Software for guided tours

Tour operator software for group seats, guides and payment up front

A tour operator does not sell a free hour, it sells a seat in a group on a specific route and date: a sightseeing walk through the city, a day trip to a castle, an evening tour of the old town. Tour operator software has to count those seats, take money before the group sets off and show a guide what they earned on a route. Each departure becomes an event with its own date, length, resource and seat cap, and tourists pick it in a separate booking form that lists only scheduled tours. Among other leisure and event formats, tours stand out because one group is often made up of people who have never met.

A family with two kids in one group

The parents book four seats at once, and the limit counts seats rather than clients, so the group never gets overfilled. Whether tourists can see how many seats are left on a route is decided in the event booking form settings. The price and payment method can be set separately for each event participant: a child's ticket costs less than an adult's, and a relative who joins on the last day pays cash at the meeting point. Cash taken next to the bus goes through the register just like online payments, and the cash flow report shows how much came in each way.

A visitor from abroad pays before leaving home

Guests from other countries want their booking settled before the trip. The special event booking form lets them pay an advance for a seat, and payment rules decide whom to ask for it, for example new clients only. When payment is required, an appointment that is not paid in time is automatically set to canceled, and the seat can be sold again. Before choosing a payment provider, find out whether it accepts international cards and whether it keeps its commission on a refund, because a trip canceled due to bad weather means refunding the whole group. These and other questions are collected in the guide to choosing online payments.

What a guide earned on the Saturday route

For guides, the events pay rule fits. It can pay the same rate per departure no matter how many people showed up, or set thresholds by the number of participants, where the highest one reached applies. Banded bonuses are added on top of the base pay for the participants within each band, so a full bus pays differently from a half-empty one. The amount is either fixed or a percentage of the event's total cost, and bonuses and penalties for a guide are added separately, tied to a pay period or to a specific day. Worked threshold examples are in the article on payroll rules.