Are you a travel agency, venue operator, or arts & culture organisation?
Do you bring people together for exciting tours and activities?
Whether it’s an escape room adventure, museum exhibition, a helicopter ride, or anything else you can imagine, you know that offering memorable experiences like this can be a great source of revenue.
But you’ll also know that managing tours and activities can be challenging. You have to deal with scheduling, booking, payments, cancellations, vouchers, confirmations and more. You have to keep track of availability across multiple channels and platforms. You have to communicate with your customers and employees effectively. And you have to do all this while ensuring quality and safety standards for everyone.
It’s a lot to handle, but a good tour booking system can handle all these tasks for you. It can massively streamline your business and delight your customers at the same time.
So below, we’ll introduce you to the main benefits of tour booking software. We’ll go through the most important features and show you how to choose the right one for your needs.
Tour operators have to deal with a variety of challenges in day-to-day operations. One of the biggest is the ever-changing nature of the tourism industry. Trends and customer preferences can shift quickly, and it can be hard to keep up with them and adapt your offerings.
There’s also the case of tour management. You’ve got to organise several tasks simultaneously, like creating complex tour schedules, making sure there are no booking conflicts, and managing customer information effectively. You also have to deal with multiple payment processors, which can cause a bit of a headache.
You have to manage logistics too, like transportation arrangements, accommodation bookings, or tour guides. These can get even more complicated when you’re dealing with big groups or international tours.
All of these challenges can add up, making it stressful for tour operators to stay on top of their operations and consistently provide high-quality tours. This is where tour booking software can be really valuable, streamlining and automating many tasks and reducing the workload for everyone involved.
Tour booking software is a type of event management software that allows you to create and manage multiple events across different locations and dates. It’s ideal for tours, festivals, concerts, and other live events that involve travelling and performing in various venues.
Tour operator software can solve these issues by bringing lots of the processes together into one platform. Here are some of the benefits of using tour booking software.
1) A streamlined booking process
With the right reservation system, you can make the ticket booking process much more intuitive for customers. In fact, they might even enjoy it.
Being able to take online payments (in addition to in-person) is your first advantage. Your booking engine should have simple payment options – with custom pages or a widget for visitors to book through. If they want to make an online reservation for a tour, they don’t want to jump through hoops entering loads of details - it should be simple.
Whether it’s for a chartered boat trip or an online tour round a virtual gallery, visitors should immediately know what’s on offer and be able to purchase it in a few clicks.
(With Nutickets, you can create customised event pages for each stop on your tour with minimal effort. You don’t need to get a web developer to build separate web pages for each event.)
2) Integration with everything
In order for your online booking system to run smoothly, it needs to be integrated with all your other systems, ensuring seamless connectivity.
Your online booking system has to play nicely with your other systems, or else it’s going to cause chaos. Integrations are important for your customer journey and the efficiency of your back office operations.
Firstly, there’s your payment processing options. Customers should be able to choose their preferred payment method from a range of options (credit card, debit card, PayPal, and so on), so your platform needs to integrate with many payment gateways. Setting this up manually could be a headache, but a good booking management platform will take care of this.
When they book, you’ll want customers to receive instant confirmation emails with their tickets attached as PDF files or QR codes. They could also receive SMS notifications or mobile app alerts for event reminders.
Those tickets should be linked to your inventory (so nothing is oversold), which opens them up to reserved seating, area access control, and upselling merchandise and other products.
Then those tickets can also be linked with customer accounts. From there, you’ll have the ability to offer tickets to further tours or events, like you would with a traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
3) Offer much more flexibility in your tour tickets
Activity providers know it can get complicated when you run multi-day tours. But it doesn’t have to be.
If your tour booking software is part of a more extensive online ticketing platform, you have much more flexibility in pricing and ticket types.
With the right integration, you can benefit from reservation management, timed ticketing, controlled access for certain areas, timed options, and guest lists.
So you could offer tour tickets as general admission, premium, guided, self-guided, group discounts, merchandise bundles, and so on.
4) Gain insight into performance data
Travel agents, activity businesses and cultural organisations all have targets to hit. They need to know not just how many tickets they’re selling – but how they’re reaching their customers and who’s making the purchases.
With reservation software handling the sales, you should be able to monitor and measure the success of your activities. You can track sales and inventory in real-time across all your tours. You can also generate reports and analytics that show key metrics like revenue per ticket type/venue/date/customer segment, and so on.
With a great tour booking platform, your customer support gets an upgrade. With a user-friendly interface and CRM features, you can identify issues and solve them straight away, rather than digging through legacy systems and filing cabinets.
The right tour management solution can make a massive difference to any business, especially those in the travel industry.
It’s a potentially complicated operation, but thankfully many workflows can benefit from a range of automation options – if you choose the right software solution.
Nutickets offers a cloud-based end-to-end tour ticketing platform that enables users to sell tickets online, create event pages, offer cashless payments, scan tickets with mobile devices, and more.
If you’re ready to take advantage of tour booking software for your event or travel business, book a free demo today.