The Best Tour Booking Sites: GetYourGuide, Viator, Klook, Tiqets and ToursByLocals Compared

You’ve found the tour you want. The problem is that it’s on GetYourGuide at one price, it’s on Viator at a slightly different price, and the operator’s own website has a third number that may or may not include the same things. You’ve got three tabs open, and you’re wondering whether the cheap one is a scam, whether the expensive one includes something the others don’t, and what happens to your money if the whole thing gets cancelled. We’ve been in exactly that position plenty of times since 2010, when we started doing this full time. We’ve booked tours both ways since then, some through platforms like GetYourGuide and some direct with the operator. A fair few we took as guests of the operators themselves, and we flag those wherever they come up. For this guide we also did something most tour comparisons don’t. We read the contracts tour operators sign with GetYourGuide and Viator, pulled the commission numbers out of Tripadvisor’s investor filings, ran live checkouts to see what fees appear, and searched five platforms for the same four destinations on the same day to count what each one really sells. Where our first-hand booking experience is thin, we say so, and you can judge th...