In today’s digital world, most travellers prefer to book their trips, tours, and activities online, ahead of time. For tour operators, this means you need a reliable website with online booking capabilities so you can capture this business 24/7.

And fortunately, building a website has never been easier! While there are dozens of website builders offering free templates (for all industries and use cases), it’s recommended that tour operators skip these and use a website builder provided by a tour operator software brand.

Any high-quality tour operator software includes a website builder as part of its solution because it’s essential that your website and booking engine communicate directly with your booking management system. This is the only way to automatically sync bookings to your central calendar and keep availability accurate in real-time.

Without this communication, you’re stuck managing your website, OTAs, partners, and every other sales channel separately. This creates a significant amount of manual work in updating calendars and leaves you at risk of overbookings in the meantime.

Website templates from a tour operator software (like Bókun) offer several key advantages:

  • They’re specifically designed for the tour industry, with layouts and traveller-focused features like online booking engines and payment gateways built in.
  • Easy customisation options, allowing your website to reflect your unique brand and voice.
  • The layouts are desktop and mobile-friendly by default, so travellers can book with you from any device.
  • They provide technical support and regular updates to keep your site secure and current.
  • Seamless integration with back-office tools — not only your booking management calendar but also your CRM and resource management — so you can manage tours, equipment, customers, and guides in a unified system.

This guide shows exactly how Bókun’s website builder and templates work. At the end, you’ll find resources on other top-rated tour operator software with native website builders, so you can easily compare your options.

Get started with Bókun’s 14-day free trial — no credit card required.

Bókun’s One-Click Website Builder + Template Gallery

Our website builder is included in the Bókun subscription for all users — no matter what plan you choose — so you can bring your brand online or design a new site. Our website builder comes with:

  • Dozens of templates so you can select your favourite style and start designing
  • The domain (website) name of your choosing. We partner with GoDaddy to cover these costs, so there are no fees associated with using our builder or bringing your site online
  • Maintenance, security, and updates to keep your site running smoothly

Our website builder is super easy to use, so anybody (really, anybody, even your grandma or grandpa) can build a professional, branded booking website in just a few hours. It doesn’t require any HTML or CSS knowledge; you can drag and drop page elements — adding media, text boxes, brand colours, fonts, and more — to make your site uniquely yours.

In addition to our templates and user-friendly builder, we also provide a variety of advanced website tools for those who want to go deeper in tailoring their site. You can customise your site’s navigation bar, booking widget, and buttons; add landing pages and blog posts; translate your site to serve travellers everywhere; integrate Google Analytics; and optimise your site for SEO.

Most of all, you can change your site anytime. You’re in full control, so you can update your site as your business evolves — add or remove pages, refresh images and content, even wholly rebrand. Our team can help with anything along the way.

Let’s show you how it works. After, we include a quick demo so you can get a sneak peek at the templates and website builder before starting.

Note: We also provide simple online booking widgets for teams who already have a site, so we’re not pigeonholing folks into our website builder; it’s entirely optional.

Read more: Best tour booking plugins for WordPress

How it works (from template to live site)

You’ll start building your site by selecting a template from our gallery. Take a look at a few of the designs below:

Select Website Template

Each template comes pre-loaded with three pages — a home page, tours page, and contact page — with the Bókun booking engine built in. Then, you can begin editing each page with our drag-and-drop editor.

On the home page, you can choose a cover photo, add your brand logo, insert buttons and text boxes, change the colour scheme, include image slideshows or previews of your tours, and more. You can also link your Tripadvisor account to display customer reviews on your site automatically.

Our system automatically displays all of your tours (from the product management module, Experiences) on the tours page, so you don’t have to re-create listings on your site. Then, you can easily change the layout or order of tours to highlight your best sellers at the top of the list.

On the contact page, you can easily plug details into text boxes and modify their look any which way (move them around, make them smaller or bigger, delete or add new sections). You can include contact forms and links for your email address and social media pages so customers can instantly get in touch with you.

You can also:

  • Add new pages: You can choose the page layout, give the page a title, and select where it appears in the menu navigation.
  • Create blog posts: This is an excellent opportunity to implement SEO optimisation strategies and produce content to target your ideal customers in search engines. (You can learn more about our SEO tips for tour operators here.)
  • Insert links: You can easily link to your social media pages or any other site you want to promote to your customers.
  • Connect widgets: Our system includes four primary widget types you can embed anywhere on your site:
    • Booking Button – directs customers straight to booking.
    • Product Page – displays full details about a specific product.
    • Calendar – shows product availability at a glance.
    • Product List – highlights select products with images, prices, and key info.

Our website editor is so easy to use because you can see exactly how your site will appear for travellers as you build it. You can evaluate the design and user experience to fine-tune as you go — without having to switch to a “preview mode” and constantly reload to check changes.

After you’re done designing, you’ll submit your preferred website name and our system will automatically check availability (if it’s not available, it’ll show a list of related options, or you can resubmit a new name) and secure your selected domain name.

Then, you can publish your site live!

See our website builder in action

You can see how all of this comes together in our quick demo below:

Additional Tour Operator Software with Native Website Builders

As we mentioned earlier, most high-quality tour operator software includes a native website builder as part of its core toolset. So there are dozens of options for tour operators to choose from.

But two important notes here:

  • Not every tour operator software offers a website builder for free. Some brands charge a monthly or yearly fee to keep your site live and current.
  • Some brands design your site for you, which can be a pro or con depending on your vision and preferences. They’ll chat with you about your website design, what images or media you want to include, what information you want to provide for travellers, and more. After they’ve designed the “first draft,” they’ll work with you to come to a finished product. This service can also come at an additional cost.

Always be careful to check pricing and read the fine print. That way, you know exactly what you’re signing up for, and you don’t end up paying extra for what should be a standard feature.

Instead of going into detail on every available option in this post, we wrote a review guide of the best tour operator software with native website builders, which you can read here.

Try Bókun for free!

Selling tours on your website is just the tip of the iceberg with Bókun. Our all-in-one tour operator software has an extensive variety of tools to help you reach travellers across all online channels and booking sites, including:

  • Connections with 50+ global online travel agencies (OTAs), so you can promote your tours on the sites travellers commonly use to plan and book vacations.
  • A robust distribution network, The Bókun Marketplace, where you can establish partnerships with over 27k businesses in the travel and leisure industry — travel agents, destination management companies, hotels and resorts, transportation services, attractions, educational institutions, and more. Win new bookings, add revenue streams, and create comprehensive travel packages to diversify your offerings.
  • Referral Tracking so you can extend partnerships beyond our network and earn bookings through any affiliate of your choosing — other businesses in your local area, travel bloggers or influencers, or any other partner who can send customers your way.

We also offer exclusive partnerships with popular travel sites and OTAs, including.

  • Tripadvisor: We’re a Tripadvisor brand, so you can connect platforms and feed traveller reviews across sites.
  • Viator: Viator and Bókun seamlessly connect, so Viator users can instantly import their tours to Bókun and sell them on their websites. Plus, our Preferred Partnership with Viator allows us to offer 0% Bókun booking fees and (12, 24, or 48) free subscription checks yearly. Which is why we’re the #1 tour operator software for teams selling on Viator.

Build your website for free with Bókun and start selling tours where travellers are searching!

You can also read more in our guides below:

Or check out some of our case studies to see how Bókun tour operators use our system to scale to new heights: