Need help integrating booking engines with your travel or tour activity business? Booking engines can significantly streamline your reservation process, improve customer experience, and increase your bookings. But setting one up can be challenging if you’ve never used one before.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the basic integration process you can expect to go through for some of the most popular booking engines.
Key Takeaways
- Before you start the integration process, it’s essential to choose a booking engine that aligns with your business needs.
- Most booking engines provide an embed code or a widget that you can easily integrate into your website. This code generates the booking form or button directly on your site.
- After embedding the code, test the booking process to ensure it works correctly. It’s a good idea to make a few test bookings to verify that everything functions properly.
8 Steps to Integrating Booking Engines with Your Business
1. Choosing the Right Booking Engine
Before you start the integration process, it’s essential to choose a booking engine that aligns with your business needs. There are many software options out there, but not all of them will have the right tools to grow your business. To find the right engine, consider factors such as:
- Ease of use
- Customization options
- Integration capabilities
- Pricing model
- Customer support quality
Popular booking engines for travel and tour activity businesses include Bookeo, Bokun and Rezdy. Each platform offers unique features, so be sure to evaluate them based on your specific requirements and business goals.
2. Setting Up Your Account
Once you’ve chosen a booking engine, the next step is to set up your account. While each booking engine may ask for different information, you can usually count on the process being the same across every platform. Follow these general steps to get your account set up:
- Visit the booking engine’s website and sign up for an account.
- Fill in the required business information, including your company name, contact details, and website URL.
- Verify your email address and complete any additional registration steps.
3. Configuring Your Booking Engine
After setting up your account, configure the booking engine to match your business needs. This typically involves:
- Creating Tours/Activities: Enter details about each tour or activity you offer, including descriptions, pricing, availability, and any specific booking rules for your customers.
- Setting Availability: Define the schedule for each tour or activity, including start times, duration, and blackout dates.
- Customizing Booking Forms: Add custom fields to your booking forms to collect necessary information from customers during the reservation process.
4. Adding the Engine to Your Website
Once you’ve set up things on the booking engine’s end, the next step is to actually integrate it with your website. This step is crucial in order to give your customers a seamless booking experience. Here’s how to do it:
- Get the Embed Code: Most booking engines provide an embed code or a widget that you can easily integrate into your website. This code generates the booking form or button directly on your site.
- Insert the Code: Add the embed code to your website’s relevant pages. This typically involves editing the HTML code of your site and pasting the embed code where you want the booking form or button to appear.
- Test the Integration: After embedding the code, test the booking process to ensure it works correctly. It’s a good idea to make a few test bookings to verify that everything functions properly.
5. Integrating Payment Gateways
Next, it’s important to integrate your booking engine with a payment gateway, so you can accept payments from your customers. Popular options include Stripe, PayPal, and Square. To set one up, follow these steps:
- Access Payment Settings: Log in to your booking engine dashboard and navigate to the payment settings section.
- Choose a Payment Gateway: Select your preferred payment gateway from the list of supported options.
- Enter Necessary Information: Provide the required information, such as application programming interface (API) keys or merchant IDs, to connect your payment gateway to the booking engine.
- Enable Payment Processing: Enable payment processing to start accepting payments through your booking engine.
6. Integrating CRM and Marketing Tools
Integrating booking engines with customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing tools makes it easier to keep up with your customers and automate your marketing efforts. Common CRM and marketing tools include Mailchimp, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM. To integrate these tools with your booking engine, follow these steps:
- Access Integration Settings: Go to the integrations section of your booking engine dashboard. The exact location may look different on each platform, but there should be an option in the settings.
- Select CRM and Marketing Tools: Choose the tools you want to integrate with your booking engine.
- Authenticate and Connect: Provide the necessary credentials or API keys to authenticate and connect your booking engine with the selected tools.
- Configure Data Sync: Set up how customer data and booking information should be synced between the booking engine and your CRM and marketing tools.
7. Testing and Optimization
After completing integration with your payment gateway, CRM, and marketing tools, the last step you’ll need to take before launching the engine is testing. You’ll need to thoroughly test the entire booking process to ensure everything works seamlessly from start to finish. To do this, follow these steps:
- Test Bookings: Make several test bookings to check for any issues.
- Verify Payments: Confirm that payments are processed correctly and are accurately reflected in your payment gateway account.
- Check Data Sync: Ensure customer data and booking information sync correctly with your CRM and marketing tools.
Optimize the booking engine by gathering feedback from customers and employees. Based on their experience, make necessary adjustments to improve the usability and performance of the engine.
8. Launching and Monitoring
Once you’re confident that everything is set up correctly, you can officially launch your booking engine. However, this doesn’t mean your work is over. Instead, it’s important to continually monitor the engine’s performance after launch. This ensures it works properly and delivers an excellent customer experience.
Follow these steps to make sure your booking engine functions properly:
- Announce the Launch: Inform your customers about the new booking system through email, social media, and your website.
- Monitor Bookings: Regularly check your booking engine dashboard to monitor bookings, payments, and customer interactions.
- Gather Feedback: Encourage customers to provide feedback on their booking experience and use this information to make continuous improvements.
Get Started Integrating Booking Engines with Your Business Today
While it might seem challenging at first, integrating a booking engine into your travel or tour activity business is well worth the effort. To maximize the benefits of automation, remember to take your time choosing the right booking engine. In addition, be sure to configure and test it thoroughly until you have a smooth booking process for your customers.
By following this step-by-step guide, you can successfully integrate a booking engine with your business and provide a seamless experience to your customers in no time.