Booking systems for tourism: Bókun, TourDesk or WeTravel?

Bókun

Bókun has its roots in Iceland and is widespread among Icelandic tour companies. Its strength is the connection to resellers: travel agencies and booking sites, at home and abroad, can sell your tours from the same availability you sell on your own site. If a large part of your sales goes through others, that is a strong argument for Bókun.

TourDesk

TourDesk is an Icelandic system built around selling many companies' tours in one place. A reseller can offer tours from many operators with live availability and prices.

Travelers Choice, a travel marketplace we built, shows around two hundred tours from TourDesk this way in its own design, and payment completes on TourDesk's page.

WeTravel

WeTravel is built for longer trips and group trips, where the buyer often pays a deposit first and the rest later. Ride With Locals, which sells motorcycle tours in Iceland and in Africa, uses WeTravel: departures and seats left are read straight from it and shown on the site.

Other systems

FareHarbor, Rezdy and Regiondo are also used by tour companies. The questions below apply to all of them.

What matters for the website

First ask whether the system has an API that gives availability and prices. Without one, the only option is an embedded booking widget, a window from the system inside your page. It works, but it is often slow, looks different from the site, and Google does not count the prices in it as part of your page.

Then ask where payment happens, on your site or on the system's page, and whether purchases can be tracked all the way. If payment completes on another domain, tracking has to be set up for it separately, or you cannot see which ads bring in sales.

And ask about languages and currencies: what does a foreign visitor see in the checkout, and can they pay in their own currency?

Hotels are a different world

Hotels use booking engines that handle rooms and nights, not departures and seats. Kirkjufell Hotel and Hotel Jazz, whose sites we built, use The Booking Factory. The same rule applies though: the site should lead the guest straight to booking, with no detours.