On June 3, 2025, GetYourGuide raised commissions to 30%. With one month's notice.

On June 3, 2025, tour and activity operators around the world received the same email from GetYourGuide, one of the largest experience booking platforms. The content, documented by Arival, the industry's reference publication: your commission is going up, in many cases from 20% to 30%, effective July 3. Exactly one month's notice. In the middle of high season. The stated reason: "to ensure fairness and reflect current market conditions". No negotiation. Anyone who didn't like it could remove themselves from the platform.

After the backlash, some operators who disputed the increase through support got it reversed. Others didn't. But the point of this story isn't how it ended. It's that it could happen at all.

This isn't an outlier. It's the model.

If you work with BookYogaRetreats, BookSurfCamps, or the other platforms in the Tripaneer group, open their terms and conditions: the platform "has the right to modify the applicable commission", with the sole obligation of telling you in advance. Your alternative, in black and white, is removing your listings. The same clauses, in different words, sit in nearly every portal's terms, from the retreat verticals all the way to Booking.com, where the standard commission starts at 15% and climbs to 20-25% for visibility in preferred programs.

It's not malice: it's the logic of whoever owns the channel. A platform that controls access to your customers can redefine the terms whenever it wants, because it knows that for many operators the alternative, disappearing from the platform, is scarier than the increase. The day they decide, you have a month to adjust. Like the GetYourGuide operators did.

Let's run the numbers on a retreat. A €900 ticket at 20% commission: you hand over €180 per person. The platform moves to 30%: €270. Across a 12-guest session that's €3,240, the equivalent of three and a half guests working for free for the portal. And you didn't make that decision. You received it by email.

The direct channel isn't anti-OTA. It's insurance.

Let's be clear about one thing, because the point is not to demonize platforms. OTAs are a marketing channel: they put you in front of people who would never have found you, and for that, a commission can be money well spent. As Martin Harlow, the distribution expert Arival quotes on this very case, puts it: don't obsess over the commission, make them earn it.

The problem isn't paying 20% on a booking you'd never have gotten. The problem is when platforms are the only way customers reach you. At that point you don't have a marketing vendor: you have a landlord for your price list. And every email like the one from June 3 is something you suffer instead of something you evaluate.

A direct channel, meaning a website that converts, a way to book without middlemen, a contact list you own, and a steady flow of inquiries that doesn't pass through any portal, is what transforms the relationship. With a direct channel bringing half your bookings, the increase to 30% becomes a commercial decision: you accept it, raise your prices on the portal, or limit availability there and keep your best dates for your own channel (all options the operators interviewed by Arival were actively considering). Without a direct channel, the same email is an ultimatum.

This piece stops at the risk and the negotiating leverage. How to actually use portals to your advantage, date by date and as a demanding customer, is the subject of its twin piece on strategic OTA use.

What you can do right now

First: measure your dependence. Take last year's bookings and split them by origin: how many from portals, how many direct (website, WhatsApp, email, word of mouth)? If portals are above 60-70%, you'll be on the receiving end of every future commission increase. That number is your risk level, and most hosts have never calculated it.

Second: make sure whoever finds you on a portal can find you again outside it. Your name on the listing, a well-kept Google profile, a website that shows up when someone searches your name: a guest who came through a portal once should be able to come back direct. Every guest who doesn't pay commission on their second booking is margin coming home.

Third: build the channel before you need it. The right moment to have a direct channel isn't when the increase email lands: it's now, while you can build it calmly. A site that converts, contact capture, inquiries that arrive even while the portals sleep. It's months of work, not days, which is exactly why it should start before the next email.

Fourth: negotiate from a different position. The operators who got GetYourGuide to reverse the increase were the ones who disputed, documented, and insisted. You negotiate best when you can afford to say no, and you can only say no if the portal isn't your only door.

If you'd like to know your current level of portal dependence, and what the next increase would cost you in real money, that's one of the first things we calculate together in a free audit. And if the missing piece is a website that actually converts direct visitors into inquiries, that's the work we do every day at GrowYourTribe: happy to show you what it would look like for your place.

Sources & references

1. Arival · Janelle Visser, "GetYourGuide Commission Increasing for Some Operators" (June 10, 2025, updated July 7, 2025) · https://arival.travel/article/getyourguide-commission-increasing-for-some-operators/ · June 3, 2025 notices, increases from 20% to 30% effective July 3, 2025 (one month's notice), email screenshots, operator reactions, partial reversals after disputes, Martin Harlow quote.
2. Tripaneer (BookYogaRetreats, BookSurfCamps and others) · Terms and conditions / commission policy · https://www.bookyogaretreats.com/terms-and-conditions and https://tripaneer.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/360000114605-Commission-VAT- · The platform may modify the commission with notice; the organizer's alternative is removing their listings.
3. Cloudbeds · "A Guide to OTA Commission Rates in 2026" · https://www.cloudbeds.com/online-travel-agencies/commissions/ · Booking.com 15-17% standard, 20-25% preferred.