How to take online bookings and card payments for your tours
Every booking, from every channel, belongs in one system that sells each seat once and takes the payment.
What your booking system must do
Every booking in one list
From your website, online travel agencies (OTAs), phone, WhatsApp, walk-ins and agents.
Live availability everywhere
A capacity for each departure and for shared boats, seats or guides, so nothing sells twice.
Instant confirmation
Bookings confirmed at once, until a cut-off you choose, with dates you can block.
Online payment
Card payments straight into your own account.
Connected to your OTAs
Bookings and availability shared with each OTA you sell on: see Online travel agencies.
Automatic e-mails
The confirmation and voucher, information before the tour, and a review request after it: see Guest experience.
A login for each person
Staff see only the pages they need; guides and drivers see their jobs on their phones.
Reports and your data
Bookings by channel and by departure, and every booking yours to export.
Enter phone and walk-in bookings the moment you take them: in 2025, two in five bookings still reached tour operators offline (Arival). How to answer enquiries and turn them into bookings: see Enquiries and WhatsApp.
Take payments online
- ✓Use a gateway that works in your country. A payment gateway takes the card; never take card numbers by e-mail or chat.
- ✓Price in your bank account's currency, or keep a separate price list in US$ or € for guests from abroad.
- ✓Write the currency in full, as in CLP 45.000 or US$ 49: a bare “$” means pesos in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Uruguay.
- ✓Build card fees into the price. With currency conversion, a foreign card can cost over 5% in fees (2026).
- ✓Take a deposit on private or expensive trips, with the rest due before free cancellation ends: see Booking policies.
- ✓Make a test booking of your own tour before you sell, and check the payment, the confirmation e-mail and the voucher.
A guest can dispute a card payment through their bank, a chargeback. The terms they accepted, their voucher and your check-in record are your evidence: see When things go wrong.
In TourTask
The setup checklist takes you from your first tour to a test booking: see Getting started. For payments, see Online payments, Gateways by country and Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Create your TourTask account when you are ready to sell; Pricing shows what it costs.