Hot air balloon operators have more behind-the-scenes logistics to manage than most activity businesses. Every booked flight needs a pilot and chase crew, there’s a cap on how many passengers fit in each basket, and the forecast decides whether the balloon takes off at all.

Then there’s the sales side. Most of your passengers are travellers searching around for hot air balloon rides — they don’t know who to book with, or that you even exist yet. So you need ways to get your flights seen while they’re planning their trips.

Plenty of booking platforms will happily sell to a balloon company, but not all of them are set up to manage these logistics or help fill your baskets. When comparing systems, look for:

  • A central booking calendar — so bookings from your website, OTAs, partners, and the phone all land in one place.
  • Seat limits for each flight — so a shared basket stops selling on every channel the moment the last place goes.
  • Private charter options — to sell the whole basket to one group at its own price, separate from your shared flights.
  • Resource management — to assign a balloon, pilot, and chase vehicle to each launch and keep them off anything else running at the same time.
  • Custom booking forms — so passengers confirm they’re under your weight limit before they pay, not when they arrive at the launch site.
  • Weather rescheduling tools — to move everyone on a cancelled flight to a new date (or refund them) without phoning each passenger.
  • Deposits and balance payments — so you aren’t chasing money from passengers who booked months ahead.
  • Gift vouchers — to sell a flight today and let the recipient pick a date later, since so many balloon rides are bought as gifts.
  • Connections with OTAs and resellers — to get your flights in front of travellers browsing Viator, GetYourGuide, or their hotel’s list of local experiences, not just people who already know your name.
  • Low booking fees — because percentage fees add up fast on an expensive seat. On a $300 flight, 1.5% is $4.50, while 6% is $18.

We put together this guide with 11 of the top hot air balloon booking software — starting with our own platform, Bókun — so you can see how they stack up.

To explore Bókun further after reading, start a 14-day free trial — no CC required.

1. Bókun

Balloon flight bookings, crew & distribution in one system — with the industry’s lowest booking fees

Bókun homepage: More bookings. Better experience.

Bókun is an all-in-one booking, operations, and distribution management system for tour and activity operators. We’re a Tripadvisor and Viator brand, and we’ve spent over 10 years building software alongside operators in over 80 countries. Our system works for balloon operators of every size, from a pilot flying one balloon out of a single field to companies running a fleet across several launch sites.

With Bókun, you can sell shared sunrise and sunset flights alongside private charters, tie each flight to the balloon and crew flying it, and offer gift vouchers year-round for the months you’re in the air. And when the weather grounds a flight, you have what you need to help passengers reschedule or cancel, without calling down a list one by one.

Then, because most of your passengers find you through travel sites and hotels, we packed Bókun with a ton of distribution tools to put your flights in front of them:

  • 70+ OTA connections, including all the global players plus more niche platforms for specific destinations and activities. (We even hold advanced partnerships with Viator, GetYourGuide, and Google Things to do, and we’re the #1 restech partner across all major sites.)
  • The Bókun Marketplace, with thousands of travel industry partners, like travel agents, DMCs, hotels, and transportation services.
  • Referral Tracking to build your own affiliate network.

Operators using Bókun see an average 200% increase in bookings after tapping into our distribution network!

We’re one of the top-rated systems — 4.7 stars on Capterra — for our all-in-one toolkit and extensive growth drivers (everyone gets access to the core features, everything we cover below), ease of use (anyone can get started with zero training), and industry-low fees (just 1.5% in booking fees vs. the 4% to 8% many competitors charge).

In the following sections, we’ll show you exactly how our core features work for hot air balloon operators. But you can also start a free trial to check out the platform yourself.

See every flight on one booking calendar

Bókun’s central calendar brings every booking into one place. Reservations from your website, OTAs, resellers, and affiliates land there automatically. And you can add phone bookings, walk-ups, and any other offline reservations yourself (we never charge booking fees on those).

Bókun Calendar: Departure Details Screen

This calendar also powers real-time availability updates on every connected channel, so when the last seat in a basket gets booked, that flight closes everywhere you sell, at once. And if you know you won’t be flying on a certain day — say, you’re taking a balloon to a festival or giving the crew a day off — you can block that day or a single launch time right on the calendar, so it can’t be booked.

The calendar is also where you manage your bookings. You can open any booking to see the details, then edit, reschedule, or cancel it. You can also manage pilot and chase crew assignments from here if you need to switch things up.

It’s also your starting point when weather conditions turn. Select the bookings on a grounded flight and trigger a Disrupted Departure, and every passenger gets the option to reschedule or cancel (more on that below).

Create listings for all your flight types & manage the behind-the-scenes resources

Every flight you offer gets its own listing in our Experiences module: your shared sunrise flight, your sunset flight, and your private charter, each with its own description, duration, capacity, and price.

You can also sell gift vouchers, which customers buy online and recipients redeem when they’re ready to pick a date. And you can create combo products that pair a flight with another experience, whether it’s one of yours or a partner’s.

There are a few ways to create listings: build from scratch with our product builder, start from a template, or import them straight from your website or Viator.

Experience: Product Recommendations, Availability, OTAs, Start times, Rates

The first step is to fill in the details passengers need before they book: a description of the flight, photos, how long the full experience takes (from meeting up to the post-flight toast), where to meet, what’s included and what’s available as an add-on, and anything they should know beforehand, like what to wear and your passenger requirements.

Re: Add-ons — you can offer these to passengers at checkout, like a champagne breakfast, a photo and video package, a flight certificate, or hotel pick-up.

Setting flight availability

From there, you set the availability rules for each flight. Set your sunrise and sunset launch times to repeat, cap each flight at the number of seats in the basket, add a booking cutoff (say, the evening before, so your crew knows exactly who’s flying), and block out the months you’re not in the air.

Managing your balloons, pilots, chase crew & equipment for each flight

Our resource management tools keep track of everything (and everyone) each flight needs. You add your inventory in two layers: resource types (balloons, pilots, chase vehicles, inflation fans, trailers, and radios) and the individual resources inside each one.

Then you link them to your listings, so every flight is automatically assigned the right people and equipment. For example, one team of pilots and chase crew can run your sunrise flights, another can cover sunset flights, and your most experienced pilot can take private charters.

As soon as a flight is booked, everything assigned to it is locked for that launch (but you can always shift assignments in the central calendar, as mentioned).

You can also add buffer time to a resource, giving your crew time to pack up and recover between flights. And you can close a single resource when it’s out of action, say when a balloon needs repairs, without touching the rest of your fleet.

Collecting passenger details

Custom booking forms let you ask passengers whatever you need to know before they fly, like:

  • Whether they’re under your weight limit.
  • Whether they meet your health requirements (for example, if they’re pregnant or recovering from recent surgery).
  • Any accessibility needs, so you can plan for an accessible basket or extra help boarding.
  • Children’s ages, if you have a minimum age.
  • Whether they’re celebrating anything special, so your pilot knows about a proposal before take-off.

Every answer is saved to the passenger’s record in our CRM.

Setting your prices & payment options

Our pricing tools are super flexible. You can charge per seat for shared flights, offer separate adult and child rates, and build in bulk discounts for larger groups. Private charters get a flat rate.

Bókun also offers dynamic pricing that can raise or lower your rates automatically based on rules you set. For example, you can charge more on weekends and in peak season, or drop the price in shoulder months or when baskets still have seats open right before booking cutoffs.

You can also choose how passengers pay: in full upfront, with a deposit to hold their seats, or on arrival.

Sell seats through OTAs, partners & your own website

OTA connections

A memorable hot air balloon experience is often the highlight of someone’s trip, so it’s one of the first things travellers look for when they’re planning.

Bókun helps you reach those folks looking for exactly what you offer by connecting to 70+ OTAs and online marketplaces from one dashboard: Viator, GetYourGuide, Google Things to do, Airbnb Experiences, Expedia, Civitatis, Klook, Trip.com, Headout, TourRadar, Musement, and KKday, plus niche platforms for specific destinations and activities.

We’re the #1 restech partner across all major sites and have a few advanced partnerships that earn our customers extra perks:

  • As a Viator Preferred Partner, we don’t charge any Bókun fees on Viator bookings, and you receive free subscription checks (12, 24, or 48 per year, depending on your plan) so you can add more listings to Viator without fees.
  • Our GetYourGuide Premium Connectivity Partnership helps you get visible there and ensures best-in-class API performance so bookings and availability sync fast, always.
  • As an official Google Things to do partner, you can join Google’s program straight through Bókun (no lengthy application required!) and get your hot air balloon rides listed in Google Search and Map results.

There are no caps on how many channels you can connect — you can browse all the options in our Sales Tools tab and add or remove channels as you wish.

We also put together the guides below so you can learn more about the most popular online travel sites and how to sell on them:

Bókun Marketplace

The Bókun Marketplace connects you with thousands of travel businesses: travel agents, DMCs, accommodation providers like hotels and resorts, transportation providers, rental companies, attractions, and other tour and activity operators. There are a few ways to use this network:

  • Work with resellers who sell your flights to their own customers, for a commission you agree on. For balloon operators, hotels near your launch site are a natural fit: their guests want something unique and exciting to do, and a sunrise flight is an easy sell at the front desk (even more so if you offer pick-up). Travel agents are another good match, since a balloon flight is just the kind of experience they add to honeymoons, anniversary trips, and bucket-list itineraries.
  • Resell others’ services or experiences for a commission — a nice way to earn extra revenue on days your baskets are already full.
  • Team up with partners to build combo packages, like a flight paired with a vineyard tour or a night at a partner’s hotel.

You can search for partners by business or product type, reach out and agree on terms, and build contracts right in Bókun, with every conversation and document saved in one place.

Bókun Discover Partners GIF

See how others use the Bókun Marketplace to win bookings in our case studies below:

Referral Tracking

Referral Tracking lets you build your own affiliate network with partners outside the Marketplace — and you’re in complete control of it.

You can add as many affiliates as you like, from B&Bs, holiday rental hosts, and visitor centres to tourism boards, restaurants and cafés, local gift shops, wedding and proposal planners, corporate event planners, photographers, and travel creators.

Then, you set each affiliate’s commission individually and give them a link or a dedicated booking page where their customers can book directly with you. Bókun tracks where every booking came from, so you can see which partners actually send you passengers.

Your own website

OTAs and partners get you in front of travellers who haven’t heard of you yet, but your own website is where everyone else books — passengers who heard about you from a friend, spotted your brochure at their hotel, or read a review and went looking for you. So your site needs to take bookings, not just enquiries.

If you already have a website, you can add our booking widgets across pages. They work with nearly every website builder, including WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly — you grab the code from Bókun and drop it into your site.

And we offer a few different widget types, so you can pick the right one for each spot on your site:

  • Place a “Book Now” button on your homepage or navigation bar, so passengers can book from any page.
  • Put a calendar view on a “Book a flight” page, so passengers can see which dates and launch times are available.
  • Give each flight type its own product widget, with the details and availability for your sunrise flights, sunset flights, and private charters.
  • Use a product list on an “Our flights” page to show every option side by side.
  • Drop the gift card widget on a gifts page (or feature it around the holidays), so anyone shopping for a birthday or anniversary present can buy a voucher straight from you.

Choosing your Widget Type: Button, Booking Calendar, Product Page

Read more: How to add a booking system to your website

If you don’t have a website yet, our one-click website builder makes it super simple to create one. Pick a template, then plug in your details: add your logo and brand colours, drop in photos of your flights, give some background on your business, and add your contact info.

Website Settings: Choose Template

Read more: How to create a booking website

Every template is optimised for desktop and mobile, and your booking widgets come pre-installed (though you can always change them up or add more).

We also offer more advanced website tools so you can add custom CSS, publish blog content, test SEO strategies, translate your site for international visitors, and connect Google Analytics.

Then we make it easy to get your site live by managing your domain— we’ll secure it and cover those charges, so you can publish your site without any extra setup.

Bókun also supports the full booking process and checkout flow by connecting with dozens of payment processors, including Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, Klarna, and Worldpay. You can add as many of these to your checkout as you like, so you can offer the payment methods that are popular where your passengers come from, as well as the ones they simply prefer to use. That way, you don’t risk losing bookings at checkout because the right payment option wasn’t there.

Keep in touch with passengers before & after the flight

CRM

Bókun comes with an built-in CRM to manage your customer base, communications, and email marketing in one place — so you don’t have to pay for (or work in) a separate system.

Passenger details are captured as soon as someone starts a booking. Every passenger gets a profile with their contact details, booking form answers, and full booking history. Your team can also add notes, like a passenger who mentioned they’re nervous about heights or a couple celebrating a milestone.

Operations and Customers: Manage customer communications with ease

Having all of that in one place makes it much easier to stay in touch with passengers, from the moment they book to long after they’ve landed.

And it gives you a much clearer picture of who’s flying with you, so you can more strategically target your marketing efforts. For example, you could send a sunset flight offer to passengers who flew at sunrise, an anniversary offer to the couple who got engaged in your basket last year, or a gift voucher reminder ahead of the holidays.

All of this leads us to…

Automated communications

Bókun’s automated communications. This serves two purposes: it dispatches all of your standard emails (booking confirmations, mobile tickets, reminders, follow-ups, and waivers if you plug in that module), and it powers all your email marketing campaigns. We provide templates for both sides of it.

Operations: Pick a base for your template

Your standard emails run on their own once they’re set up. Pick a template, adjust the wording, and specify when they send. Then, every passenger gets what they need, without anyone on your team manually firing every email: their pre-dawn meeting time, where to park, and what to wear before the flight, then a thank-you and a review request once they’ve landed.

On the marketing side, we provide templates for abandoned cart nudges, upsells, and discount codes. You can also add your own templates for anything else: newsletters, seasonal promotions, an announcement about a new launch site, a “book your next flight” email for past passengers, or a last-minute deal when a basket still has seats. Schedule campaigns in advance and send them to the right passengers in your CRM.

Self-service portal

Bókun also offers customer self-service portals, linked from every confirmation email.

Passengers can view their booking, reschedule or cancel, and add extras like a photo package or champagne breakfast.

Any changes they make update your calendar automatically, so your team isn’t fielding emails over every small change.

It’s also where passengers land when the weather grounds a flight, which we’ll get to next.

Run the morning of the flight (& troubleshoot those mornings you can’t fly)

Bókun also comes with tools to help you run each flight morning, and to handle the ones that don’t go to plan.

Checking passengers in

Our iOS and Android apps put the day’s manifest in your crew’s pockets. They can see who’s booked on each flight and which balloon, pilot, and chase crew are assigned. As passengers arrive, your team scans their mobile tickets to check them in and can see who’s still on the way.

And since launch sites are often out in open fields with patchy signal, check-in works offline and syncs as soon as you’re back in range.

Handling weather disruptions

For the mornings you can’t fly, there’s Disrupted Departure. Select the bookings on a grounded flight from the calendar, and every passenger gets a notification with a link to their self-service portal, where they can pick a new date or cancel for a refund. If they reschedule, anything attached to their original booking (add-ons, booking form answers, and pick-up details) moves over to the new one. Disrupted Departure also closes the grounded flight to new bookings, so nobody else books onto it.

In cases where there’s no realistic path to rescheduling — bad weather sticks around for days, you’re booked out for the rest of the season, or you’re close to the end of your season — you can use Mass Cancellation to cancel and refund everyone on a flight at once.

And for changes that don’t require a full rescheduling or cancellation, like a later meeting time or a different launch field, Mass Mail lets you message everyone booked that day in one go.

Reporting to see which flights & channels fill your baskets

Bókun comes with reporting dashboards that break down your bookings and revenue by flight, sales channel, and time period. That helps you answer the questions that shape your season, like:

  • Whether your sunrise or sunset flights sell better, so you can decide if it’s worth putting up additional balloons for those launch times.
  • How often private charters book compared with shared flights, so you can tell whether your charter rate needs adjusting. If charters regularly book up weeks ahead, you can likely charge more. If they rarely book, you might need to lower the rate or include a few extras.
  • When gift voucher sales pick up during the year, so you can time your voucher promotions around those peaks.
  • Which channels bring in the most passengers — from your website to OTAs, Marketplace partners, and affiliates — so you can open up more listings and availability where you’re consistently winning business.
  • Which add-ons passengers actually buy, so you can offer more of them and keep inventory stocked.
  • Which months book up fastest, so you can plan your crew and balloons for the busy stretches.
  • Which days of the week fill up first, so you can adjust your dynamic pricing rules to match.
  • Which months are slowest, so you can fill them with discount codes, email campaigns to past passengers, or lower prices for those dates.

Reporting Dashboard: Bookings, Passengers, Booking Value

We also offer a more advanced reporting module in our App Store. This lets you build custom reports and hone in on the data that’s most valuable to you, like how many bookings you lose to weather cancellations, where your passengers travel from, or how far ahead they book.

Bókun App Store

In addition to our core features, the Bókun App Store offers a variety of extra modules to support your operations. A few that work especially well for hot air balloon flights:

  • Digital waivers — sent out with the booking confirmation, so passengers sign before they arrive, and every signed copy is attached to their booking.
  • SMS messaging — to text passengers about last-minute changes, like an updated meeting time, when they may already be out and about, not checking email.
  • Tip management — so passengers can tip your pilot and chase crew from their phones after they land, instead of hunting for cash in a field.

Bókun packages & pricing

The easiest way to see whether Bókun fits your operation is our 14-day free trial (no credit card required). Build out your flights, set up your resources, and get a feel for how it would run your season before you commit to anything.

From there, most balloon operators go with our START plan. It includes everything we’ve covered above for only $49 a month and 1.5% online booking fees (you can choose to pass that fee on to passengers or absorb it). We never charge Bókun booking fees on Viator bookings, and offline bookings are always free.

We also offer two enterprise-level plans — PLUS and PREMIUM — with more advanced tools, like agent portals, subvendor management, resource allocations, and Zapier integrations. These plans also include dedicated onboarding, priority support, and a yearly strategy call with our team. PLUS and PREMIUM support you as you scale, and are a good fit for larger operations, like companies flying from several bases or managing a bigger team.

Start your 14-day free trial to see how Bókun can give your balloon business a lift.

2. Xola

Xola homepage: Online Booking Software.

Xola is a booking platform built for tour and activity operators, and it’s been around long enough to have a solid, well-rounded set of tools. You get booking widgets, OTA connections, a reseller network, staff and equipment management, a native POS, a CRM, digital waivers, and a full suite of marketing tools, all wrapped up in a clean, easy-to-use interface.

For balloon operators, a few things stand out:

  • You can build age limits, weight ranges, and group-size requirements right into your booking forms. That way, every booking you take is one you can actually fly, and you’re not finding out on the morning that someone doesn’t meet your requirements.
  • Equipment and staff management tools let you assign balloons and pilots to each flight, so you know you’re prepared for each launch.
  • Upsells, like a champagne toast or GoPro footage, help you get more out of each booking.
  • Split payments and deposits give passengers more flexibility at checkout and help you win more group bookings, since one person doesn’t have to foot the whole bill upfront.
  • Abandoned booking emails and waitlists help you win back bookings you’d otherwise miss out on. Emails nudge anyone who bailed halfway through checkout, and if a flight sells out, the waitlist automatically offers any cancelled seats to the next person in line.

Reviewers also rave about Xola’s 24/7 support, which comes in handy when a booking issue pops up at 5 am before a sunrise launch.

The thing to keep an eye on is pricing. Instead of charging a subscription, Xola adds a partner fee to every purchase that your customers pay at checkout. It starts at 2.39% + 30¢ per transaction but can climb to 6% on international bookings. Since so many balloon passengers are travellers visiting from abroad, that higher rate could apply to a big chunk of your bookings, so it’s a good idea to run the numbers and get an idea of what travellers could be hit with before you commit.

The other thing to mention on pricing is Xola’s website-building service. There’s no free website builder for operators who still need a site, so you pay Xola’s team to design and build one for you. That means less creative control over your site, and a fair chunk of change just to get your business online.

Find more Xola reviews here.

Features

  • Website-building service
  • Online booking widgets
  • Channel management & OTA connections
  • Distribution network
  • Availability management
  • 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 starts at 2.39% + 30¢ per transaction but can be as high as 6% for international transactions.

Read more: Best Xola alternatives comparison guide

3. Checkfront

Checkfront homepage: The Most Flexible Booking Software for Every Experience

Checkfront is online booking software for tour, activity, rental, and accommodation businesses — and it’s one of the longest-standing players in the space, around since 2010. It packs in 100+ features, from booking widgets and a website builder to OTA connections, a reseller network, and reporting, so it covers most of what a balloon operator needs day to day, plus the tools to win more bookings.

A few of its tools suit balloon flights nicely.

First, resource sharing lets you track baskets, burners, crew, and chase vehicles across all your flights. And the system blocks any overlaps, so you never have to worry about the same balloon or crew being assigned to two launches at once.

Checkfront also includes in-built waivers. You can set up a different template for each flight type (say, one for shared flights and one for private charters), and keep track of who’s signed and who hasn’t before your passengers arrive.

Lastly, there’s payment flexibility. Deposits make it easier to win passengers who are booking months ahead, and groups who don’t want to pay in full straight away, since they can lock in their seats now and pay the balance later, online or in person.

Where Checkfront gets harder to justify is cost. After merging with Rezdy at the end of 2023, it moved to a $99 monthly subscription plus a 3% fee on online bookings. Checkfront does give you the option of absorbing the fee or passing it to travellers. However, when you’re dealing with pricey experiences, neither option is great. Absorbing it means fees eat into your margins. Passing it on means asking travellers to pay a hefty fee on top of an already expensive experience, which could put some of them off checking out.

Read more Checkfront reviews here.

Features

  • Website builder
  • Online booking engine widgets
  • Centralised booking calendar
  • Availability management
  • Channel management & OTA connections
  • Partner network
  • Product management
  • Resource management
  • Upselling tools, including options to sell add-ons & bundle products
  • Custom form builders and waivers to send to customers before their tours
  • Mobile tickets & ticket scanning
  • Marketing tools, including customer booking map, customer outreach & ROI tracking
  • Integrations with a variety of online payment processors (Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay)
  • POS integrations & invoicing tools
  • 50+ integrations & Checkfront API to create custom integrations
  • Reporting

Pricing

Checkfront charges a $99/month subscription fee and 3% booking fees. You can either cover the booking fees or pass them along to customers.

Read more: Best Checkfront alternatives

4. TicketingHub

TicketingHub homepage: Booking and ticketing software tour operators trust

TicketingHub is a ticketing and booking platform that was originally designed for attractions managing high-volume ticket sales, but is now marketed to tour and activity operators of all kinds. It’s a smaller player than some of the names on this list, with around 40 reviews on Capterra, but those reviews are glowing, and users regularly call out how responsive and hands-on the support team is.

The feature set covers most of what you need to run your day-to-day. What we think balloon operators will like best is the Magic Link. Every passenger gets a link where they can change their booking, cancel it, or turn it into a voucher themselves. So when the weather grounds a flight, passengers who can’t commit to a new date straight away can hang onto a voucher and rebook when it suits them, instead of cancelling outright.

TicketingHub also has resource management built into its calendar. You add the vehicles and staff you have, and each flight’s availability is tied to them, so a flight only shows as available when the resources it needs are free. From there, you can assign pilots to each flight and automatically send them the manifest (and any last-minute changes), plus track crew hours and shifts without a spreadsheet.

And it’s strong on distribution, with 50+ OTA connections, a reseller portal, and trackable affiliate links. Plus, you get waitlists for sold-out flights so you can keep baskets full even during last-minute cancellations.

However (not to sound like a broken record), fees here are also worth careful consideration. There’s no monthly subscription, which sounds ideal for a seasonal business, since you only pay when you’re actually selling flights. But TicketingHub takes 3% of every booking, including offline ones like phone bookings and walk-ups (most platforms only charge fees on online bookings).

Find more TicketingHub reviews here.

Features

  • Online ticketing engine widget
  • Availability management
  • Waitlists
  • Channel management
  • Reseller network
  • Team management
  • Resource management
  • CRM & automated communications
  • Customer portals
  • Multi-currency support
  • POS integrations
  • Reporting dashboard

Pricing

TicketingHub charges a 3% fee on every booking, including online, OTA, and in-person card bookings. Cash sales are free.

Businesses selling over $2.5M a year can request a custom package.

Read more: Best TicketingHub alternatives

5. TripWorks

TripWorks homepage: The first Business Intelligence powered booking platform built for tour & activity operators

TripWorks is an all-in-one reservation platform for tour and activity operators. It once worked with businesses of all sizes, but these days it’s geared towards larger operators managing high-volume bookings.

Weather-dependent businesses — like hot air balloon companies — will get a lot out of its automated rescheduling. When conditions change, you can move passengers to new dates without working through each booking by hand. Hot air balloon operators also tend to like:

  • The smart guide assignments that let you match pilots and chase crew to each flight so you’re prepared ahead of time. Your team can check their schedules from their phones, so everyone knows where they need to be and when.
  • The QR code check-in and in-built digital waivers that speed things up at the launch site. Passengers sign before they arrive, and your crew just scans tickets as people turn up.
  • Dynamic pricing that lets you charge more when demand is high, like on weekends and in peak season.
  • Gift cards and vouchers that let you sell flights as presents, so recipients can pick a date whenever it suits them.
  • Connections to 50+ marketplaces, including Tripadvisor, Viator, GetYourGuide, Klook, and Expedia, to get your flights in front of more travellers.
  • And tipping tools that make it easy for passengers to thank your pilot and crew after landing. One TripWorks reviewer says tips went from 250–400 to 800–1,000 per group.

Pricing is where things get trickier. TripWorks now only offers custom quotes, but it has historically charged 6% booking fees plus a 2.9% + 30¢ transaction fee, which adds up to nearly 9% of every booking. And TripWorks collects the fee on the full booking totalas soon as a deposit comes in. So if a passenger books a spring flight in winter with a small deposit, you pay the full fee months before the rest of the money arrives.

Read more TripWorks reviews here.

Features

  • Online booking widget (that connects to existing sites)
  • Reservation management
  • Product management
  • Availability management
  • Connections with OTAs & channel management
  • Reseller marketplace
  • Options to sell gift cards & vouchers
  • Dynamic pricing
  • Digital waiver solution
  • Native POS
  • Integrations with Apple Pay & Google Pay
  • Marketing tools to build PPC campaigns & improve your reach on social media
  • Integrations with marketing & business applications
  • Reporting

Pricing

TripWorks now offers custom quotes. You must get in touch with their team to learn more. (However, they’ve historically charged 6% online booking fees and a 2.9% + 30¢ transaction fee per booking.)

Read more: Best TripWorks alternatives

6. Peek Pro

Peek Pro homepage: More Bookings, Happier Customers.

Peek Pro is booking software for tour, activity, and rental operators, built with outdoor adventures and excursions in mind. Reviewers find its clean, modern interface easy to pick up, and the team behind it keeps rolling out new tools — with a particular emphasis on AI.

Its AI assistant, Peek Copilot, lets you automate staff scheduling, daily reporting, and guest messages to take some admin off your plate during the busy season.

And Peek’s AI dynamic pricing is quite advanced. You set minimum and maximum rates, and then the system automatically adjusts them (within those thresholds) based on demand, weather forecasts, and past booking patterns. So prices can climb as a weekend flight fills up on a clear forecast, or drop to fill a quiet slot, without ever setting rates you’re not comfortable with.

In addition to those AI features, Peek covers the operations side well and includes distribution tools to get you in front of more travellers.

The big operational one to mention is resource management. It lets you tag and assign balloons, equipment, and crew across all your flights, so nothing gets booked twice. Digital waivers are another handy tool.

On the sales side, you get OTA connections and Peek’s reseller marketplace to expand your reach. Peek also includes abandoned cart recovery, so you can win back more of those bookings.

Our main hesitation is cost. Peek no longer publishes its pricing, so you’ll need to request a quote, but it previously charged some of the highest booking fees in the industry (6% to 8%), plus merchant service fees. Reviews also mention slower support for long-term customers and some delayed payouts, which is a lot to weigh when every booking is a high-ticket one.

Read more Peek Pro reviews here.

Features

  • Online booking widgets
  • Abandoned booking recovery
  • Resource management (tag/assign inventory, equipment, and staff across activities)
  • AI dynamic pricing with operator-set minimums & maximums
  • Digital waivers
  • Automated guest communications
  • POS for walk-ups & on-the-spot add-on upsells
  • OTA integrations
  • Reseller marketplace
  • AI automations: staff scheduling, daily reporting, guest comms
  • Security deposits, card holds, photo documentation for rentals
  • Waitlists
  • Mobile apps (iOS and Android)
  • Reporting

Pricing

Peek Pro no longer publishes pricing online; you must contact them for a quote. However, booking fees have historically ranged from 6% to 8%.

Read more: Best Peek Pro alternatives

7. FareHarbor

FareHarbor homepage: Powerful booking software. Unmatched support.

FareHarbor is one of the biggest names in tour and activity booking software. It’s owned by Booking Holdings (the company behind Booking.com), has been around since 2013, and now serves over 23k operators — plenty of businesses choose it for the name recognition alone.

The toolkit itself is complete. A central calendar holds your online and offline bookings. Inventory management lets you track equipment and staff availability and set the capacity for each flight. Staff management tools help you schedule your team and assign pilots to flights. And customer portals let passengers change or cancel their own bookings.

On the morning of a flight, FareHarbor’s check-in tools and online waivers keep things moving at the launch site, and mobile apps let your crew manage everything from the field.

For distribution, FareHarbor integrates with dozens of OTAs, and the FareHarbor Distribution Network (FHDN) connects you with resellers. You have a variety of options to get in front of new customers.

Cost is where FareHarbor loses us. It used to be known as “free” software, but these days it seems to nickel-and-dime both you and your customers wherever it can.

Take its website-building service, which costs $5k a year (or $499 a month). There’s no free website builder (the same issue we flagged with Xola), so if you still need to get your business online, you’ll pay FareHarbor thousands to do it. FareHarbor also sells SEO services to optimise your site for $2.2k or $5k a year, though those are optional, so you can skip them.

Then there’s the 20% to 25% commission FareHarbor takes on every booking you win through FHDN — most platforms don’t charge these fees for reseller bookings.

And on top of all that, FareHarbor’s booking fees run up to 6% and 8%, and they’re passed straight to your passengers at checkout. The fees vary, so it’s hard to predict exactly what passengers will pay. On an already expensive flight, that’s a lot to ask travellers to swallow.

You can learn more about FareHarbor pricing in our guide.

Read more FareHarbor reviews here.

Features

  • Website-building services (and online booking widgets for existing sites)
  • Centralised booking calendar to manage online & offline bookings
  • Channel management
  • Distribution network — including connections with OTAs and partners
  • Inventory management — to create product listings, track equipment and staff availability, set tour capacities, and create tickets and pricing options
  • Staff management — to manage staff schedules and assign guides to tours
  • Native POS
  • Integrations with online payment providers
  • Customer portals to cancel or modify reservations
  • Flexible check-in features & online waiver solutions
  • Options to sell memberships
  • Reporting
  • Mobile apps

Pricing

FareHarbor charges booking fees of up to 6% and 8%. They also charge:

  • $5k per year (or $499/month) for their website-building service
  • $2.2k or $5k per year (depending on your package) for SEO services
  • 20% to 25% commission from every booking you earn through the reseller network

Read more:

8. Bookables

Bookables homepage: Easy business bookings ahead.

Bookables is a general booking app for service businesses — so it isn’t built specifically for tours and activities, but it covers a surprising amount of what a balloon operator needs (and you can start on a free plan to see if it works for you).

Here’s what it does well for balloon operators:

  • Simple flight sales. Shared flights sell by the seat and stop taking bookings once the basket capacity is reached, while private charters work as a separate product with their own price. You can also take a deposit upfront with the balance due by a set date, which suits passengers who book months ahead.
  • Crew scheduling. Add pilots and chase crew as team members, tag each with their role, and set their working hours. You can then assign them to flights based on their working times, and drag a flight over to someone else if plans change at the last minute.
  • Partner accounts. Bookables makes it easy to work with partners you already know, like a hotel or tour operator that sends you groups every season. Instead of taking a card for each booking, you keep all of that partner’s flights on one record and send them a payment request afterwards to settle up. It’s not a reseller network (those partners still book with you directly), but it saves you chasing payments booking by booking.
  • Low pricing. The free plan covers up to 200 bookings a month, and the Pro plan, which you’ll need to take card payments, costs a flat $1 per booking. On a high-ticket experience like a balloon flight, that’s about as cheap as it gets.

And where it falls short:

  • No distribution. Bookables doesn’t offer a reseller network or connect to OTAs, so bookings only come through your own website and the partners you already work with.
  • Unclear equipment management. The site says you can schedule vans, so chase vehicles could be covered, but it doesn’t mention tracking balloons, burners, or other flight gear.
  • Hands-on weather changes. The system gives you tools to move every passenger to another day, but you still have to email or call each passenger to confirm the new date works before rescheduling anyone. Then you’re coordinating with everyone on the original manifest to either get them moved or send a refund.
  • No verified reviews. Everything we know comes from Bookables’ own website, so there’s no real way to gauge how it holds up for other operators.

Bookables does not yet have any verified reviews.

Features

  • Online booking page
  • Per-seat capacity limits
  • Private charter products
  • Deposits & balance payments
  • Card payments
  • Payment requests for partner accounts
  • Email confirmations & reminders
  • Customer records
  • Bulk flight rescheduling
  • Individual booking rescheduling
  • Staff logins & working hours

Pricing

Bookables offers a free plan that includes all core features and supports 200 bookings per month. The Pro plan supports unlimited bookings, card payments, branded emails, estimating tools, and accounting integrations for $1 per booking.

9. RecSystems

RecSystems Hot Air Balloons Solutions landing page: Rise With the Sun. Book With Confidence.

RecSystems is booking and fleet management software made mainly for rental businesses, like boat rentals, powersports, and outdoor recreation, though it also covers tours and experiences.

Its AI copilot, Rex, is a big part of the pitch. Rex offers 24/7 support, sends you a morning briefing on the day ahead, helps train new staff, and flags anything unusual in your bookings. You also decide what Rex can handle on its own, what it can only suggest, and what has to go to a person.

The booking side is fairly straightforward. You can add custom questions at checkout (like asking whether passengers are celebrating anything special), show your weather policy before passengers pay, and send reminder emails with the early meeting time. Payments are simple, too. Card processing is included, and you can keep cards on file to charge balances or extras with one click.

RecSystems also offers in-built weather workflows for days you can’t fly. It flags any weather alerts or storm advisories before your day starts. Then, you can send one mass email to everyone booked on a grounded flight, with their options to reschedule or get a refund (though you’ll handle the rebookings yourself from there). It also integrates with Sensible Weather, which sells weather guarantees that refund customers if bad weather ruins their plans.

On days you’re set to launch, QR check-in and digital waivers keep things moving.

The downside is distribution. We couldn’t find any OTA connections or reseller tools on its site, so you’d be relying on your own website to bring in passengers.

RecSystems is also a newer platform that doesn’t have any verified reviews, so we can’t say how well Rex or the rest of the platform performs once operators are using it every day.

And at 10% per completed booking, RecSystems has some of the highest fees on this list. You can split the fee between yourself and passengers, deciding how much to absorb and how much to pass on, but it’s still a big cut of every high-ticket flight.

RecSystems does not yet have any verified reviews.

Features

  • Online booking engine
  • Custom booking questions
  • Card on file & one-click charges
  • Automated reminder emails
  • QR check-in
  • Digital waivers
  • Weather workflows
  • Fleet management
  • Staff accounts & role permissions
  • Rex AI copilot
  • Reporting

Pricing

RecSystems charges 10% booking fees but lets you choose how that’s split between you and the customer. You can pass all 10% to the customer, absorb all 10%, or divvy it up any which way.

10. Quick Release

Quick Release Flight Management Software for Commercial Balloon Operators homepage

Quick Release is flight management software made specifically for commercial balloon operators. It was built by Wim Maet, a Belgian balloon pilot and software engineer, and it’s been running for over 10 years. According to Quick Release, more than 190 pilots across Europe use it today.

Its flight-planning tools go further than anything else on this list. You get weather forecasts for each launch site, with wind profiles at different altitudes, plus a map that predicts where your balloon will drift once it’s up. Quick Release also calculates lift based on your balloon, fuel cylinders, and passenger weights, and warns you if there isn’t enough reserve, so you can adjust the load before anyone climbs into the basket.

The paperwork is covered, too. It generates manifests and Operational Flight Plans as PDFs, keeps digital logbooks for every pilot and balloon, and reminds you before insurance, inspections, or licences expire.

For crew management, pilots and ground crew add their own availability, so you can see who’s free when you’re planning each flight. Once a flight’s confirmed, everyone assigned to it automatically gets a briefing by email or WhatsApp with the passenger list, meeting point, and trajectory map, and the flight shows up in their phone’s calendar. On the day, they can check in, sign off, and log the landing with GPS from any smartphone.

It also has nice customer management tools to turn booking requests into confirmed flights. Passengers can send in a booking request (or redeem a gift voucher) to get on your radar. From there, each passenger receives their own page, where they can pick from your available flights, or accept one you’ve invited them on, and check in online. And if a flight gets cancelled, Quick Release suggests other dates to help you fill those seats again.

However, getting new bookings is another story. Quick Release doesn’t offer OTA connections or a reseller network, and you’ll need a web developer to connect it to your website through its API.

It’s also built with European operators in mind. It’s only available to businesses with a VAT number, and passenger messages come in four languages: Dutch, French, English, and German.

And while Quick Release has plenty of pilots on board, we couldn’t find any independent reviews, so it’s hard to know how it holds up compared to the other platforms here.

Quick Release does not yet have any verified reviews.

Features

  • Website integration via API
  • Booking request management
  • Passenger booking pages & online check-in
  • Gift vouchers
  • Alternative date suggestions for cancelled flights
  • Weather forecasts per launch site
  • Flight trajectory predictions
  • Lift calculations
  • Manifests & Operational Flight Plans
  • Crew availability & automatic briefings
  • Digital logbooks
  • Licence, insurance, and inspection reminders
  • WhatsApp & SMS messaging

Pricing

Quick Release offers three plans. All plans include all features and support unlimited flights and bookings. You choose your plan based on your fleet capacity. All prices are listed in euros.

  • Tropo (€330/year) for fleets up to 15 seats.
  • Strato (€825/year) for fleets up to 30 seats.
  • Meso (€1,650/year) for unlimited fleet capacity.

11. AéroSI

AéroSI homepage: Management and Booking Solution for Your Aerial Activities

AéroSI is reservation and management software for aerial activity businesses, covering everything from hot air balloons and helicopters to microlights and paragliding. It’s made by VisionSI, a software company in Dijon, France, and most of its customers are French balloon operators.

Where AéroSI goes deeper than most is the back office. On top of reservation planning and order management, you can manage your flight bases, track maintenance on your equipment, and handle pilots, instructors, partners, and subcontractors in one place, including their leave.

It also gives everyone involved their own online space. Passengers, pilots, partners, and subcontractors each get an extranet with the information they need, so you’re not sending the same details back and forth by email.

Billing, accounting, and document storage are built in as well, and you can brand your tickets, invoices, and emails with your own logo and colours.

When you sign up, AéroSI’s team imports your existing orders and customer data and gives you personalised training, with a support hotline based in Dijon if you need help later on.

Distribution is more limited. AéroSI connects to your WordPress or PrestaShop site and to some suppliers and marketplaces (it partners with French experience site Sport Découverte), but it doesn’t list connections to the big global OTAs.

Pricing isn’t published, so you’ll need to request a demo to get a quote.

And with no verified customer reviews to go on, it’s tough to say how AéroSI compares once it’s up and running.

AéroSI does not yet have any verified reviews.

Features

  • Website integrations (WordPress & PrestaShop)
  • Supplier & marketplace connectors
  • Real-time reservation planning
  • Ticket & order management
  • Flight base management
  • Equipment maintenance management
  • Pilot, instructor, and subcontractor management
  • Staff leave management
  • Passenger management
  • Extranets for passengers, pilots, and partners
  • CRM & marketing emails
  • Email & SMS notifications
  • Document storage
  • Billing & accounting

Pricing

AéroSI does not share pricing online. You must request a demo to receive a custom quote.

Getting started with the best booking software for your hot air balloon business

Every balloon flight depends on a handful of things going right. The basket sells out, the right balloon and crew are on the launch, and passengers know exactly when and where to meet. And when the forecast doesn’t cooperate, everyone gets moved without a morning of phone calls.

Many of the platforms on this list handle some of that well. Few handle all of it — and even fewer help you find the travellers to fill those baskets in the first place.

But Bókun is one of those few. Our central calendar, real-time availability, resource management, and Disrupted Departure tools keep every flight on track, from the first booking to touchdown. And with 70+ OTA connections, the Bókun Marketplace, and Referral Tracking, you can get your flights in front of travellers around the world. We offer all of it at some of the lowest rates around.

Ready to fill more baskets? Start your 14-day free trial today (no credit card required).