📌 Key takeaways
- Civitatis is a Spanish OTA specialised in tours, excursions and activities, the leader in the Spanish-speaking world with several million monthly visitors.
- Signing up as a supplier is free: Civitatis only earns a commission, negotiated with each partner and not made public.
- No fixed fee and no subscription: listing and updating your activities costs nothing.
- Becoming a supplier goes through a form (credentials, company details, catalogue), then presenting your activities for validation.
- The technical connection to Civitatis is known to be complex: booking software like Tourbiz syncs availability and bookings to avoid double entry.
Are you a guide, an inbound agency or an excursion provider looking to become a Civitatis supplier to sell your activities to an international clientele? Born in Spain, this OTA has become the benchmark for activity booking in the Spanish-speaking world, with several million visitors each month. For a provider, being listed there means reaching travellers, especially Spanish-speaking and Latin American, that other platforms reach poorly. What’s left is to understand how Civitatis earns its money, how to create a supplier account and how to sell effectively. This guide reviews how the platform works, its commission model, the steps to sell on Civitatis and the related best practices.
What is Civitatis and which providers is this OTA for?
Civitatis is a Spanish platform for booking guided tours, excursions and activities, founded in Madrid. Its specialty: city tours, day trips and free tours, with unmatched reach in Spanish-speaking markets, where it far outpaces the Anglo-Saxon giants. It is one of the OTAs we place in context in our guide to OTAs, the online booking platforms a provider can connect to. Civitatis works like a marketplace: it brings the audience and visibility, collects payment from the customer, then pays the provider the activity amount minus its commission. It is aimed primarily at guides, inbound agencies and excursion organisers who want to capture an international, especially Spanish-speaking, clientele.
What commission does Civitatis charge its suppliers?
Like most OTAs, Civitatis charges neither a sign-up fee nor a subscription: listing and updating your activities is free. The platform only earns a commission, taken on each confirmed booking. A particularity: Civitatis does not publish a single rate. The commission is negotiated with each partner and sits within the usual range of the activities sector. Since the model rests on rates and agreements specific to each supplier, it is best to frame your pricing strategy upfront: our pricing policy guide helps set consistent prices across your channels before you start.
| Item | With Civitatis |
|---|---|
| Sign-up and listing | Free, no fixed fee or subscription |
| Model | Commission on confirmed bookings |
| Rate | Negotiated with each partner, not made public |
| Strong market | Spanish-speaking and international clientele |
This no-fixed-fee model means you pay nothing until you sell: the cost is directly tied to the bookings actually generated.
💡 Good to know: Like every marketplace, Civitatis reports the amount of sales made through the platform to the tax authorities each year, and sends you a summary. This is the European DAC7 framework (impots.gouv.fr). Remember to reconcile these amounts with your accounting.
Why sell your activities on Civitatis?
For an excursion provider, Civitatis’ appeal lies in its audience and its geographic positioning. The concrete benefits are as follows:
- Privileged access to the Spanish-speaking market, poorly covered by GetYourGuide or Viator.
- An international audience of travellers who book their activities before departure.
- A strong presence on tours and excursions, the platform’s core business.
- A channel that complements your direct sales, with no fixed fee.
The point is to make it one channel among others, chosen for its specific audience. It is the same reasoning as in our comparison of the best OTAs: each platform captures a particular clientele, and Civitatis excels where others are weak.
How do you become a supplier on Civitatis?
Creating a supplier account on Civitatis takes three steps, with no entry fee. The last, technical step deserves particular attention.
Step 1: create your supplier account
The first step is to fill in the supplier registration form from Civitatis’ providers area: you choose credentials and enter your company details. Registration is free: the platform only earns a commission. You can attach a catalogue of your activities. Prepare before you start:
- Your company information and contact details.
- The list of tours, excursions or activities to offer.
- The languages you operate in.
Step 2: present your activities and get them validated
You then detail your products: titles, descriptions, prices, durations and availability. This step is still free and prepares your listing for sale, with Civitatis validating activities before publication. The quality of the listings weighs directly on whether your activities are picked up. For each product, provide:
- The activity type (guided tour, excursion, free tour, ticket).
- Your prices and price categories (adult, child, group).
- The availability calendar and departure points.
Step 3: connect your inventory and publish
The technical connection to Civitatis is known to be demanding: the platform recommends going through a booking system to sync your inventory. Going live costs nothing; you only pay the commission on sales. As when you become a GetYourGuide supplier, connected software avoids double entry. To publish smoothly, make sure to:
- Keep an availability calendar in real time.
- Keep prices consistent between Civitatis and your other channels.
- Complete listings, translated where possible for the international clientele.
💡 Want to sell on Civitatis without drowning in the tech?
With Tourbiz, connect your activities to your back office, sync your availability in real time and manage all your bookings, across every channel, from a single screen.
Create my free accountHow do you sell your activities well on Civitatis?
On an international platform, visibility rewards listings that are complete, well rated and suited to a foreign clientele. These best practices also apply when you sell on Tiqets and on most activity OTAs.
- Translate your listings, especially into Spanish, to match Civitatis’ core audience.
- Fill in each listing 100%: duration, inclusions, meeting point, guide’s languages.
- Collect reviews: the rating weighs on ranking and reassures travellers.
- Keep your calendar up to date so you never sell a slot that is already full.
⚠️ Warning! Selling on Civitatis in addition to your own site and other OTAs multiplies channels, but also the risk of overselling if your calendars are not synced. An international traveller turning up for an excursion that is already full means a dispute that is hard to handle remotely and a negative review.
How does Tourbiz simplify connecting to Civitatis?
Since the technical connection is the main hurdle on Civitatis, that is exactly where we come in. At Tourbiz, we connect your activities to your back office and sync them across your channels, sparing you the headache of an integration handled alone.
Concretely, rather than managing a separate Civitatis calendar, you sync it with the rest of your business through our OTA integrations: an activity created once is distributed and kept up to date automatically. Here is what we automate for our clients:
- The real-time synchronisation of availability, to avoid overselling between Civitatis, your site and other platforms.
- The centralisation of Civitatis bookings in the same calendar as the rest of your business.
- The creation of products only once, then distributed to the connected channels.
- Sales tracking per channel, to measure precisely what Civitatis brings you.
The result: Civitatis becomes an additional source of international bookings, with no double entry and no overbooking. Technical complexity stops being an obstacle and becomes a simple setting.
🎯 Our tip: At Tourbiz, our clients targeting a foreign clientele tell us the hardest part is never creating the activity, but keeping several calendars up to date at once. That is exactly what the channel manager does for them, platform after platform.
