Making visitor attractions bookable

There are three pricing models for online booking systems.

Fee per booking

The system takes a commission on each individual booking. This can be useful for smaller businesses that have quiet seasons, as you only pay more when bookings (and income) are higher.

Fees are usually between 1 and 8%, and there could be an additional fee for credit card merchants.

There are a few things to be aware of:

• Deciding whether to mark the fee up for customers as a booking fee, or just make it past of the overall cost. Some customers can be put off by an additional booking fee and abandon their purchase during the booking.
• If your booking provider is also the merchant of record, you will only be able to accept the debit and credit cards they accept. If you expect to get bookings from European customers, make sure the system accepts their common cards – eg SEPA or iDeal (popular with Dutch and German travellers).

Subscription price

A fixed price for the online booking system, usually payable monthly or annually. This option helps you to budget your technology costs for the year.

Some companies may offer tiered pricing – a lower cost for less features and limits on the number of bookings or users.

Costs usually begin from around £10 a month for a basic system.

Subscription price and a booking fee

Some booking system companies will charge a monthly fee for the system and a smaller booking fee per customer.

What else to know

Some companies will:

• Charge a fee for website bookings only, whereas some may also charge for in-person bookings taken for example at reception.
• Work with you to charge a higher booking fee but share some of the money back with you.

How to calculate your costs

Forecast your future sales

When it comes to reviewing the pricing of each booking system, you will need to have an accurate estimate of your expected sales over a set period. This will allow you to estimate the cost of the booking system if it includes a price per booking.

Find more advice on pricing

• Arival guide to booking system pricing
• Arival guide to choosing a booking system (free if you create an account)

Sector-specific systems

There are many systems which are tailored to a certain type of business – e.g. day tours or attractions.

A system that focuses on (for example) outdoor activities could have more features to support equipment management and rentals, while (for example) a system for day tours may have features to manage and help tour guides.

Travel distribution partner access

Look for an online booking system that allows for multiple channels to book the same inventory. It can be time consuming if you work with lots of partners and have to upload your product details manually.

Some systems offer business to business (B2B) bookings for partners with live availability and price information. The booking is also tagged as a partner booking, so you can easily see bookings by this channel in your reporting.

The benefits

• Single booking system
• Direct access to availability for partner
• Access to customer data - partners can check and update themselves
• Reporting - both get bookable reports, revenue and accounts payable

If your booking system doesn’t give them access and you don’t have a back-office system where you can make bookings for them, you might be able to use your website booking system. Most systems support either coupons, or promotional or discount codes. By creating a unique code, you can get partners to book through there.

Tracking sales channels

As well as having your business listed through travel distribution partners, you may have set up free listings for your business through other partners such as VisitScotland.com, Google and Tripadvisor.

Where you are able to add a booking link, make sure that each link is trackable. This means you can accurately see what channels your sales are coming from.

Find out more about free business listings

Application Programming Interface (API)

An API lets two different applications (or systems) talk to each other and share information automatically. Within tourism and events, an API lets a travel distribution partner access your online booking system.

Some booking systems are open to APIs, and some still have limited access.

Ask your sales agent how long they’ve had the API (newer APIs are more up-to-date), what partners the API connects with, and what features it has.

You should also ask if the API allows you to share live availability and pricing with OTAs. Is it a two-way API connection ie when someone makes a booking on your website does it automatically update the OTA and vice versa?

Back-office or manual bookings

Sometimes there is a need to take a booking in-person or for a group with special requirements.

Most online booking systems provide an admin interface that allows you to add bookings directly into the system - this is known as back-office or manual bookings.

The benefits of having the manual booking feature are:

• Staff training - all staff use the same system so easy to train new team members.
• Standard process – less chance of an error when the process is the same every time.
• Central real-time inventory – avoid overbooking the time slot with accurate availability.
• Customer information stored - easy to access information as in the one place.
• Reporting – can do sales reporting across all channels and compare trends.

Note on channel managers

You may have heard of channel managers - these allow you to manage and allocate your product by channel or partner with price information. It also allows partner access to manage booking information.

It provides a one-to-many connection between your booking system and your partners. You load your products into one place and an API connects your partners to your channel manager, rather than you having to connect to each partner individually.

But these are only used by larger businesses - if you’re a small business with a few partners and your online booking system already connects to them, then you don’t need a channel manager.