Creating a booking system in Microsoft Excel (or a similar tool like Google Sheets) is a simple and affordable way to manage tour reservations — you can keep a record of all bookings in one place and track specific details about reservations.
However, in our experience working with dozens of tour and activities companies to help them manage bookings over the past 10+ years, this approach has limitations. Specifically, it isn’t sustainable as you grow: it’s hard to keep these sheets organised as you add more bookings, it requires a lot of time and manual effort, and it’s also error-prone.
Excel simply doesn’t have all of the functionality tour operators need to effectively manage bookings (for example, it doesn’t automatically update if someone modifies a booking and you can’t set availability to prevent overbookings).
So in this guide, we’ll walk through the steps to create a booking system in Excel. Then, we’ll cover the limitations of an Excel-based booking system and explain how we designed our booking software, Bókun, to fix these problems making booking easier for tour companies.
You can
start a free trial (no credit card required) of Bokun here.
Using a spreadsheet solution — like Excel or Google Sheets — to manage bookings can work well for small businesses in scenarios when you have a low volume of bookings and few staff members. You can create basic tools to log reservations, schedule staff, and track booking details.
Excel and Google offer very similar solutions to manage bookings; both systems provide custom form builders that pair with their spreadsheet tools (Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Forms; Google Sheets and Forms).
Regardless of the system you choose, the easiest solution is to create a form that links to your spreadsheet — the form is where the customer does the booking, which automatically syncs with your spreadsheet, where you can see new reservations.
We’ll show you how this works in Google Sheets/Forms, but it’s largely equivalent to Excel/Microsoft Forms:
First, create and title a new spreadsheet. We’ll call ours “Tour Bookings 2023”.
Then, create a form that links with your sheet. You can do this under
“Tools” > “Create a new form”.
You can design this form to gather all necessary information from attendees before they arrive; there are several ways to format questions so you can collect all the information you need. These form builders are also straightforward and easy to use so anyone can create custom surveys.
You’ll want to log basic information like the tour or activity they book and the date/time of their reservation, but you should also ask customers to share their contact information (email and phone number), specify the number of attendees, and share any special requirements.
After completing the form, the questions automatically convert to columns in the linked spreadsheet, and any answers to those questions (form fills) automatically populate in the rows below. You can check the form to see the latest reservations, schedule staff, and track payment information.
Note: You can add columns to the sheet to keep track of payment information and schedule staff, but you will have to complete this information manually.
Pro Tip: We suggest creating a new sheet every month (you can create these within your main spreadsheet) to keep reservations organised. Then you don’t have one massive spreadsheet of names, and it’s easy to reference past bookings.
You can select the
+ on the bottom left hand corner to add a new sheet; then you can link the form you’ve already created to log answers in the new sheet.
You have a few options to share your form and track reservations:
You can edit forms at any time and the changes will update automatically in your sheet.
So in summary, here are the benefits of a spreadsheet based booking system like this:
However, as we mentioned, spreadsheets have limitations, in particular as the business grows and the number of bookings increase:
It's also worth noting: On top of potential loss of sales because of the added back and forth, manual data entry in spreadsheets takes employee time and adds extra operational headaches to the business.
Bókun is an online booking management tool designed for tour and activity-based businesses — our solution is also referred to as
tour operator software — and we offer the most cost-effective option for teams ready to make this jump.
Our platform lets you:
We’ll show you how this works.
Regardless of how you currently receive bookings, Bókun lets you bring everything under one hub:
Bonus: We have a partnership and integration with Viator that allows existing Viator users to push products to Bókun for fast set-up. We offer free bookings from Viator and four free product checks per month.
The dashboard captures and displays all booking details, such as the day and time, tour/activity booked, number of attendees, contact details, and additional notes.
Note: You can customise booking forms to gather information from attendees at the time of booking, then it’s easy to track the data pertinent to your reporting.
Our booking engine offers self-service features for customers to cancel bookings without having to contact your staff for help. Bookings automatically update in your calendar so you can see the most recent details.
We offer the
lowest fees of all booking management software — 1.5% for online bookings and free from Viator and offline reservations.
Bókun integrates with over a dozen payment processors, including well-known names like PayPal, Braintree, Stripe, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Worldpay, and Trust My Travel. We also partner with Klarna and offer payment options through Google.
You can require payment at time of booking, create and send invoices, or give customers the option to pay when they arrive. You can also log in-person or cash payments in Bókun, so you can keep record of all payments in our booking solution.
Excel and Google Sheets can limit staff members visibility into what’s going on. They may know the tour schedule and how many attendees are expected to arrive, but if someone makes a last-minute change or cancels, guides can be left in the dark, tours can be held up, and in-office staff have to spend time updating all appropriate parties.
Bókun lets you add other employees to the dashboard, share the booking calendar, and keep everyone in the loop (you can adjust permissions to choose which information you want to share).
Our platform also makes it easy to gather guides’ availability, communicate with staff, and set work schedules. You can also adjust general availability — the times you’re open to accepting reservations — in Bókun, and our tools will ensure you only receive bookings during approved windows. These tools also prevent double bookings and overbookings.
We also provide mobile apps so tour guides can always stay in touch and reference calendars or check-in customers from anywhere.
Bókun’s automated customer communications save your staff time and facilitate a smooth check-in. We provide a library of email templates to get you started; you can customise each with new text, branded logos or colours, attachments, and links to review sites. For example:
In addition, mobile apps support your field staff — they can access the booking dashboard, view reservation details, and use the ticket scanning feature to simplify check-in when attendees arrive.
Bókun product management lets you list the tours and activities you sell on your website. Then, channel management lets you connect and list products across connected sales channels.
We design both tools so they’re straightforward:
Note: We’ve also introduced dynamic pricing (called Pricing Modulator in Bókun), a tool that can automatically update tour and activity prices to maximise revenue. Our platform can adjust rates based on tour length or number of days before the start date, or reflect a general discount.
You can update products through the experience management dashboard, and add or remove sales channels through Sales tools.
Within Bókun, there’s a suite of reporting tools to monitor what’s going on behind the scenes. You can review:
Reports are customisable — so you can analyse metrics over different periods. You have insights to make data-driven, strategic decisions to improve your business and processes.
Bókun has tools to help your business grow. If you’re ready to increase bookings, you can:
You can use Excel and Google Sheets to keep track of bookings for a short time: they’re low cost, and as you saw above, creating booking systems in those tools isn’t time-consuming or difficult. But these tools only let you record bookings in a central sheet; they aren’t designed to support the entire booking experience, so they leave a lot of ground uncovered.
Bókun is a natural next step for teams ready to move on from traditional spreadsheet systems. Our platform is intuitive and user-friendly so you can learn the ropes and work through setup quickly (most can build their site, add products, and connect sales channels in an afternoon). However, our platform has advanced features to support tour operators and their staff, beyond tracking bookings.
With Bókun, you can:
Our booking software is available for one low subscription cost — $49 per month — and this includes access to all features, the Advanced website builder, a domain of your choosing, and customer support. We offer the lowest subscription fees (1.5% for online bookings) and cost-saving perks like zero booking fees on Viator and offline reservations.
Get started for free (no credit card required!) with our 14-day trial.
Related reads:
Online Booking Engine • Channel Management
Inventory & Resource Management
B2B Marketplace • Reporting • Websites