That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 500,000-1 million tour operators estimated by Arival. In fact, the largest restech company, Fareharbor, claims 15,000 clients. Let’s start by saying: you absolutely do not need one, you’re not alone if you don’t use a service. This is the most important step of all, and often the most neglected!ĭo you need to use one of these services? Am I missing out? Are there alternatives? Finally, Make a list of the criteria you need.Understand the landscape of day and multi-day tours by reading articles by Arival, like this one.Shane interviews real tour operators + representatives of the tech companies as they demo the product. Explore the Meet the ResTech video interviews created by Shane Whaley of Tourpreneur.Try the checkout process for a tour, and ask yourself as a customer whether it feels natural and easy. Explore fellow tour operator websites in your niche, and see what platforms they’re using.Browse the company websites of the list below, to get a feel for what’s out there.Tour operator software might be just what you need, but it’s just as likely that it’s overkill. Peek Pro charges a small percentage of a booking. Peak 15 presents itself as an all-in-one solution for your business needs, covering everything from trip planning, vendor contracting, operations, sales, accounting and more. Peek Pro does a great job of handling all the complex needs of your day tour business. Full-Featured Tour Operator Software - consider this the difference, for example, between Peek Pro and Peak 15 (not related).Some multi-day booking software does a version of this. Itinerary planning software - solutions like Travefy and Proposify and Wetu help you craft custom itineraries and deliver proposals to clients.Different set of features, although some overlap. Travel Agent Software - if you search for travel software, you’ll get a lot of packages aimed at travel agents.Booking tech does often connect via Zapier with your email solutions. You’ll need something like Drip or Mailerlite or Activecampaign for that. Email automation software - booking software will help you email your clients before and after a tour (transactional emails), but they won’t help you with advanced segmenting of your audiences and automating behavior-triggered marketing emails.Some restech solutions are better at acting like a lite version of a CRM than others. CRM software - like Hubspot or Pipedrive or Nutshell, that help you organize communication and sales with your clients.There’s a lot of other software out there. A few important notes about what booking software is not:īooking software is what it says it helps you with your bookings. Most booking software does a LOT more than that. often connects with OTAs (online travel agencies) like Viator and GetYourGuide and other sales channels, so sales on those websites automatically show up in your booking software, allowing you to keep track of bookings across multiple channels in one place.lets you manage your tour schedule and bookings.takes a commission and/or charges you a monthly fee for their general services (above and beyond the credit card fee, even if it’s combined).allows you to accept online payments for your tour or activity business (charging you a card processing fee). is a cloud-based web service you sign up for, and integrates into your website through code or a plugin.In a separate post, we’ll help you ask the question: how should I decide which software to use? What do we mean by tour booking software?īooking software is sometimes called reservation technology or ResTech if you’re hip. So let’s dive in to what it is, exactly, and list some example companies for you to explore. Ask the question what is the best platform to 10 operators, and you very well might get 15 different answers.īooking software is only a relatively recent invention (the earliest incarnations are less than 20 years old), and it’s just really in the past decade in particular that reservation technology has been on the minds of tour operators, as 100+ companies have begun offering competing versions of software that all claims to be special and different. There’s no simple, obvious answer, except: it depends!Īnd since many operators have recently had more time than they wish they had, people are asking whether they are using the best platform, or whether they should change. One of the biggest questions that new tour operators ask themselves is, which tour booking software should I use? It’s one of the most important and frequent questions we get as hundreds of our students work through our Start and Grow a Tour Business online course.
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