A reservation system — also known as an online booking system — allows you to accept bookings directly online, 24/7, and effectively manage all of your booking channels and calendars.

With more capacity than a basic online scheduling tool, reservation systems enable customers to browse your products and services, check real-time availability, and complete their entire booking and payment process instantly online — without the hassle of phone calls or back-and-forth emails.

The key features you’ll find in these systems include: booking and availability management, channel management, customer management, and analytics dashboards.

Reservation software has become essential across numerous industries: wellness studios, fitness centres, restaurants, salons, event venues, the hospitality industry, and the travel industry.

In the travel and tourism sector — where customers often book plans weeks or months in advance and require instant confirmations — having a reliable online booking system isn’t just convenient, it’s critical for staying competitive.

Cue Bókun. We’re a Tripadvisor brand with an online booking platform specially tailored to tour and activity operators, attractions, and travel experience providers.

In this guide, we review:

Start your 14-day free trial of Bókun — no credit card required!

Benefits of Online Reservation Systems

If you’re still managing bookings in spreadsheet systems like Excel, you’re likely missing out on new reservations, dealing with disorganisation and blunders, and spending (too much) time consolidating calendars every day.

Here are just a few of the benefits a quality online reservation system brings to the table:

  • You’re always open for business. 24/7 availability means customers can book with you at any time, from anywhere. While competitors without online booking software might only answer phones 9 to 5, your booking system works around the clock to capture those late-night planners and early-bird bookers.
  • Create a smoother customer experience. Modern reservation systems handle the entire journey from browsing to booking confirmation. Customers get instant confirmations, automated reminder emails, convenient mobile tickets for check-in, and self-service portals to manage their bookings. No more email threads or phone calls to schedule a simple booking.
  • Say goodbye to overbookings and double bookings. With online reservation systems, your availability updates automatically across all sales channels in real-time, so you’ll never have to deal with the awkward “Sorry, we’re at capacity” conversations again.
  • Free up time for what actually matters. Automated booking confirmations, real-time calendar syncing, and centralised management mean you’re no longer spending hours each day manually updating calendars and confirming bookings across multiple platforms. Instead, you can focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences and growing your business.
  • Expand your online reach without headaches or disorganisation. Channel managers and partner networks enable you to test new distribution channels, sell tours across multiple sites and online travel agencies (OTAs), and synchronise all calendars to ensure they work in unison.
  • Gather insights to make smarter business decisions. These systems often offer in-built reporting dashboards to help you analyse which tours are most popular, when your busy seasons are, what types of customers book with you, and where your revenue peaks. This data helps you optimise your product line, pricing, marketing strategies, and operational planning.
  • Improved resource management. Native inventory tracking allows you to identify precisely when you need more staff, vehicles, or equipment, based on actual booking data. This helps you avoid overstaffing during slow periods and ensures you’re prepared for busy seasons.

Ultimately, tour operators who stick with manual booking processes are leaving money on the table. Every missed call is a potential lost booking, every double-booking damages your reputation, and every hour spent on administrative tasks is time you could spend growing your business or improving your tours.

An online reservation system isn’t just about internal operational efficiency — it’s about meeting modern customer expectations and staying competitive when travellers expect instant, seamless booking experiences.

Read more: 3 ways to create an online booking system

Bókun’s Reservation System for Travel Experience Providers

Bókun is an all-in-one operations management system that combines reservation management, product and resource management, channel management, CRM and customer management, and business intelligence reporting.

As a Tripadvisor brand, we have a preferred partnership with Viator and premium integrations with major names like GetYourGuide, Google Things to do, and Airbnb.

Our software solution is also equipped with several growth drivers — such as out-of-the-box OTA integrations and our Bókun Marketplace, which boasts over 27k international travel partners — to help you strategically scale and reach new global audiences.

We work with travel businesses across 80 countries, and we’re one of the most top-rated tour operator softwares in the market (with a 4.7-star rating on software review sites) because we prioritise accessibility with affordable pricing and an intuitive user experience.

Bókun is available for all business sizes: Our START plan includes all of our key features to manage operations (everything listed below) at a low price of $49 per month.

Then, we provide scalable PLUS and PREMIUM plans to grow with your business. These enterprise-level plans even include free yearly strategy calls with our team to discuss your growth plans and ensure Bókun is optimised for your current and future goals.

Most of all, business owners love Bókun because we charge the industry’s lowest booking fees at just 1% to 1.5%. This allows them to explore digital strategies and expand their business online without incurring high fees (as some of our competitors charge up to 8% on online bookings!).

Below, we’ll run through our system’s core features and provide a quick demo so you can get a sneak peek at what’s under Bókun’s hood. However, you can dive deeper and explore the system yourself by starting a free trial.

Our comprehensive system includes:

  • Booking engine widgets to make your site instantly bookable and sell tours online, 24/7. (Our widgets are compatible with all website builders.)
  • Integrations with over a dozen online payment gateways — Stripe, Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Worldpay, Braintree, and more — to provide customers with secure payment options and avoid abandoned carts.
  • Bókun central booking calendar that aggregates bookings across all sites and sales channels. You can also add offline or in-person bookings to this calendar for free. This calendar serves as the source of truth for automatic availability updates, keeping all connected calendars in sync.

Booking Calendar GIF

Our network includes other tour and activity providers (all Bókun users are automatically added when they subscribe) as well as travel agents, destination management companies, lodging providers, hoteliers, resorts, transportation services, and more. We also provide all of the partner and contract management tools you need to support these connections.

We’ve also recently released Bókun Referral Tracking so you can partner with any business or social media influencer of your choosing and provide affiliate links for them to earn bookings on your behalf.

Online Travel Agencies GIF

  • Native CRM to capture customer contact information when they start the reservation process on your website. The CRM stores all customer and contact details in a clear list and provides reports to help you gain a deeper understanding of your customer base.
  • Automated communications to complement our CRM and dispatch booking confirmations, reminders, mobile tickets, and follow-ups for you. We also provide a template gallery, allowing you to customise and schedule a variety of email types, and support all email marketing initiatives via Bókun.
  • Customer portals for travellers to view, modify, and cancel reservations without back-and-forth with your team. Updates and cancellations automatically display in the central calendar, so you know as soon as travellers make changes.
  • Product management to design stunning listings for your travel experiences and manage the fine details (like the add-ons offered, availability schedules, pricing structures, and required inventory). As a bonus, Bókun offers dynamic pricing to optimise rates and improve booking conversions.
  • Resource management, as an extension of our Product Manager above. This lets you assign resources to experiences, set allocation rules, and manage real-time inventory. This also reinforces the availability management tool by closing out experiences and blocking bookings when inventory is unavailable.

Give your experience a short but descriptive name

  • Mobile apps (for iOS and Android) with check-in tools, such as ticket scanning, and access to the central calendar. This allows guides to streamline departures, monitor no-shows, and stay connected with other staff members.
  • Reporting dashboards so you can gather valuable business insights and apply learnings to make more data-driven business decisions. Our reports enable you to measure bookings and profitability across various categories, determine your most successful sales channels and partners, identify your most popular products, understand the types of customers you convert, and more.

Bókun Reports: Experience Sales

  • The Bókun App Store, where you can purchase additional modules, like tip management or SMS messaging, to support our core functionality.

Check out a quick overview of Bókun below:

 

You can also review some of our case studies to see how current Bókun customers leverage our system to fuel their continued success:

Whether you’re a small family-owned operation or a global company with international teams, Bókun adapts to your needs. See how Bókun can transform your operations by starting your 14-day free trial — no credit card required!

You can also compare more online booking systems in our guides below: