Selling Rome tours on GetYourGuide: what ranks

Rome is one of the most contested tour markets on any marketplace. Nearly every first-time visitor wants the Colosseum and the Vatican, and dozens of operators sell close to the same itinerary. If you sell tours in Rome and you run that one city, the hard part isn’t getting listed. It’s getting seen on a page where the leaders have years of reviews behind them.

This note is for that operator. It covers what GetYourGuide says it rewards, what Rome’s first page actually looks like (from our Rome report), where the crowding sits, and a practical plan for finding a position you can hold. It doesn’t promise a ranking formula. GetYourGuide doesn’t publish one, and you should be wary of anyone who claims to know it.

What GetYourGuide rewards (and what it doesn’t say)

GetYourGuide doesn’t disclose how it orders search results. What it tells suppliers consistently, and what we covered in our GetYourGuide supplier guide, is that ranking favours listings that travellers are more likely to book and less likely to regret. In practice that comes down to three levers:

• Conversion. How often people who see your activity go on to book it. Photos, a clear title, honest inclusions and a price that makes sense next to its neighbours all feed this.
• Reviews. The volume and rating of recent, verified reviews. A new listing starts with none, so the first months matter a lot.
• Availability. How much bookable inventory you keep open, how far ahead, and whether confirmation is instant. A mostly closed calendar is hard to rank.

Two things follow that matter more in Rome than in a quieter city. First, every lever is relative: you’re not judged against an absolute bar but against the tours beside you, and in Rome those tours are very strong. Second, results change with where the traveller browses from, so “my rank” is really “my rank from a given country”. Our Rome report loads GetYourGuide from the United States for exactly this reason. Check from the markets your guests actually come from.

What Rome’s first page looks like

Our Rome report records GetYourGuide’s first page for Rome at least weekly, skipping sponsored and promo tiles so every position is organic. Some patterns are visible in the free preview without unlocking anything.

The leaders carry very large review counts

At the latest check, the top ten tours had a median of about 15,200 reviews, against about 6,600 across all 20 ranked tours on the first page. The median rating was 4.6 (OTAlytics Rome report, checked 11 Oct 2026).

The takeaway isn’t “you need tens of thousands of reviews”. It’s that the city-wide first page is the wrong first target for a new or small listing. Going head-on against the leaders for “Rome tours” is a long fight. The more winnable fights are one level down.

The page clusters into a few itinerary types

The report groups similar tours so you can see which product types are fighting over the same slots. In recent checks the groups included private golf-cart city tours, Vatican Museums tours with the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s, and day trips out of the city to Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast. Meanwhile the very top positions were held by Colosseum, Roman Forum and Palatine Hill combinations. Each group has its own typical price and range. On the 11 Oct 2026 check: golf-cart city tours (6 tours, typical €49, €37–€104), Vatican Museums/Sistine Chapel/Basilica tours (4 tours, typical €77, €64–€84) and Pompeii/Amalfi day trips (3 tours, typical €84, €72–€121).

If your product falls inside one of the big groups, your real competitors are the handful of tours in that group, not the whole page. If it falls outside them, that can be an advantage. There are fewer direct comparisons to lose.

A few suppliers hold a lot of the page

The “Who owns the first page” section shows which suppliers hold the most positions and what share of the page’s new reviews each one took over the last 30 days. At the latest check, the top three suppliers took about 76% of the page’s new reviews (Rome report, checked 11 Oct 2026). One of them is GetYourGuide’s own supplier entity, so the marketplace competes directly on some of its own Rome inventory. That’s worth knowing when you decide where to put your effort.

Where a single-city operator can find room

Go one level down: points of interest

Rome travellers rarely stop at “Rome”. They search for the sight. The report tracks separate first pages for the Colosseum, Vatican Museums, Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, St. Peter’s Basilica, Trevi Fountain, Borghese Gallery, Castel Sant’Angelo and the Catacombs. Each has its own price band and review profile, and they don’t all look like the city page.

Compare them. A sight where the top tours carry far fewer reviews than the Rome page, or where prices are spread widely, is a sight where a well-built listing can rank sooner. For example, on 11 Oct 2026 the Colosseum page’s top ten had a median of about 4,500 reviews, against about 15,200 on the Rome city page, with prices spread from €15 to €309.

Pick a product that isn’t a copy

GetYourGuide says it favours experiences that offer something distinctive over duplicates of existing listings. In Rome, where the classic three-sight combination is sold by many operators, a clear angle earns you a separate comparison set: a time of day, a group size, a language, a theme, a neighbourhood. Some examples:

• A small-group or early-entry version of a classic, if you can actually deliver it
• A theme the big combos don’t cover (a single era, a single artist, a single quarter)
• A language or audience the top tours don’t serve well

Only claim what you deliver. A distinctive title that leads to disappointed guests costs you the reviews you’re trying to build.

Price against your group, not the city

The city-wide median is a blunt number. The useful comparison is the typical price and range of the group your tour sits in, which the report shows on one shared scale. Pricing just under a group’s typical price can help conversion, and pricing well above it needs a visible reason (smaller group, longer duration, skip-the-line access you actually have). For the cost-floor side of this, see our tour pricing strategy guide. Avoid racing to the bottom of the band. Rome’s leaders can absorb a price war far longer than a single-city operator can.

Build reviews deliberately in the first months

With no history, a new listing leans almost entirely on listing quality and conversion. Make the most of the bookings you do get:

• Ask every guest for a review at the end of the tour, in person, not just by automated email.
• Reply to every review, especially critical ones. Our negative review playbook covers how.
• Fix the recurring complaint before you chase more volume. Your own reviews tell you what that is; read the last 30 and count the repeats.

Keep the calendar open

Availability is one of the three levers GetYourGuide names. Open dates as far ahead as you can honestly staff, offer instant confirmation where you can, and close only the dates you really can’t run. In a city that sells all year, a calendar with gaps quietly gives position to whoever kept theirs open.

Rome-specific checks before you scale

• Licensing. Under Law 190/2023, working as a tourist guide (guida turistica) in Italy requires passing the national qualifying exam run by the Ministry of Tourism (written, oral and practical) or having a foreign qualification recognised, and being listed in the national register of tourist guides; guides already qualified before the law can join the register. The first national exam opened in January 2025. If your product includes guiding, make sure every guide is qualified, and expect sites like the Colosseum to ask guides for proof.
• Entry tickets. Agencies and tour operators that sell Colosseum entry with their own services must be on the Colosseum Archaeological Park’s official operator list and buy through its B2B channel; tickets bought by operators on the public site are cancelled. Every Colosseum ticket is nominative, the name can be changed once up to 23:59 three days before the visit, and a missing or mismatched name means no entry. The Vatican Museums keep their own list of accredited tour operators, and their tickets are valid only on the date issued and non-refundable. Say exactly what’s included and how entry works, and collect guest names early.
• Other marketplaces. Many Rome operators list on Viator as well. Ranking works differently there. Our Viator supplier guide and Viator vs GetYourGuide comparison cover the differences.

What to do with this

1. Open the Rome report and find which group of similar tours your product belongs to.
2. Note that group’s typical price and range, and where your price sits.
3. Check the point-of-interest pages for your main sight and compare their review profile with the city page.
4. Choose the comparison set you can realistically win, and make the listing obviously the best in that set: title, photos, inclusions, availability.
5. Recheck your position on a schedule, not when bookings drop. Positions move as competitors collect reviews and change prices.

The full Rome report shows every ranked tour, every operator competing for the page with an estimated share of turnover, and which tours moved this month. It’s $39 a month for one city, with no tours to configure, and you can cancel any time. See pricing or open the Rome report.