Your first booking system, not your second
About four in ten tour and activity operators worldwide run without booking software at all, and for businesses founded after 2022 it is more than half. If that is you, most of this site is written for somebody else. This page is written for you.
Is a spreadsheet and a phone actually a problem?
Not necessarily. It is how a lot of good venues opened and some run that way for years. You know your week. You know who is coming. The diary has never double-booked anyone, because you are the one holding it.
What it does not do is take a booking at eleven at night, hold a deposit while you sleep, or tell you in March what last September actually looked like. Those are the three things that usually decide when it is time, and none of them is a criticism of how you have run the place so far.
What if I have no booking system to switch from?
Every other page here is about leaving something: exports that will not join up, a contract with a date on it, two systems running side by side for a month while the numbers are reconciled. None of that applies to you.
There is no incumbent to notify, no data trapped behind an API, no parallel run, no risk of two systems selling the same slot. You are not switching. You are setting up once, on a clean sheet, and the whole of that awkward middle stage simply does not happen.
How do I set up my first booking system?
Bring the spreadsheet. Upload the file you already keep. Customers, past bookings, whatever columns you happen to have. We map them with you rather than handing you a template and wishing you luck. In build
Describe the venue once. Your rooms or tables or lanes, how long a session runs, how many people fit, when you are open, what it costs. This is the part people expect to be a fortnight. It is an afternoon.
Put the booking page live. It renders inside your own site in your own brand, so the first thing a customer sees is you, not a platform. In build
Keep the diary for a week. Not because you have to. Because it is a sensible way to satisfy yourself that the sessions on screen are the sessions in the room.
What will it cost me when I am starting out?
We charge one percent of what you sell online, capped at $99 per venue per month. In your first season that is a few dollars, because a percentage of a modest month is a modest amount. You are not signing up to a subscription that assumes you already have the volume to justify it.
There is no commission on top, no surcharge added to your customer, and no contract term. If online booking turns out not to suit how you trade, you export everything and go back to the diary with your data in your hand.
And when the second venue happens, the account already knows what to do with it.