Walking tours, e-bike tours, boat trips, cooking classes, kayak rentals, escape rooms, guided day trips — the booking logic is the same: a product, a date and time, a capacity, a price per person, sometimes a deposit. Activity marketplaces and booking software charge a percentage of each sale plus a monthly fee. A booking system on your own website sells the same thing commission-free.
The problems
- A percentage of every booking — forever — including repeat customers and referrals.
- Enquiry forms for "is Saturday available?" that get answered too late.
- Overbooked departures, or departures that run half-empty because nobody could see the last two seats.
- Vouchers and gift bookings handled by email.
What the booking system should do
- Products with schedules: departures by date and time, seasonal calendars, private vs shared, minimum and maximum group size.
- Live seats remaining on the site; instant confirmation.
- Prices per person with adult/child/group tiers, extras, and payment or deposit through Stripe in the traveller's currency.
- Vouchers and gift bookings with codes redeemable on the site.
- Manifest per departure for the guide's phone: names, numbers, dietary notes, pickup points.
- Confirmations, reminders with meeting-point details, weather-cancellation messages from your own address.
- Review request the evening after the tour; customer list and CSV export.
What changes
Your own site becomes the cheapest place to sell every tour, marketplaces stay for discovery, departures fill to the last seat, and guides stop chasing names. Multi-currency and multi-language are reusable in all our builds, which matters for operators selling to visitors from several countries.
What it costs
Our Booking Panel ($500) adds all of the above to the website you already have — booking form, inbox, confirmations, reminders, rules, calendar, export — in about a week, on your own hosting, with no monthly fee and no per-booking commission. Operators compare it with one busy weekend of marketplace commission. If you later need staff calendars, deposits or a client portal, it grows into a full admin panel. Compare it with what a subscription costs you over a year in build vs subscribe, or ask for a free demo with your own branding.