Tour Booking Software for Guided Tours, Workshops and Experiences

A tour operator does not need a ticketing platform built for stadiums. You need a page where a guest can see when the tour runs, what it costs for their group and whether there is still room, and then pay. The confirmation email is the ticket, and your dashboard is the manifest. That is what BookingMachine does, and it does it for a sunrise photography walk, a 10 km running tour or a full-day workshop in the same way.

Each tour is a service with a price per person, a duration and the hours it runs. Add options for anything that changes the price, such as golden hour or a night shoot. Guests pick the date and the group size, see the total, pay and are done. They do not need an account, which matters when they are booking from a hotel lobby on a phone.

Because the booking lives on your own website or your hosted page, the guest is your customer. Their details arrive by email and in your dashboard, and the payment goes to your own Stripe account.

Set the price for one guest. Then add a group size option where each choice is a multiplier: two people at two times, three to four at a little under four times, five to six at a little under six. The small discount for larger groups appears on the page without you explaining it, and a couple sees exactly what a couple pays.

Add a second option for the thing that makes some tours worth more. For a photography tour that is light: standard, golden hour, night shoot. For a seasonal business it might be low and high season. Each option can be a percentage, a fixed amount added or taken off, or a fixed price.

Private tours are simpler. List them as a separate service with one flat price for up to a set number of guests. Guests who want the group experience book the group tour, and guests who want the guide to themselves book the private one. Both land in the same calendar.

A guest who has paid shows up. Set a deposit percentage per tour, or take the full price at booking. The card is charged through Stripe into your own account at the moment they confirm. If you take a deposit, the balance is charged when you mark the tour complete, or you can send an invoice.

For a tour with a small group, one no-show can be a quarter of the morning’s income. The deposit covers part of that, and your cancellation terms on the booking page make the rest clear before the card is charged. Guests tend to accept terms they read at the moment of booking more readily than ones they are told about on the phone.

Online payments are on the paid plans, and your account applies for payments once it is set up. The booking page, quotes and invoices work on the free plan, so the tours, prices and dates can be ready before the first payment.

If you have a website, embed the booking widget on it with one line of code. It works on Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow and Shopify, carries your brand colours and logo, and the guest never leaves your page.

If you do not have a website, the free hosted one is built for this. It has a page for each tour, a page about you, and your reviews, and on the Pro plan it runs on your own domain. Many operators start here and never need anything else.

Either way you also get one booking link and a QR code. Put the link in your Instagram profile and your Google Business Profile, give it to the hotels and cafes that send you guests, and print the QR code on a flyer for the tourist office. Every channel lands on the same calendar, so a departure booked from the flyer is not offered again on the website.

When you mark a tour complete, each guest is emailed a review request. They can write a few lines and add the photos they took, or a short video. For a photography tour the result is a page of your guests’ best shots with their own words beneath them, which sells the tour better than any description you could write.

The reviews appear on your reviews page and can be embedded on your website next to the booking widget. A guest deciding between two tours sees last week’s group at the estuary at sunrise, and books.

The request goes out by email after the tour, not during it, so guests are asked when the experience is fresh and the photos are already on their phone.