How to Save Money On Travel: Activities/Excursions/Tours Edition (Using GetYourGuide and Viator)

Updated November 3, 2025

Originally published November 1, 2025

The reality is that traveling can still be expensive even if you have used miles for your flight and points for your hotel with money spent on activities and excursions quickly adding up.

I have talked about it before but here I will do a deep dive into what I mean when I say that I am money hacking or maximizing my spend. I take the money that I was going to use – say on booking activities, excursions, tours and get more from that spend. Let me show you exactly how I save money and earn miles/points on the things I see and do whilst on my trips!

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Why Use Viator or GetYourGuide To Book Activities, Excursions, Tours+ ?

Viator is a platform that allows you to book tours, excursions, museum passes and much more around the world – they are similar to Etsy in which they host the tour companies that provide these services or goods (but they do not directly provide the tours as Etsy does not directly sell the handcrafted items on its site). I love that I can see reviews to help me choose the right company and love that there are double/triple travel hacking stacking opportunities (more on that of this post). For more info on Viator, check out this post.

In the same vein, GetYourGuide is also a platform that allows you to book tours, excursions, museum passes and much more around the world. While there is often overlap between the two, there are often times that I can only find an activity on GetYourGuide or Viator so it pays to check both sites out. For more info on GetYourGuide, check out my review and how to guide here.

Savings Using GetYourGuide

Savings Using Viator

Viator Rewards

• Introduced in 2023, this program now gives you 5% of the tour price on eligible bookings upon completion (the amounts that you are seeing above right are when it was 10% of the activity/excursion price!)
  • You can see the rewards amount during booking or on your confirmation if eligible as well as Viator sending you an email once they have been added to your account
• Once added to your account, the funds can be used towards future bookings.
• Beautiful tips: Learn from my unfortunate mistakes.
  • 1: You will earn rewards in the currency of your first booking so all other bookings need to be in that currency to earn rewards (ie 1st: paid in US dollars, 5th: paid in British pounds – I did not earn on these and that was a decent amount of cash =/)
  • 2: Rewards expire 180 days after they are added to your account – I had over $200 expire!
    • Beautiful tip: To extend your rewards you can book an activity (make sure it’s cancel for free!), apply rewards and cancel. This will reset the expiration period to six months from date of cancellation.

My Real Life Redemptions Using Viator Rewards!

Also known as all of the activities that I was able to do around the world for only $1 (and these are only the activities that I have written up about!)

Add in More Savings with Shopping Portals

What is a shopping portal? Condensed version: You shop with one small difference being that you do it through a shopping portal. They get paid by the store/merchant for your business and then will pass on some of that money to you! Fairly straightforward to do but proper cooking tracking is vital!

One of my fave resources and it’s free! Cashback monitor helps me figure out which shopping portal is paying what and is a good time to showcase how personalized travel hacking is? AA miles are so valuable to me that I would forgo what is technically more cashback – more why in the AA Shopping Portal section below =)

More Savings with Cash Back when using Rakuten

Book via Rakuten and earn cashback or Amex MR points – here’s all you need to know about Rakuten here.

Or Wanting Miles Instead? Use the AA Shopping Portal

I will typically use the American Airline eshopping portal – read this for my detailed explanation for why, but the TLDR version is that 1392 AA miles is more valuable than the $18.56 I would have earned at 8% Cashback via Rakuten for these activities. I flew to Anguilla in January for only 12K Miles (and that flight was originally 10K Miles but I kept changing the dates last minute) and the flights would have been $1,148.41 had I paid in cash!

Remember to Check For Credit Card Offers To Add in More Savings!

I make a habit to check my credit card for offer periodically but especially when I am booking activities and excursions as I have seen Viator offers for both my AMEX and Chase cards – sadly have not seen any for GetYourGuide ever.

Note: that this deal shows up periodically on Chase Offers as the one shown expired August 30 but I received another one right after that expired September 29 AND the best part of Chase Offers is that they can be used on ALL cards that you have the offer on versus Amex when you can only redeem once! You just need to add the offer to all cards before having one of the offers redeemed. For my Iceland trip, this was be a very nice bonus for me!

See how easy it is to make your money work harder for you?