Booking system for tours and transfers: what it actually needs

Most small tourism businesses start out with a contact form and WhatsApp. And that's perfectly fine. While things are quiet, it's quicker and more personal. The trouble comes in peak season. Four guests message you about the same departure within the same hour, and you're out at sea with no signal. So let's go through what a booking system needs to do to actually take that work off your hands, rather than just giving you one more screen to keep an eye on.

A form isn't a booking

A contact form sends a message, and that's where its job ends. The slot stays open until somebody writes it down somewhere by hand. If a second enquiry comes in meanwhile, both guests think they've got a place. And you've got a problem that only an apology will fix.

A booking system works the other way round. The moment a booking is confirmed, the seat is taken and nobody else can have it. Confirmation emails, reminders and tomorrow's list all follow from that. If a system can't do that one thing reliably, none of the rest will help you.

Capacity is the hard part

On paper it looks simple. The boat takes twelve people, so you sell twelve seats. In practice it almost never works out that way.

• The same boat does both the morning and the afternoon tour, so the afternoon departure can't overlap with the time it gets back from the morning one.
• Some departures are sold as a group tour per person, others as a private charter for the whole boat. And it's the same boat, of course.
• With more than one vessel, a booking goes to whichever one is free, not always to the same one.
• The schedule changes through the season. Two departures in June, four in August, none in October.

With Navy Blue and Blue Cave Tours, that was exactly the interesting part of the job. Two separate brands, each with its own site, but one shared fleet. A booking on one site has to take the seat on the other straight away, otherwise you sell the same crew twice for the same departure. No off-the-shelf system does that on its own.

With SeaExplore, the group tour, the private charter and the taxi boat transfer all share one calendar, and each of them has its own rules for capacity and price.

Charge now or confirm by hand

There's no technically correct answer here. It's a business decision, and both options make sense. If you go with card payments, some paperwork comes with it, and we listed it in what you need for an online shop in Croatia.

Charging upfront all but gets rid of no-shows, and you know the departure is genuinely sold. The price you pay is that some guests drop out right at the payment step, especially the ones who've only just started looking. It makes the most sense for popular tours with a limited number of seats, where a guest who doesn't turn up really does cost you a place you could have sold to someone else.

Booking without payment has a higher completion rate. But somebody has to confirm each booking, and you have to live with cancellations. For transfers it tends to be more practical, because guests often book weeks ahead and their flight changes in the meantime. With Dubrovnik4U Transfers, the booking goes through without payment and the confirmation goes out by email and WhatsApp, because most changes get sorted out by message anyway.

With Trogir Tours, it's the other way round. Guests pay by card as soon as they book, either a 25% deposit or the full price, depending on the tour. Many book months ahead, and cancellation is free up to 48 hours before departure.

Your own channel and commissions

The big platforms bring you guests, but they take a percentage of every booking, and over a whole year that's not a small sum. We're not saying you should drop them. But if booking on your own site is harder than on the platform, the guest will go there anyway. The same goes for social media, which we wrote about in a website or just Instagram.

Say your price on your own site is the same or better, and booking takes as few taps as on the platform. Then some of the guests who already know you will come direct, and that share is pure margin. And a guest who finds you on a platform the first time and books direct the second time is the most profitable guest you can have.

Phones, and guests who don't speak the language

Nearly every tour gets booked on a phone, often on a patchy connection and often in a language that isn't Croatian. That leads to three things that are easy to overlook.

The site has to open quickly, even on a weak signal. The booking has to fit into a few steps, without typing out long details. And guests need to be able to go back a step, because someone who picks a date and then changes their mind mustn't end up stuck.

One more thing. The price has to be visible before the guest starts typing in their details. If you hide it until the last step, that's the quickest way to lose a booking.

What to ask your developer

If you're commissioning a booking system, these are the questions you want clear answers to before you sign anything.

• How does the system stop the same departure being sold twice?
• Can the same resource, say a boat, be sold both per person and as a whole charter?
• How do you change the schedule from month to month without calling a developer?
• What happens when a payment fails halfway through a booking?
• Who sees tomorrow's list, and on which device?
• Can a booking be cancelled and refunded without you doing the maths by hand?

If the answers you get are vague, that system probably doesn't exist yet, not even in the developer's head. The best place to see how we do it is our case studies, and we describe the approach itself on the web development page. As for why a system like this rarely fits into a ready-made platform, we explained that in WordPress or custom code.