for online bookings). Additionally, we waive Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations.
We offer two solutions for tour operators to manage GetYourGuide bookings:
- You can use Bókun as your restech software to manage all bookings and operations. We offer a 14-day free trial (no credit card required!) so you can explore our platform, features, and Marketplace.
- You can use Bókun’s channel manager API to connect your existing booking system with OTAs and synchronise calendars. Our API also lets you leverage Bókun Marketplace to grow your distribution network. Bókun then acts as the middleman to route bookings to your main calendar and keep availability updated on all channels in real time.
We have 10+ years of experience working with tour and activity providers, large and small. Whether exploring online sales channels or adding to your distribution network, our products can support your growth strategies and keep you organised as you scale.
In the following sections, we’ll briefly explain how Bókun works to connect your sales channels and manage your booking calendar.
You can also watch an introduction to Bókun below:
Connect with GetYourGuide and other OTAs
Bókun connects with dozens of OTAs so you can sell tours through multiple streams and fill your booking calendar. In addition to GetYourGuide and Viator, you can connect with Trip.com, Klook, Tiqets, Civitatis, Expedia, Headout, TourRadar, Google Things to do, and more.
Integrating with OTAs is easy — choose the site you’d like to connect from the Sales tools tab. Then, you can log into your GetYourGuide account (for example), and the set-up assistant will guide you through the rest.
Create partnerships with other tour operators & travel businesses
In addition to OTAs, our online Marketplace is home to thousands of businesses in the travel industry. This includes not only tour and experience operators like yourself but also travel agents, DMOs, hotels, resorts, rental providers, and attractions like theatres, museums, and theme parks. This diverse network allows you to establish partnerships and collaborate with other travel businesses.
Tour operators use our Marketplace in three primary ways:
- Connecting with resellers: First, they connect with resellers who promote and sell tours on their behalf. Selling tours through OTAs and partners is a great way to reach new customers and book out your calendar.
- Working with resellers: Tour operators can also work as resellers, promoting others’ experiences and services for a commission. This allows our users to continue driving new revenue even when their calendars are full.
- Creating tour packages: Finally, they create tour packages with other businesses to offer more standout or convenient experiences. They can partner with different tour operators to provide combo experiences or work with a hotel or car rental company to cover other parts of customers’ travel.
We don’t limit the number of contracts you can create (see how one client grew their network with 100+ reseller contracts!), and we provide all the tools to manage communications and contracts in Bókun. You can send initial outreach emails, negotiate terms and commissions, and store all documents in a central repository.
We also send notifications when contracts are set to expire so you can stay on top of renewals.
Read more: Venice Tours achieved a 400% revenue increase through the Bókun Marketplace
Embed our booking engine widget on your site to enable direct bookings
Bókun’s restech system includes our booking engine widget to enable direct online bookings. You can embed our widget on your existing site, or, if you don’t already have a site, use our one-click website builder to bring your brand online.
Our website builder is user-friendly, and we provide a gallery of templates to help you hit the ground running. You can plug in the fields with custom text, colours, images, and even include brand elements like logos.
All sites include the booking widget and are optimised for desktop and mobile devices. We’ll even do the legwork to bring your site online and secure your preferred domain.
Read more: How to create a booking website in 7 steps
Route all bookings back to Bókun
All bookings — from OTAs, partners, and your website — are routed back to the Bókun booking calendar. You can also add offline bookings to this calendar at no extra charge, allowing you to manage all reservations in one place. The calendar updates in real-time as users make, modify, or cancel bookings, so this management is fully automated.
Managers can then schedule guides for experiences, and staff can view their schedule through the Bókun calendar.
Users can access the booking calendar from our desktop or mobile apps (available for iOS and Android). This allows both in-office staff and guides to stay informed and access booking details. They know who’s scheduled for each experience and can review any special accommodations.
Bonus: Our apps include a ticket scanning feature for checking in travellers upon their arrival. Guides can also mark no-shows during check-in, making it easy to keep accurate records.
Bókun availability & inventory management
Bókun updates your availability across all sales channels as new reservations feed into your booking calendar. Our availability management tool blocks off reserved time slots and prevents double bookings or overbookings by checking:
- Minimum and maximum capacities
- Booking cutoffs
- Physical inventory (like kayaks for boat tours or bikes for bike tours)
Your availability auto-updates on your site, partner sites, and OTAs, so travellers only see open booking times.
You can also manually edit your availability from the central booking calendar — such as blocking out a specific day or departure time — to quickly apply those changes across all channels.
Note: Bókun channel management only lets you manage bookings and availability on OTAs. If you want to add a product to GetYourGuide or edit the details of a tour listing, you’ll do that on GetYourGuide’s site.
Bókun reporting dashboard
Our restech system includes a reporting dashboard to see where you’re earning business. You can monitor bookings by sales channel, calculate bookings and revenue by partner, see which tours are most popular, pinpoint busy and slow seasons, and more. These insights lend to your growth strategies so you can lean into what’s successful.
For example, if you notice the majority of your bookings come from OTAs, you could dig into which OTAs bring the most bookings, then open up more availability or add more tour experiences to those channels. Alternatively, you could think about ways to increase direct bookings from your site and lower OTA costs.
Read more: 10 ways to get more tour reservations & earn new customers
Next steps
In summary, there are three solutions to manage GetYourGuide bookings:
- If you’re only selling tours on GetYourGuide (or very few sales channels), you can use GetYourGuide’s Bookings tab to track new bookings and view detailed information. Then, you can copy booking details to a central calendar or spreadsheet.
- If you sell on multiple channels, you’ll want an OTA booking system like Bókun to maintain organisation and automate booking management tasks. You can use Bókun’s complete restech system to manage website, OTA, and partner bookings.
- If you already have a restech system to manage website bookings, you can opt for our channel manager API. This solution connects with OTAs and the Bókun Marketplace, routes all bookings to your central calendar, and synchronises availability across all channels.
Our clients love us because our channel management solutions are advanced yet user-friendly — there’s no learning curve to get started — and we offer the most competitive pricing in the market.
Our restech system — with Bókun’s core functionality — starts at $49/month. We charge the lowest booking fees (1%–1.5%) for website, OTA, and partner bookings. We waive Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations. Offline bookings are always free.
Start your 14-day free trial to explore the platform!
Our channel manager API is configured on a per-customer basis, with custom quotes provided based on booking volume. If you already have a reservation system and want to learn more about this solution, you can request a free demo with us.
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