How to Get the Best Deals on Tours: 3 Insider Tips From a Tour Company Founder

If you've ever planned a trip, you've probably read a dozen guides on how to score cheap flights or find a hotel that punches above its price tag. That makes sense. Flights and hotels usually take up the biggest slice of any travel budget, so it's fair that most savings advice focuses there.

But experiences are where most of us actually want to spend. They're the parts of a trip we remember years later: the walking tour through cobbled streets, the pottery workshop in a back-street studio, the pasta-making class with someone's grandmother. And yet, almost nobody writes about how to get the best value on them.

So I thought I'd share what I've learned. I'm Bhavana, co-founder of Tourific, a self-guided audio tour company currently operating in over 100 cities across 9 languages. I've spent the last two years inside this industry, and I travel a lot myself. Below are the three things I personally do to get the best deals on tours and activities, in the order I'd recommend them.

1. Compare OTAs and consider booking direct

Online travel agencies like Tripadvisor and GetYourGuide are genuinely useful. They're the easiest way to discover what's available in a city, filter by rating, compare prices and read reviews. I use them all the time for research.

But I don't always book through them.

Here's why. OTAs charge tour operators a significant commission to be listed on their platforms. GetYourGuide, for example, charges around 30% commission on most tours and activities. That money has to come from somewhere, and it ends up in the price you pay.

Most tour operators are happy to pass a meaningful chunk of that commission back to you if you book directly through their own website or app. It's still cheaper for them than paying the OTA, and you get a better price. At Tourific, our direct prices are on average 20% cheaper than what you'd pay on an OTA for the exact same tour. There is a caveat to this method though and I'll get to that in my third tip/

A quick note on choosing an OTA

The major OTAs aren't interchangeable, and it's worth comparing two or three before you assume you've seen everything a city has to offer. I know you might prefer Booking.com because you have a"Genius" loyalty discount or your first choice is GetYourGuide as it tends to have stronger coverage in some European markets, particularly for tours offered in specific languages like German. But by looking at only one OTA you might miss out on a larger selection. For instance, GetYourGuide doesn't list lower-priced options like self-guided audio tours, so you'll never see those there at all and many operators prefer one platform over others.

My personal preference is Viator (part of Tripadvisor), simply because it usually has the largest selection of tours and experiences in any given city, including the lower-priced and self-guided options that other platforms filter out. Whichever you use, comparing across two or three is the only way to find all available experiences and to know whether a specific platform has a better deal on the exact tour you want.

When direct booking saves you the most

The savings from booking direct get even more meaningful in two specific situations:

Private tours. Private experiences are already premium-priced, so a 20 to 30% saving on a $250 private walking tour is real money you can put towards something else on the trip.

Group bookings of 10 or more. If you're travelling with extended family, a corporate group, or a bachelor or bachelorette party, contact the tour company directly. Most operators are willing to offer a discount for groups of 10 plus, and many don't advertise this publicly. At Tourific, for example, we're happy to offer 25% off for large group bookings. A simple email asking, "Do you offer group rates?" almost always gets a useful response.

2. Use self-guided tours for the must-see landmarks

Let's be honest about how most of us travel. When we land in a new city, we want to see the famous landmarks. We want to know the fun legends, hear about the kings and the wars and the ghosts, and feel like we've covered the "must-dos." That part of travel isn't going away, and it shouldn't.

The question is how to do it without burning your budget or your time.

A standard group walking tour costs anywhere from $20 to $50 per person in most European cities, and a private guided tour can easily run $200 to $400 for a half day. Even "free" tours require a tip of 10-20 $ depending on the length and quality. Group tours also tend to mess with your schedule, since you have to show up at a fixed time, walk at the group's pace, and stop where the guide stops, not where you want to.

This is where self-guided audio tours come in. Full disclosure: this is the problem we set out to solve at Tourific. A self-guided audio tour gives you the same landmarks, the same stories and the same historical context as a group tour, but you walk at your own pace, start whenever you want, and pay a fraction of the price. Most self-guided tours cost between $5 and $10 for the entire experience.

The math is simple. A family of four taking a group walking tour might spend $120 to $200 on a single morning. The same family doing a self-guided audio tour pays under $25 and saves the rest for something they genuinely can't replicate elsewhere, like a cooking class, a pottery workshop, a wine tasting, or just a really good dinner.

In fact, this gap between "I want to see the landmarks" and "I don't want to be herded around" was one of the reasons I started Tourific in the first place.

3. Book ahead, but be strategic about where

The best tours, and almost always the best-value tours, sell out well in advance. This is especially true for niche experiences with small group sizes, like cooking classes, food tours, or anything that includes a workshop. If you wait until you're already in the city, you'll be left with whatever's still available, which is usually the more expensive options or the ones with mediocre reviews.

So book ahead. But here's where I'll partially contradict my first tip.

If you're travelling during peak season (summer in Europe, festival weekends, school holidays), book through an OTA like Viator, even though you'll pay slightly more. Most OTAs offer free cancellation up to 24 to 48 hours before the experience. Travel plans during peak season change all the time, and that flexibility is worth the small premium.

If you're travelling in the off season, the calculation flips. Tour operators sometimes cancel during low-demand periods if they don't get enough bookings, or if the weather turns. In those cases, having a backup plan matters more than saving a few dollars. Self-guided tours are the perfect backup. They run regardless of weather, group size or operator availability, and you can pick one up the morning of.

My typical approach when planning a trip looks like this:

1. Use different OTAs to research and shortlist what I want to do.

2. Book the headline experiences (cooking classes, day trips, anything that tends to sell out) directly with the operator if I'm sure of my dates, or through an OTA with free cancellation if my plans are still fluid.

3. Have one or two self-guided tours queued up as my main way to cover the city's landmarks.

   
   

That's it. Three tips, all of which I actually use myself, and none of which require a discount code, a loyalty programme or a credit card hack.