Best way to grow our business

If you run a small tour operation I would certainly recommend getting onto Bokun, it gets you started faster and at the same time set you up for bigger stuff in the future.

Pros

Bokun delivers a system that integrates just about every functionality we need as a Food Tour company. I particularly like how we can easily find new partners to hook up to the same functionality. Using bokun we can give our clients a seamless experience and at the same time keep administration on our end as lean as possible.

Cons

Cons isn't the right word, the company has a few places to work harder on. - Support could respond faster - Support and new feature roll-out has to get more transparent - E-commerce integration has to be enhanced. Up selling, down selling, cross selling are all in its infancy at this moment. - Partner integration needs more work, the software currently doesn't work well with a model where brick-and-mortar tour agencies sell tours on behalf of us. (Ticketing displays incorrect messages to the end user, invoices can only be sent to one party, not to a different invoicing department, payments are not assumed to come in just before or just after the tour date).

Great features, with some annoying bugs

Good value for money, good connectivity, good support. Product owned by large OTA is a minus in the long-term when operators are fighting to minimize OTA dependence.

Pros

The best part of this reservation software is the marketplace that allows you to contract directly with other suppliers and resellers of tours and activities. Live support is also a good feature that most other reservation systems don't have. The help articles are quite extensive as well. Product import from Viator is a great feature.

Cons

There are some annoying bugs and features that can leave you clicking around furiously to find a solution for quite some time, eg. the setting up pricing was a mess. The software is being developed constantly and it's possible that these issues have been fixed since, but I got quite frustrated a number of times when setting up the products. Also, raising the commission from 0.1% to 2.9% without any prior notice was not cool -- I thought the agreement was that we were paying with data to Viator... and now we're paying both ways. The OTA-owned reservation systems are creating data oligopoly situations similar to that of Google which is not the right direction in my opinion.

Where shall one begin...?

Bókun is hard to avoid in Iceland if one is working in tourism - sadly, there is way more room for it to improve than would be desirable after so many years, especially when accommodation and transport also come into play... Still, hopefully, the current down time has been used to efficiently improve the program.

Pros

In the Icelandic tourism industry, in which I used to work for 5 years, Bókun seems to be insurmountable when it comes to booking activities related to a trip, be it individual or (small) group excursions. It is a wonderful attempt at pooling all operators into one platform.

Cons

Maintenance during business hours without any notification toward operators, resellers, and administrators. Synchronisation issues between Bókun and operators on what is available and what is not (group size/vehicle capacity etc.) resulting in extremely iffy situations with clients as well as between operators and resellers. Less enthusiastic customer support, available only during banking hours, definitely not on weekends. No updates on changes regarding bookings in the system - unless one does everything in triples: updating Bókun, notifying the operator, wait for confirmatiom from operator, notify client. Key-word search is quite cumbersome. Software getting less and less user-friendly with every update. Inability to edit certain aspects of bookings and the invoice, so one has to cancel everything, and re-book, while keeping their fingers crossed that the re-booking will work and no one will take the seats while Bókun is thinking its life through.

One of the best trave; booking apps

Pros

The interface is highly user-friendly and they have great customer service.

Cons

There was nothing to not like above this software.

The only booking software with options to match all needs

We used it as an operator (selling our products), as a reseller (selling others products) and through the API which we used in the software we were building. It was very easy to use and set up and offered help whenever we needed. As we were using the API we talked to both developers and customer support often and they were kind and helpful.

Pros

Whatever we needed it to do, it did. Rare were the cases when we could not set up products as we wanted them and then the developers listened and made the options available. If you are looking for software to offer your tours or sell other companies' products, Bókun is the way to go.

Cons

Sometimes it had down time that lasted for longer periods of time.