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8 Best Alternatives to Ventrata: 2024 Comparison Guide | Bókun

Sam Jefferies • November 20th, 2024

Ventrata is a UK-based tour operator software company that offers solutions to support booking management and high-volume ticket sales.

The brand works with tour, activity, and experience providers, event management companies, cultural venues, and attractions like observation decks. Some of Ventrata’s clients include The Empire State Building, Boston Duck Tours, Uber Boat, Gray Line, Big Bus Tours, Discover Banff Tours, and Paramount Pictures Studio Tours.

While Ventrata offers many convenient features and receives positive customer feedback, it is one of the priciest tour operator software on the market — and pricing suggests the brand only works with enterprise or global organisations that generate a minimum annual revenue of $1M.

Packages start at $550/month, and Ventrata charges transaction fees in addition to expensive subscription fees; most small teams are priced out at early conversations.

Many other tour operator systems offer the same features and benefits as Ventrata, but at better value for money. So, we’ve compiled this guide to Ventrata alternatives for small, midsize, and growing teams seeking an affordable, flexible solution that can scale with their business.

Best Alternatives to Ventrata

Bókun (our scalable booking management solution for tour and experience providers)
Xola
FareHarbor
Checkfront
TicketingHub
Peek Pro
Regiondo
TripWorks

You can start a 14-day free trial of Bókun to explore our platform’s features.

1. Bókun

Flexible, scalable all-in-one booking & ticket management solution

Bókun’s cloud-based booking and ticket management software offers everything tour and experience providers need to streamline operations, including booking widgets, real-time calendars, product and resource management, and a vast distribution network. It also features a CRM and automated communications to manage customer data and email correspondence.

What sets us apart is our OTA partnerships — we’re a Tripadvisor brand, Viator preferred partner, and premium connectivity partner with GetYourGuide. These partnerships offer benefits like increased visibility on these channels, plus we waive Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations.

With over a decade of experience in the travel industry, we offer solutions for tour operators and attractions at all growth stages.

We provide packages for small teams to digitize their business and leverage online strategies, as well as custom enterprise packages for scaling teams. Our support team can even offer guidance as you grow to help you achieve your goals.

Even more? We charge the lowest booking fees (1% to 1.5%) across all competitors, so you can sell online and benefit from OTAs without costly fees.

In the following sections, we’ll review our core offerings to give you an overview of how Bókun works. If you’d like to try our platform, you can start a free trial (no credit card required).

Drive direct bookings via the Bókun booking engine widget

One of Bókun’s key features is our online booking engine widget, which you can easily embed on your site to enable direct bookings. Our widget is optimised to guide travellers through the checkout flow and reduce drop-offs. It also includes retargeting tools to recover abandoned carts (more on that later).

We’ve found that many smaller teams lack websites and rely on traditional methods and in-person bookings. While this can work to a degree, specifically in tourist-heavy areas, it limits growth. To help, we’ve added a website builder to Bókun, enabling small teams to bring their businesses online and receive direct bookings.

With easy-to-use templates and plug-and-play fields, even those who aren’t tech-savvy can create a site in just a few hours.

Our website builder is included in all subscription plans, and we cover the costs of securing your domain and bringing your site online.

You can learn more about creating a booking website in our guide here.

Expand your reach & diversify your distribution network

Bókun’s Marketplace includes over 27K partners in the travel industry — including OTAs, Google Things to Do, tour and activity operators, attractions, travel agents, destination management companies (DMCs), rental providers, hotels, resorts, and other lodging providers.

Our clients leverage our Marketplace to:

Connect with OTAs and sell experiences on the sites travellers use to plan and book travel. Our site connects with big names like Viator, GetYourGuide, Headout, Trip.com, and Klook, but it also connects with niche-specific OTAs so you can sell on the sites most relevant to your offerings.
Establish reseller partnerships. You can connect with resellers who will earn you more bookings, or you can resell others’ tours and experiences to earn a commission.
Create travel or tour packages with partners. This allows you to differentiate and expand your product line and offer more convenient packages to travellers. For example, you could connect with a nearby hotel to provide travellers with lodging and things to do during their visit.

Bókun also includes contract management tools, so you can contact partners through our system, save all communications, and store final contracts. Our system can also show contract status to keep you on top of renewals and negotiations.

You can learn more about our Marketplace and how to sell on OTAs in our guides below:

Bókun centralised booking calendar

All new online bookings — from your website, OTAs, and partners — automatically feed into your Bókun booking calendar. Then, our system communicates with all integrated sales channels to update availability as new bookings roll in.

Bókun’s centralised calendar is super easy to use, eliminating the tedious task of checking multiple calendars and aggregating bookings. You can also add offline bookings to this calendar for free.

Our calendar has handy staff scheduling tools so you can easily assign guides and other resources to bookings or shift them on the fly.

Take a look at the flow below:

Manage all tour listings, pricing, availability & resources

Bókun’s Experiences tool includes everything you need to build and manage tour listings.

Design detailed, attention-grabbing listings for your tours, activities, attractions, or event spaces. You can get as creative as you like here, and our product builder also lets you offer add-ons (“Extras”) with experiences.

Set pricing and create dynamic pricing rules. You can create pricing categories, charge one flat rate, or specify rates for private tours. You can also leverage our tiered pricing tool to offer bulk discounts and dynamic pricing to optimise rates and improve booking conversions.

Specify tour availability, including start and close-out dates, available days of the week, time slots, minimum and maximum capacities, booking cutoffs, and how customers book (e.g. if they purchase a pass or choose a day and time).

Allocate resources for experiences. Bókun’s resource management module lets you add supplies, equipment, and staff members required for experiences and oversee resources in our system. You can create resource categories, monitor real-time inventory, and set resource allocation rules to optimise resource usage.

Our product builder guides you through creating listings and you can even create templates to streamline adding listings in the future.

Note: Viator users can import listings directly to Bókun, edit them, and easily sell Viator experiences on their own site.

You can add unlimited products — there’s no catalogue cap or extra fees for listings.

Simplify bookings & check-ins for travellers

Upgrading to booking management software benefits both business owners and travellers. We’ve already discussed some ways Bókun supports tour providers’ operations, so let’s review how our system makes life easier for customers.

First, customers can book, confirm reservations, and complete checkout online — all in one quick process. They no longer have to call you for information, request bookings and wait to hear back, or hold bookings and pay in person.

Plus, Bókun integrates with numerous payment processing solutions (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Worldpay, Braintree, Klarna, and more), so business owners can give customers various payment options.

Next, Bókun automatically sends important emails, like booking confirmations, mobile tickets, and reminders before tours, so customers can arrive prepared.

Bókun provides customer portals so travelers can view, modify, or cancel reservations independently. The booking calendar updates to reflect changes, and another confirmation email is sent outlining the modifications.

Finally, we offer mobile apps (iOS and Android) for on-the-go access to the booking calendar and ticket scanning tools. Tour guides can scan customers, monitor arrivals, track no-shows, and start tours promptly when everyone arrives.

Oversee back-office operations

Bókun includes back-office management tools to streamline your tech stack and automate processes.

For example, Bókun’s CRM collects and stores customer information (like names, email addresses, booking history), enabling managers and marketers to quickly access details and use insights for retargeting or promotional strategies.

Bókun also features an automated communications tool to send essential customer emails, like booking confirmations and reminders. You can configure it to send various emails, and we provide a template library to customise abandoned cart reminders, review/referral requests, upsells, and more.

Lastly, Bókun includes a native reporting suite to monitor:

Bookings, tracking the number of bookings across different time frames.
Sales channel and partner performance, identifying your top business sources.
Product performance, comparing popular vs. unpopular experiences.
Revenue, with breakdowns by sales channel or product, to analyse wins and losses.
Customer data, helping you understand your audience and refine future marketing initiatives.

You can use this data — along with insights from your CRM and customer histories — to improve your product line, invest in top-performing sales channels, guide growth strategies, and accelerate scalability.

Note: Bókun also offers an app store to supplement our core features and better support your operations. Our app store includes things like tip management, a messaging app, CartStack, PaxFlow, and more.

Packages & getting started with Bókun

All new clients receive a 14-day free trial to test our platform and ensure it’s the right tool for their operations.

After the trial, you can upgrade to the START plan, which includes all of Bókun’s core features mentioned above for $49/month with 1.5% booking fees. We waive Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations and never charge for offline bookings.

Alternatively, you can remain on the limited free plan to sell tours on Viator and manage bookings, including offline bookings.

We also offer PLUS and PREMIUM plans for growing teams with more advanced requirements. These plans include access to some of the apps mentioned above and Zapier.

Compare our plans or start your free trial here.

Note: We now offer a new channel management solution for teams with an existing restech system. This channel manager grants access to Bókun’s partner marketplace and works as a middleman between your restech system and online partners; it feeds new bookings to your central calendar and updates availability across all sites.

If you want to learn more about this solution, please request a free demo with us here.

2. Xola

Xola is a popular booking management system for small to mid-size teams, thanks to its feature set and pricing.

It appeals to small teams newly focused on online strategies, as they offer a website building service to get you off the ground running.

For teams looking to boost direct bookings, it touts an optimised booking engine widget to improve conversions and prevent abandoned carts. (Xola also has tools to grow your distribution network, like OTAs and a partner network.)

Overall, Xola’s features improve booking, resource, and back-office management, automate repetitive tasks, and help you provide a better customer experience.

Xola’s affordable pricing is another draw for smaller teams, as it doesn’t charge subscription fees. Instead, it applies a small partner fee to book and checkout online.

Features

Website building service
Online booking widgets (for existing sites)
Channel management & connections with OTAs
Distribution network
Inventory management
Availability 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 does not charge subscription fees. Instead, it charges travellers a 1.9% + 30¢ partner fee when they book and checkout online. This fee can impact booking conversions, so you should consider the price of your experiences and how Xola’s fee will affect customers’ total costs.

3. FareHarbor

FareHarbor is another nice booking software for small and midsize teams; it offers a convenient website-building service (like Xola above) and a robust feature set to manage operations and support growth. FareHarbor is also popular because it’s a Booking.com partner, offering extra benefits to tour operators who sell on that channel.

Small and midsize teams that want to keep costs low often turn to FareHarbor, which does not charge subscription fees.

However, FareHarbor pricing can be risky because it charges variable subscription fees of up to 6% — some of the highest fees in the industry. Before investing in FareHarbor, you must consider the pricing of your tours and how extra fees may impact booking conversions.

Features

Website-building services
Online booking widget
Customisable booking calendar
Connections with OTAs & channel management
Reseller network
Product management
Availability management
Staff management
Native POS
Integrations with Stripe
Customer portals
Fast check-in features & online waiver tools
Options to sell memberships
Reporting
Mobile apps

Pricing

FareHarbor does not charge subscription fees; travellers pay a variable booking fee at checkout. Booking fees can vary, but they are often as high as 6%. FareHarbor also charges to use its websites and website-building service.

4. Checkfront

Small and midsize businesses also tend to like Checkfront because it:

Offers 100+ features to oversee bookings, staff, inventory, and back-office operations, so you can manage everything under one roof.
Charges moderate booking fees of 3% (no subscription fees).
Is recommended as easy to use, with little to no learning curve.

Global or international teams also like Checkfront for its strong multi-language and multi-currency functionality.

It’s worth noting that Checkfront recently merged with Rezdy (as did Regiondo, below), so offerings and pricing are subject to change. We omit Rezdy from this list because its pricing is more expensive than other competitors.

Features

Website builder
Online booking engine widgets
Centralised booking calendar
Availability management
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 a 3% booking fee per online reservation, and tour operators can choose who covers booking fees (travellers at checkout or the business).

5. TicketingHub

TicketingHub is an online ticketing system for high-volume ticket sales and fast-growing businesses. It advertises its solution for attractions, tour operators, activity providers, cultural sites and monuments, animal parks, and event organisers.

Their ticketing solution includes essentials like a centralised booking calendar, booking engine widget, OTA connections, distribution network, and POS to manage payments — as well as advanced extras that appeal to growing teams, like multi-currency and multi-language tools, options to create tour packages, and digital marketing features to monitor paid advertising.

TicketingHub offers a nice balance of essentials for managing operations and extras for growing your business, and pricing is still accessible for even small teams — it charges 3% booking fees per reservation (no subscription fees).

Features

Centralised booking calendar & availability management
Online booking widgets
Channel management & OTA connections
Tools to create tour packages
Options to sell gift cards, vouchers & merchandise
Upselling & abandoned cart retargeting
Reseller marketplace
Native POS
Online payment integrations
Multi-currency features
Inventory management
Native CRM
Reporting
Mobile apps

Pricing

TicketingHub charges a 3% booking fee for every online reservation. Tour operators can cover this or pass it onto the traveller. TicketingHub does not charge subscription fees.

TicketingHub also offers custom enterprise packages for businesses with more than $2 million in annual revenue.

You can also compare more tour operator software for small and midsize teams here.

6. Peek Pro

Moving into more of our options for scaling businesses, Peek Pro advertises its booking solution for larger teams and offers numerous advanced features to support fast growth — marketing tools, membership management, and even a convenient tool to apply for business loans.

In addition to its advanced tools, the platform includes expected basics like online booking widgets, real-time booking calendars, availability management, inventory management, and a reseller network.

Peek Pro has a modern, elegant UI and user-friendly features, so learning the platform and onboarding other staff isn’t challenging.

The downside here is expensive booking fees. Peek Pro now offers custom pricing per client, so you can discuss rates and booking fees with its customer support team, but historically, pricing has been high (with booking fees of up to 6%).

Features

Online booking widgets
Customisable booking calendar
Reservation management
Integrations with OTAs & channel management tools
Availability & staff management
Options to sell memberships, add-ons, bundles, gift cards & vouchers
Marketing tools (including customer retargeting)
Dynamic pricing
Fast check-in features, including digital waivers, Kiosk mode & ticket scanning
Customer portals
Peek reseller network
Peek Capital (to apply for loans)
Inventory management
Native POS
Integrations with online payment processors
Reporting
Mobile apps

Pricing

Peek Pro doesn’t publicly disclose pricing; however, user reviews suggest Peek Pro charges variable (often high) booking fees (up to 6%).

7. Regiondo

Regiondo — also merged with Rezdy, mentioned above — is a German-based tour operator software brand that often works with larger tour operators, attractions, and destinations in the United Kingdom. They advertise their software for “the leisure industry” and offer packages to support small and large teams. (That said, we list them for larger teams who can afford the top-tier plans with full feature access.)

Overall, Regiondo doesn’t have the most expansive feature set; it provides the essentials to manage your bookings, staff, and back-office operations, drive new business, and improve customer experiences. It’s easy to learn, and Regiondo’s team offers support when you get started.

While the Regiondo platform supports booking and ticket management, the brand also offers solutions for travel agents and DMCs.

Features

A one-click website builder to create custom sites — Regiondo charges an extra $52/month for this feature
Online booking engine
Product & availability management
Channel management & connections with OTAs
Reseller marketplace
Touch POS to manage walk-up reservations & payments
Online payments via Stripe
Marketing tools to offer discount codes & request reviews
Mobile apps
Reporting

Pricing

Regiondo provides three packages for tour operators:

The Starter plan starts at $50/month. This package supports two users and grants access to features like Regiondo’s booking widget, channel management, and online payment gateways.
The Advanced plan starts at $105/month and is Regiondo’s recommended package. This package supports five users and provides access to more advanced tools like the smart resource manager, automated communications, and options to sell add-ons. This plan also grants API access.
The Enterprise plan starts at $210/month. This package supports 25 users and unlocks full feature access, including the marketing and SEO suite and tools to create tour packages.

Note: Regiondo lists starting prices. Final subscription costs are based on what you require from the software and may be higher than stated here.

Regiondo also charges a 3% system usage fee and a 52¢ ticket fee in each package.

Regiondo also offers packages for resellers who want to join its marketplace. However, they do not list pricing for these packages online. You must enrol in separate packages to access both the tour operator software and the reseller network.

Regiondo is one of the more expensive Ventrata alternatives.

8. TripWorks

The last option on our list, TripWorks, is a booking management platform generally recommended for large teams due to its advanced feature set and high booking fees of 6%.

In addition to essential booking management tools, TripWorks offers digital marketing tools and integrations to manage paid advertising campaigns and other marketing initiatives. TripWorks also appeals to adventure or excursion providers with an advanced digital waiver solution.

While TripWorks scores well in the ease of use category, users warn of a slight learning curve. They say TripWorks offers many features and that it requires some time to learn all of the ticketing platform’s ins and outs.

Features

Online booking widget
Connections with OTAs & channel management
Reseller network
Reservation management
Product & availability management
Dynamic pricing
Digital waivers
Marketing tools to build campaigns & manage online advertising
Integrations with marketing software & business applications
Native POS
Integrations with Apple Pay & Google Pay
Options to sell gift cards & vouchers
Reporting
Mobile ticket scanning app

Pricing

TripWorks lets you join the platform for free. You can explore the features, build tour listings, connect OTAs, and browse the reseller network. When you’re ready to accept bookings, you start a paid subscription.

TripWorks offers two packages: the core plan with 30+ features for managing operations and custom enterprise plans with complete platform and API access. TripWorks does not share pricing for either plan on its site.

TripWorks also charges travellers a transaction fee (2.9% + 30¢) at checkout.

Get started

Start a free trial of Bókun to unlock platform access and see if we’re the right tour operator software for your teams.

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