Bókun & Viator Partners (How It Works + Benefits)
Bókun and Viator are complementary solutions, and are both part of the Tripadvisor group:
- Tripadvisor is an online directory for travel brands and travellers, helping users research and plan trips. Tour, activity and experience providers, attractions, event venues, and other travel businesses can create profiles to showcase their offerings and collect customer reviews.
- Viator is an online marketplace where tourists can book travel experiences. Tour operators can list their offerings and promote experiences to millions of interested travellers.
- Bókun is a tour operator software and channel management solution that helps business owners manage bookings, availability, products, resources, staff, and back-office operations.
Tour operators can use Tripadvisor and Viator to promote their brand and sell tours, while Bókun helps them manage their business operations behind the scenes.
Bókun offers a preferred partnership with Viator, providing valuable benefits for tour and experience providers. For example, Bókun waives booking fees on Viator reservations when managed through our platform.
This guide outlines the setup process and showcases the benefits of the Bókun and Viator partnership. You’ll also find a brief introduction to Bókun and our travel industry solutions.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
How the Bókun & Viator Partnership Works
As mentioned, Viator operates an online marketplace where tour operators and other travel businesses can promote their experiences. Viator is one of the most popular online tour and activity platforms — alongside GetYourGuide, Expedia, Trip.com, Booking.com, and Google Things to do.
If you haven’t joined Viator’s platform yet, you can learn how to sell tours on Viator here.
Bókun complements Viator by consolidating reservations from all online sales channels into a central booking calendar, automatically updating availability across connected channels.
Bókun aggregates bookings from Viator, OTAs, your website, and partners, allowing you to view all reservations and manage availability from one place — helping you stay organised as you scale.
Linking Bókun and Viator is simple, and setup takes less than 5 minutes. Here’s how to do it:
- Open Bókun’s “Sales tools” tab to view OTA options.
- Select “Viator” from the list.
- Log in to your Viator account.
[source: bokun-online-travel-agencies]
Voila! The platforms are automatically synced.
Benefits of the Bókun & Viator Partnership
Our partnership unlocks several benefits — here are a couple of examples:
- Bókun lets you manage Viator bookings, along with bookings from other sales channels, and automatically updates your availability as shown on Viator.
- We waive Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations, allowing you to manage these bookings in our system without any extra costs.
In addition, our partnership:
- Earns you free submission checks to reduce operational costs as you expand your product line and test new experiences. The number of free checks varies depending on your Bókun package (12, 24, or 48 checks per year).
- Enables Viator users to import products directly into Bókun, bypassing setup in our platform. Viator products are automatically displayed on your website, allowing you to receive direct bookings.
Note: You can also link Bókun and Tripadvisor to feed traveller reviews to your website listings.
Linking your Viator account with booking management software like Bókun puts you one step closer to receiving Viator’s Badge of Excellence.
This badge is added to product listings where the product has met certain high quality standards, and are optimised for the best performance.
To earn Viator’s Badge of Excellence on a product listing, your listing must:
- Include a minimum of six high-quality photos
- Have acquired at least 15 reviews
- Maintain an average 4.5-star rating from traveller reviews
- Accept mobile tickets
- Include a standard cancellation policy
- Maintain a supplier-driven cancellation rate of below 2% — automatic availability management helps keep calendars updated, preventing overbookings and cancellations
- Offer instantly confirmable listings — also made possible by linking a booking system
Getting Started with Bókun & Viator
Enrolling with Viator is free and easy; you can do so here.
You have multiple options to get started with Bókun — we offer both:
- Tour operator software with comprehensive features to support all areas of operations. This option is best for teams upgrading from manual processes and spreadsheets that don’t already have a restech system or are switching from another system. We provide numerous packages to support teams at different growth stages or with specialised requirements.
- Channel manager with the Bókun Marketplace, so you can grow your distribution network and leverage Bókun’s availability management tools. We’ve developed this solution for teams that already have an existing booking system and need solutions to sell on OTAs, aggregate bookings, and keep availability up-to-date.
Bókun tour operator software
We offer a 14-day free trial of Bókun, so tour operators can explore its features and determine whether we’re the right solution for their business.
Our booking platform includes:
- Online booking engine widgets to sell tours online, receive direct bookings, improve travellers’ booking experiences, and increase conversions.
- A website builder to create a branded booking site with user-friendly templates.
- Payment integrations with Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Stripe, Raypd, Worldpay, Braintree, Klarna, and more — enabling online payments at checkout and offering customers various payment options.
- A central calendar to view bookings from all channels, add offline bookings, and manage availability on the fly.
- Advanced availability management, allowing you to create availability rules that auto-populate your calendars.
- Connections with global OTAs, including the major platforms and niche-specific sites.
- Bókun Marketplace, with 27K+ businesses in the travel and tourism industry. Our Marketplace includes travel agents, destination management companies (DMCs), rental providers, hotel and resort chains, universities, attractions, and other tour and activity operators, helping to expand your reach and earn more bookings. You can connect with resellers, sell others’ services for commissions, or create packages with partners.
- Product management tools for designing listings, creating tour packages, offering add-ons, linking Tripadvisor reviews, and dynamic pricing to attract customers and boost revenue.
- Resource management for scheduling staff, allocating equipment for experiences, and optimising resource usage.
- CRM to store customer information and booking history for quick reference.
- Automated communications for booking confirmations, mobile tickets, reminders, follow-ups, upsells, abandoned cart emails, newsletters, and more.
- Customer portals for travellers to view, modify, or cancel reservations independently.
- Mobile apps (iOS and Android) with on-the-go access to Bókun’s booking calendar and ticket scanning tools.
- Reporting dashboard to track bookings, sales channel performance, revenue, and customer insights.
- An app store to supplement and customise Bókun’s core features.
We offer all of these features and full Marketplace access in our START package, priced affordably at $49/month — accessible to even small, one- and two-person teams.
We charge industry-low booking fees at 1.5% for online bookings (from OTAs, partners, and your website). Remember, we waive Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations.
Additionally, we offer two upgraded plans — PLUS and PREMIUM — with advanced tools to support scalability, such as travel agent portals, Zapier API, and sub-vendor management.
You can also watch a brief tutorial on Bókun and the Marketplace below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2X9zhSmoM
Bókun channel manager
Bókun’s channel manager works as an intermediary between your existing restech system and online sales channels like Viator — it centralizes and feeds bookings back to your restech system, then updates availability across sites as new reservations roll in.
Our channel management solution also grants access to the full Bókun Marketplace, where you can connect and collaborate with partners to expand your distribution network and establish new income streams.
Learn more about Bókun’s channel manager by requesting a free demo with our team.
You can also read more about Bókun solutions in our guides below: