Viator and Venice water taxis

What Viator is and who’s behind it

Viator was born in Sydney, Australia, founded by Rod Cuthbert. It later moved to San Francisco and was then bought by Tripadvisor for about 200 million dollars. Today the contracting company is Viator, Inc., based on the Tripadvisor campus in Needham, Massachusetts. In Tripadvisor’s accounts the division is now called “Experiences” and makes up about half of the group’s revenue.

Like GetYourGuide and Tiqets, Viator doesn’t transport anyone. Its terms describe it as the supplier’s agent and payment collector: your transfer contract is with the local company that drives the boat.

In Venice it sells the same boat, under another name

Searching for an airport water-taxi transfer, Viator returned more than 200 results. Among them, the only genuine shared transfer from Marco Polo is the “Venice Marco Polo Airport Link”. It’s the Bucintoro Viaggi service, the same company that supplies the shared taxi on GetYourGuide and Tiqets. Bucintoro belongs to the group behind the Alilaguna waterbus and also runs the Venice Link website. The other offers labelled “water taxi” are private boats, priced for the whole group.

Here’s what Viator was selling on the airport–Venice route.

The shared-taxi listing gives desk 71 at the airport as the meeting point. The exact meeting point, however, is the one written on your voucher, so check it there.

A note on catalogue quality. Some Venetian transfers appeared on pages with obviously wrong addresses, referring to ports in other countries. It’s a sign of bulk uploads by resellers operating in many destinations. It says nothing about the boat, but it’s a reason to check who the supplier is before paying.

Prices: why we don’t convert them to euros

The Viator prices we collected were shown in Polish zloty, in a localised session: 174 PLN per person for the shared taxi and 1,118 PLN per group for the Bucintoro private taxi. Converting them at an arbitrary exchange rate would produce figures that are wrong to the cent, so we don’t: you’ll see the price in euros on the listing, in your own session, before paying.

There are some fixed points all the same. The same supplier’s shared taxi costs €39 per person on GetYourGuide and Tiqets, and €36–39 on the Venice Link site. The Alilaguna ticket costs €18 wherever you buy it directly. A private taxi from the consortia, booked online, costs €140–160 per boat, and the City fare is €110.

On the Rick Steves forum there’s an often-cited precedent. In an old thread, a traveller had found the private taxi at 180 dollars return on the Venice Link site. On Viator the same service cost 245 dollars one way. Another user summed it up: Viator is a reseller. It’s a single, dated episode, not a rule. But it explains why, for a private taxi, it always pays to get a direct quote too.

If you want a private taxi, the per-head maths is the same everywhere. With the €215 GetYourGuide private taxi for up to 6 people, two people pay €107.50 each, four €53.75, six about €36. How to find the break-even point against the shared taxi is explained on the private water taxi page.

Why the rating is lower: same boat, four numbers

This is the most useful part of the review. The same Bucintoro shared taxi has different ratings depending on where you look, because each site counts reviews its own way.

The rating drops as the pool of people who can write widens. That doesn’t mean any of the numbers is rigged: they measure different groups of people. Viator’s rating actually has one merit. It also includes people who had a problem and weren’t invited to review, so it’s a stricter and perhaps more realistic sample.

On Viator’s shared taxi the breakdown was 2,276 five-star reviews and 452 one-star. That’s a visible tail of unhappy customers, in line with Bucintoro’s Tripadvisor listing. The typical complaints about these services (waiting at the desk until the boat fills, several stops before your hotel) are collected on the shared water taxi page.

Cancellation, commissions and fees: the clauses to know

Viator uses three categories: free cancellation, non-refundable and custom. With free cancellation you get a full refund if you cancel at least 24 hours before the start time. Within 24 hours there are no refunds or changes. With no start time, the deadline is usually 23:59 two days before. The shared taxi from Marco Polo showed free cancellation up to 24 hours before.

Two less visible details. The terms allow Viator to depart from an individual product’s policy at its discretion. And the US consumer group TINA.org has challenged the free-cancellation slogan as misleading, since stricter tiers exist for multi-day tours. For a half-hour transfer it matters little, but it’s worth knowing.

On commissions, Viator is less transparent than GetYourGuide. It doesn’t publish a percentage and only says it varies by location. And with the Accelerate programme, suppliers can raise their commission in exchange for more visibility. Viator states this on the page: highlighted placements carry a notice that it earns higher commissions there, and the default sort order takes supplier payments into account.

For travellers, the terms provide for no service fees: the price shown should include taxes and charges. In the United States, however, a class action filed in Massachusetts challenges precisely the failure to break down price components; we found no news of a ruling. At checkout, check that the total matches the listing price.

Customer service

Viator publishes a US phone number (+1 888 651 9785), an email address for Europe and a chat that starts with an automated assistant. According to Viator, most refund requests are handled within 48 hours, and the money arrives in 5–7 working days. For problems on the spot, here too the quickest contact is the supplier shown on your voucher.

When it makes sense to use it

Viator isn’t a bad platform. It’s one more channel for buying the same services, with stricter ratings and less price transparency. If you use it, compare the final total with the €39 shared taxi on GetYourGuide or Tiqets and, for a private taxi, with the consortia: the Consorzio Motoscafi and Venezia Taxi. All our reviews are on the operators and platforms page. To work out which option to take from the airport, start with from the airport to Venice.