WordPress offers several tour booking plugins on its site — WP Travel Engine, WPTravelly, Yatra, WooTour, Tourfic, and more.
While these tools make it easy to take direct bookings on your website, they fall short for tour operators because they don’t:
- Include in-depth booking management tools — they only supply a simple calendar to view bookings.
- Offer ways to expand your distribution network and sell tours outside of your website. If you start selling on online travel agencies (OTAs) like Viator or GetYourGuide, you have to manage all calendars separately.
- Support tour operators’ business operations. This leaves companies managing booking calendars, customer interactions, staff schedules, and other day-to-day processes across disparate systems — paying for and jumping between multiple software systems, which is not only disorganised, error-prone, and inconvenient, but also expensive.
In short, these plugins really only make life easier for customers by allowing them to submit booking forms and confirm reservations.
That’s why tour operators who are ready to transition to digital systems and online bookings should look for tour booking management software (also called tour operator software).
These systems include online booking engine widgets that you can easily embed on your WordPress site, plus tools to manage bookings, automate availability updates, assign staff schedules, add new sales channels, partner with other travel businesses, measure revenue and earnings, and so much more.
Even better, these full-featured tour booking management systems typically cost the same as — or only slightly more than — basic WordPress plugins that simply add a “Book Now” button to your site. Given the dramatic difference in capabilities, choosing a full tour booking management system over a simple plugin becomes a no-brainer.
We’ve compiled this guide of highly rated tour booking management software so you can compare popular solutions in one place, including:
To explore Bókun further, keep reading or redeem your 14-day free trial!
1. Bókun
Tour booking management with scalable packages & the industry’s lowest booking fees
Bókun is an all-in-one tour operator software with all of the tools you need to sell tours online 24/7, manage (all) bookings, streamline back-office operations, and drive long-term growth and profitability. Our platform is one of the most top-rated solutions in the market, packing in:
- Online booking engine widgets compatible with all website builders, including WordPress websites, to instantly make your site bookable. We also offer a one-click website builder for teams that want to create a new site or haven’t yet brought their business online.
- Comprehensive booking management with a central calendar that aggregates all bookings and powers real-time availability updates.
- Growth drivers like channel management, 50+ native OTA integrations, partnerships with leading OTAs, referral tracking, and best of all, the Bókun Marketplace with 27k+ travel industry partners.
- Product and resource management to design professional tour listings, set availability and pricing rules, assign required resources, and optimise allocation.
- CRM, automated customer communications, and email templates to keep an organised contact list, dispatch essential emails like booking confirmations and mobile tickets, and power email marketing initiatives via Bókun.
- Business intelligence reporting to measure bookings and earnings, analyse sales performance, and gather insights to guide growth strategies.
- Mobile apps (for iOS and Android) to keep field guides connected, manage departures, and streamline customer check-ins.
What sets Bókun apart from basic WordPress plugins goes beyond just features….
We started Bókun over a decade ago and have since joined the Tripadvisor family, partnered with Viator, and earned premium integrations with GetYourGuide, Google Things to do, and Airbnb — enabling our customers to expand their online presence and reach global audiences not possible with simple booking widgets.
While our comprehensive toolkit delivers numerous benefits for growth-oriented teams, what truly wins over our customers is our low fees when selling online. We offer the industry’s lowest booking fees (1% to 1.5%) and waive Bókun booking fees on Viator and offline reservations.
Our fees are substantially lower than competitors — with other tour operator software and booking tools charging 3% to 8% (!) per online reservation — which equals significant cost savings for our customers.
For example, a tour operator generating $50k in annual online bookings would pay less than $1k in fees with Bókun (only $750 at the 1.5% rate) versus $1.5k to $4k with competitors — saving $750 to $3k+ on software costs per year.
We strive to make Bókun accessible for all teams with affordable and scalable packages.
We include all our core features in our entry-level START plan ($49/month) and offer two enterprise-level plans to support your evolving operations, regardless of how far you grow. Our team also provides yearly strategy calls as you upgrade to enterprise plans, allowing us to discuss current goals and ensure Bókun is set up to support them.
You can explore Bókun for free by starting your 14-day trial here. We’ll also review our core features in the following sections so you can get a sneak peek before starting.
Bókun Online Booking Engine Widgets
Bókun’s online booking engine widgets are compatible with all website builders and thoughtfully developed to provide a smoother booking experience. Our booking engine streamlines the checkout process, reduces abandoned carts, and enhances booking conversions.
You can embed our widget on the backend of your site in just a few clicks. It integrates seamlessly with your current WordPress theme, design, and branding.
Take a look at one of our customers’ sites below:
The “Book Now” button captures your attention on the home page. After clicking, you can select the product you want to book and complete the online checkout.
Bókun connects with over a dozen online payment processing systems — Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, Braintree, Worldpay, and more — so customers can select their preferred provider and complete checkout on a secure booking page.
You’ll also notice Tripadvisor reviews on Sailing Windmere’s product listings. Bókun and Tripadvisor seamlessly integrate so that new traveller reviews automatically display on your site.
You can learn more about creating your booking website here.
Bókun Booking Calendar & Real-Time Availability Management
The Bókun calendar is your booking management command centre. Here, you can:
- View bookings from all connected channels, including your site, OTAs, partners, and affiliates.
- Add offline or in-person bookings (for free!).
- Manage guide schedules and assign or re-assign experiences.
- Modify bookings as needed.
- Update availability on the fly.
This calendar serves as the source of truth for availability management. As new bookings roll in, Bókun updates your central calendar, availability, and inventory, and then pushes updates back to all connected calendars. This keeps all calendars current and avoids blunders, like double bookings.
Unlike booking widgets and disparate systems that require constant manual updates, Bókun handles all the calendar synchronisation automatically.
Bókun Growth Drivers: Channel Management & Marketplace
One of the biggest differentiators we mentioned between WordPress plugins and full tour management systems? Growth opportunities.
Bókun delivers on this front and opens your doors to global audiences with:
- Channel management with 50+ out-of-the-box OTA integrations
- One of the largest in-built distribution networks in the industry
- Referral Tracking that creates endless partnership opportunities
We mentioned our OTA partnerships above, and our system offers native integrations with many more sites — both major names and niche-specific OTAs, including TourRadar, BeMyGuest, Headout, Trip.com, Civitatis, Klook, Tiqets, Hotelbeds, and Expedia.
You can browse our OTA integrations and add new channels from the Sales Tools tab. It only takes a few seconds to link sites, and you can add or remove channels at any time.
The Bókun Marketplace is your hub to explore partnership opportunities. Our distribution network has over 27k partners — dwarfing competitor networks that only include a couple of thousand members — and includes an array of travel industry services and professionals:
- Other tour and activity providers like yourself (all Bókun subscribers are automatically added)
- Travel agents
- Destination management companies
- Hotels, resorts, and other lodging providers
- Transportation services like shuttles and car rental companies
- Attractions like museums and theme parks
- Educational institutions
There are various ways to leverage the Bókun Marketplace; you can serve as a supplier or reseller, and we don’t limit the number of partnerships you can establish or manage through Bókun.
- To fill your booking calendar, consider partnering with resellers who earn bookings on your behalf.
- To add revenue streams, you can resell others’ travel experiences or services. Partner products automatically display on your site, letting you offer more to existing customers without additional setup.
- To diversify your product line, you can create packages with partners — comprehensive all-day experiences with other tour operators, or bundled services that cover multiple aspects of customers’ travel. You can get as creative as you like here.
We provide all of the tools you need to manage outreach, partnership discussions, and contract negotiations. You can securely store all communications and contracts in Bókun, and we send alerts when contracts are due for renewal, allowing you to manage your network strategically.
Finally, Referral Tracking extends partnership opportunities beyond the Marketplace to any business or professional of your choosing.
You can partner with virtually anyone — a neighbouring business or your favourite social media travel influencer — and share tracking links for them to sell your tours and travel products. New bookings automatically populate in your calendar, and you can easily track their source to identify your most successful partners.
You can see how current Bókun customers grow their business through the Marketplace in our case studies below:
- Tour Marbella pulls in 54% of bookings through Marketplace resellers
- The Diving Centre experienced a 40% surge in bookings after joining the Marketplace
- Venice Tours increased revenue by 400% via the Bókun Marketplace
Bókun Back Office Tools: Product Management, Resource Planning, Customer Management & Business Intelligence Reporting
Now that we’ve covered all of the ways Bókun helps you sell tours online (to new and existing audiences), let’s talk about Bókun’s tools to support back-office operations.
First, the Experiences tab includes everything you need to manage products and resources. Here, you can add new products, modify existing ones, and create tour packages — and the Product Builder guides you through the process step-by-step, eliminating guesswork.
Take a look at the Product Builder below:
You can see all the fields it prompts you to complete when adding new products — brainstorm an attention-grabbing title, add detailed descriptions and itineraries, include images and media from past tours, and provide notes for travellers to prepare for day-of experiences (such as pickup or drop-off locations and what to bring).
It’ll also prompt you to:
- Select the days/times tours are available and create availability rules
- Set rates and dynamic pricing rules — you can create pricing categories, offer bulk discounts, and set rates for private tours
- Assign resources and specify allocation rules
- Offer add-ons (if you choose)
- Connect Tripadvisor to display reviews across sites
Then, you can save templates from existing products to save time on this setup when expanding your product line.
Next, Bókun includes a variety of customer management tools:
- Bókun’s native CRM automatically stores customer information when they begin booking with you (even if they drop off mid-checkout). It captures names and email addresses to create a neat contact book that you can reference to learn about your audience types and schedule marketing campaigns.
- On that note — Bókun’s automated communications can dispatch any type of customer email you need. It handles basic tasks such as booking confirmations, tour reminders, mobile tickets, and follow-ups. Additionally, you can schedule abandoned cart emails, discounts or promotional emails, new tour announcements, newsletters, and other marketing communications. We offer a gallery of templates to help you get started.
- The system also offers customer self-service portals, allowing them to view, modify, or cancel reservations independently, without needing to contact your team for assistance. The central booking calendar automatically displays updates or cancellations to prevent confusion, and the system sends email notifications to inform all parties of confirmed changes.
- To ensure smooth day-of experiences, Bókun mobile apps include ticket scanning and check-in tools, allowing guides to access manifests, track no-shows, and streamline departures. No more long lines or late tours!
Then, to help you gauge business performance and make more informed decisions, Bókun is equipped with reporting dashboards that enable you to analyse bookings and revenue across various categories — by source, product, or time of year. This reporting helps you hone in on your most successful sales channels, partners, products, and seasons, and identify areas for improvement.
With these insights, you can lean into more of what’s working for you. For example, if you pinpoint a highly popular product, you could incorporate it into a combo package or add new similar experiences. Or, if you see that one partner brings in significantly more sales than the others, you can open up more inventory to them.
Read more: 10 free & paid tips to market your tour company
Lastly, we offer the Bókun App Store, where you can purchase additional modules, such as more advanced reporting, tip management, and SMS messaging, to support our core features.
Bókun Packages & Getting Started
It’s easy to get started with Bókun — we offer a 14-day free trial, and the platform doesn’t require any formal training. Between user-friendly tools and in-built guides, you can easily navigate between modules and learn our booking solution in an afternoon. (Though our team is always available to answer questions when needed!)
After your trial, you can join the entry-level START plan, our most popular package for small and growing teams. This package includes all of our core features — everything discussed above — so even our small business users have all of the tools to run smoother operations and strategically scale.
The START plan is available for $49 per month with a 1.5% booking fee. Remember, we waive Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations, and managing offline bookings is always free.
We also offer PLUS and PREMIUM plans to support (unlimited) growth. These plans include guided setup and unlock more advanced tools, such as Agent Portals, Zapier, and subvendor management. As mentioned earlier, our enterprise plans also come with a yearly strategy call with one of our Bókun experts.
See why users rate Bókun 4.7 stars by starting your 14-day free trial today.
2. Xola
Xola is another top-rated tour operator software because:
- The platform has a visually elegant, modern user experience and intuitive tools that require no training.
- It offers a proprietary booking engine developed to simplify the booking process, encourage customers through the checkout flow, prevent abandoned carts, and earn you more direct bookings. This is particularly appealing for teams looking to drive more business from their website.
- Xola offers a variety of tools to facilitate continued growth, from OTA connections to an in-built distribution marketplace.
Xola is also one of the more cost-effective booking management solutions available; you don’t pay a monthly subscription fee. Xola only charges booking fees — 1.9% + 30¢ per transaction, automatically passed to the customer at checkout (however, fees can be as high as 6% for international transactions).
Features
- Online booking widgets
- Availability management
- Website building service
- Channel management & OTA connections
- Distribution network
- Inventory management
- Staff management
- Phone booking system to manage offline reservations
- Native point-of-sale (POS)
- CRM
- Marketing tools to promote your tours & retarget customers
- Digital waiver solution
- Customisable tickets (and ticket scanning tools for convenient check-in)
- Reporting
- Mobile apps
Pricing
Xola charges travellers a variable partner fee at checkout; this fee is usually 1.9% + 30¢ per transaction, but can be as high as 6% for international transactions.
Read more: Best Xola alternatives comparison guide
3. Checkfront
Next up is Checkfront. Small and growing teams love Checkfront because it offers one of the most robust toolsets — over 100 features to sell tours online, manage bookings, and grow your business — without being overly complex or expensive.
Checkfront earns 4.2 stars for ease of use and 4.6 stars for customer service, with users noting that getting started on the platform is relatively simple. The only downside is that you may not need or use some of Checkfront’s functionality.
Teams also like Checkfront because booking fees fall in the middle of the spectrum. At 3% for online bookings, Checkfront lets you choose how to manage fees (you can cover them yourself or pass them to customers at checkout).
Features
- Online booking engine widgets
- Centralised booking calendar
- Availability management
- Website builder
- Channel management & OTA connections
- Partner network
- Custom form builders and waivers to send to customers before their tours
- Marketing tools, including customer booking map, customer outreach & ROI tracking
- Integrations with online payment processors (Checkfront also connects with your POS and lets you send custom invoices)
- 50+ integrations & Checkfront API
- Reporting
Pricing
Checkfront charges 3% booking fees. You have the option to absorb fees or pass them to travellers at checkout.
Read more: Best Checkfront alternatives comparison guide
4. Travelotopos
The next name on our list is a popular option for tour operators based in Europe. Travelotopos was founded in Cyprus over a decade ago (a few years after Bókun) and, over the years, has packed its software with tools to support all areas of business, and even earned itself a GetYourGuide Advanced Connectivity Partnership.
We appreciate this system for its extensive industry history, robust toolset, and moderate fees (3% for online bookings and 1.5% for agent or reseller bookings). However, the platform itself doesn’t garner too many user reviews on sites like Capterra and G2. Given the limited public reviews available, we can only go by what we hear through industry chatter.
If you’re interested in this option, we suggest contacting their team to get a feel for the brand experience before making a final purchasing decision.
Find more Travelotopos reviews here.
Features
- Online booking engine
- Booking calendar (with offline reservation management)
- Connections with OTAs & channel management
- Preferred partnership with GetYourGuide
- B2B reseller marketplace
- Resource management
- Integrations with major payment gateways, hotel reservation systems & other business applications like ERPs
- Options to offer coupon codes, promotions & vouchers
- Reporting
- Mobile apps
Pricing
Travelotopos charges booking fees on every reservation: 3% for online bookings and 1.5% for bookings made through agents or resellers. They also charge a one-time set-up fee of $270.
5. Rezdy
With this next option, we start to move into the more expensive tour operator software.
Rezdy is a popular name with a global presence, and they’ve recently joined forces with Checkfront (above) and Regiondo (mentioned below but not in our list here due to high pricing) to further expand their market reach. The platform offers a comprehensive feature set, including multiple tools to promote growth, with packages tailored to suit businesses of all sizes.
However, we hesitate to sing Rezdy’s praises because it’s not cost-effective. It offers all the same tools as Bókun and its competitors, but at a significantly higher rate. Not to mention, Rezdy doesn’t offer any exclusive partnerships with other travel brands or OTAs that could set them apart. They only tout a Standard Connectivity Partnership with GYG.
Features
- Online booking engine
- One-click website builder
- Connections with OTAs & channel management
- Reseller network
- Product management
- Reservation management
- Live availability
- Automated customer communications
- RezdyPay — Rezdy’s native payment gateway — and integrations with solutions like Stripe, PayPal, Google, and Apple Pay
- Integrations & API
- Reporting
- Mobile apps
Pricing
Rezdy offers tiered packages; the online booking engine is available in the most basic plan, but we recommend the Accelerate package if choosing Rezdy.
- Foundation ($49/month): This starter plan includes access to online booking widgets, the website builder, the central booking calendar, and channel management. Rezdy charges a 2% booking fee per online booking and $1 per offline or agent booking in this plan.
- Accelerate ($99/month) — the recommended plan: This is Rezdy’s most popular plan, offering more advanced tools, access to the reseller network, and integrations. Rezdy charges a 1.9% booking fee per online reservation and 85¢ per offline or agent booking in this plan.
- Expansion ($249/month): The enterprise package grants access to Rezdy’s API and webhooks. Rezdy charges a 1.75% online booking fee and 70¢ per offline or agent booking in this plan.
6. TripWorks
The last name on our list, TripWorks, offers an impressive solution but charges some of the highest online booking fees at 6%.
TripWorks is a popular enterprise tour operator software that earns an impressive 4.9-star rating for ease of use, customer service, and overall functionality. We mention them here because they’re a name that larger teams are likely to encounter when comparing solutions.
However, even for large teams with more flexible budgets, the TripWorks solution probably doesn’t make financial sense. While the platform offers dozens of advanced features, it’s no more powerful than options above, and, like Rezdy, it doesn’t tout impressive partnerships or integrations.
With remarkably higher fees than competitors above, you’ll find yourself paying significantly more for the same features and functionality (which even those with flexible budgets care about, as you can’t effectively grow your business or reach new heights if you aren’t using your resources wisely).
Find more TripWorks reviews here.
Features
- Online booking widgets
- Reservation management
- Connections with OTAs & channel management
- Reseller network
- Product management
- Availability management
- Marketing tools & integrations with marketing software
- Dynamic pricing
- Native POS
- Integrations with Apple Pay & Google Pay
- Options to sell gift cards & vouchers
- Digital waivers
- Reporting
Pricing
TripWorks offers two plans — the standard package (for most business sizes) and custom enterprise plans. You don’t pay subscription fees in the standard package, but TripWorks charges 6% online booking fees and (undisclosed) transaction fees.
Read more: Best alternative to Tripworks comparison guide
Alternative Tour Booking Management Systems
In addition to these names, you might also see FareHarbor, Peek Pro, Regiondo, Trekksoft, and Ventrata when comparing leading tour operator software.
While these systems all boast impressive toolsets and earn good reviews, they weren’t our first choice for this guide because they charge high subscription rates or fees that negatively impact booking conversions and cut into profits.
You can learn more about these names and browse more tour booking systems in our guide here: 10 best tour scheduling software (for all business sizes)
Try Bókun today!
As we discussed at the beginning of this guide, basic WordPress plugins might seem like a simple solution for enabling online bookings from your site, but they quickly become limiting as your business grows.
Managing separate calendars across multiple OTAs, juggling different software systems for day-to-day operations, and missing out on partnership opportunities can actually cost you more in the long run than investing in comprehensive tour operator software from the start.
Bókun delivers everything you need to run and grow your tour business in one platform — from seamless WordPress integration and real-time availability management to premium OTA connections and our industry-leading partner Marketplace.
Most importantly, our low booking fees (just 1% to 1.5%) and waived fees on Viator bookings mean you can keep more of what you earn — and invest that money back into running a successful (profitable) business.
Ready to see the difference comprehensive tour management software can make? Start your free 14-day trial today — no credit card required — and discover why thousands of tour operators trust Bókun to power their growth.
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