Booking software for multi-day tours

What a multi-day operator needs from booking software

A multi-day tour is sold long before it runs. A traveller books in January for a departure in September, pays part of the price now and the rest later, and between those dates you need their passport name, their diet, a signed release and a room for the night before. Each step is simple on its own. The trouble starts when seat counts live in one spreadsheet, balances in another and rooming lists in a third.

Good software for this kind of business does four things in one place: it sells dated departures with honest seat counts, it collects money over months without anyone chasing it, it gathers what you need from every traveller before departure, and it hands the trip to your guides and hotels in a form they can use. Tourtify is built around that journey, and the rest of this guide follows it from first enquiry to the review after the trip.

From enquiry to a paid deposit

Each tour can have several options, and each option has its own booking mode. A common set-up is instant booking for the shared group departure and request to book for a private departure of the same tour. Requests arrive in your Enquiries inbox with the exact date and group, and nothing is charged until you confirm and send a payment link. For fully tailor-made trips, Quotes & proposals (Growth) lets you build the trip day by day with cost and sell prices, send a numbered proposal and turn an accepted one into a booking with its deposit.

When a traveller books online, their seats are held for 30 minutes while they pay, and seat counts are checked in the database at the moment of booking, so two people can never buy the last place. With Deposits & instalments on, they choose to pay a deposit or the full amount. The deposit is set on each tour option, as a percentage or a fixed amount per traveller, together with how many days before departure the balance is due.

A worked example: a ten-day group tour

Say you sell a ten-day tour at $2,400 per person, with 12 seats per departure, a 20% deposit and the balance due 60 days before departure. A couple booking in February pays $960 at checkout and owes $3,840. With a card saved at checkout and Stripe connected, the balance is charged on the due date, after a heads-up email three days before. If the charge fails, they get a secure pay link and Tourtify retries on the schedule you chose.

On the Growth plan you could instead let them split the balance into equal instalments. Three instalments of $1,280 each come with their own reminders and pay links. If someone books inside your pay-in-full window, for example 45 days, they pay everything at checkout, because a deposit no longer makes sense. You can also reward paying upfront with a discount: 3% off the couple's $4,800 is $144.

Now add accommodation. With Hotel rooms (Growth), the couple picks a twin room priced per person sharing, and adds two nights before the tour at, say, $110 per room per night: $220 on the same booking. A solo traveller in a twin pays the single supplement you set. Every charge is its own line in the price breakdown, and the rooming list for each hotel builds itself from the bookings.

The weeks before departure

Checkout stays short because Traveller details (Growth) collects the rest after booking. You build one form of up to 40 questions, starting from a set made for tour operators: name as in the passport, date of birth, nationality, passport number and expiry, diet, medical conditions and an emergency contact. The lead traveller gets a personal link for each person in the group, and reminders go out 14, 7 and 2 days before departure, but only while something is still missing.

Passport expiry is checked against the trip, with a warning when a passport expires within six months of it. If your tour includes activities that need a release, Waivers & consent collects a signature from every traveller, with a parent or guardian signing for minors. The itinerary itself is built in the trip builder, and the same plan becomes a branded PDF with a cover, map and day pages that travellers can download.

On the trip and after it

Each departure has a manifest: who is coming, what is still to pay, diet and emergency details and waiver status. Guides open it in the field app, which keeps working offline and syncs check-ins when the signal returns. With Tour guides (Growth) you assign one or more guides per departure, each with a role, and a guide paid $150 a day for a ten-day trip is counted at $1,500 in the payout report and in Costs & profit.

Costs & profit (Growth) records what each departure costs, such as drivers, hotels and park fees, so you see profit, margin and break-even per departure rather than just sales. After the trip, the review request goes out automatically and verified reviews appear on your tour pages. With Email automations on Growth, you can add your own follow-ups, such as a win-back email 30 days after an enquiry that never booked.

Moving from spreadsheets or another system

You don't have to retype your trips. Paste the link to an existing tour page and Tourtify reads it into a draft tour, or upload a WordPress export to bring WP Travel Engine trips, pages, posts and images across, with old addresses redirected. Imported tours stay as drafts until you publish them, so you can check prices and itineraries first.

Customers and bookings come across from a CSV. Exports from FareHarbor, Rezdy, Bókun, Peek Pro and Checkfront are recognised by their columns, and any other spreadsheet works by matching columns yourself. A dry run checks every row before anything changes, imports never send emails to travellers, and re-importing the same file doesn't create duplicates. That makes it practical to import once for testing and again on the day you switch.

Getting started

1. 1Import your trips. Paste a tour page link or upload a WordPress export, then review each draft.
2. 2Set options and deposits. Add shared and private options, their booking modes and the deposit and balance date on each.
3. 3Build your traveller form. Start from the default questions, then set reminders and personal links for each traveller.
4. 4Add rooms and hotels. Create room types with supplements and extra nights, and give each its hotel's email for rooming lists.
5. 5Bring your bookings across. Run a dry import of existing bookings, fix what it flags, then import for real.