Managing bookings by hand can seem like the obvious solution when you want to sell guided tours, creative workshops, cookery classes, or even tickets for a rope-adventure park or children's park. All you need is an email account, a pen, and a calendar. Simple enough! Yet very quickly you discover just how much time manual booking management actually eats up. When all is said and done, handling reservations by hand comes at a staggering cost!
1/ Manual bookings are a huge time drain
When you're only logging one or two bookings a week, a notebook and pencil can just about do the job. But beyond that, you'll soon realise this approach simply isn't sustainable. When bookings aren't automated, you have to reply to every email, suggest alternative dates or packages based on each customer's requests and questions, then track payment and follow up with customers as needed. And that's on top of keeping your schedule and availability up to date at all times.Manual booking management becomes a serious time sink very quickly! You might be surprised how many hours disappear if you did what chess players do and actually kept a tally of the time spent on admin. According to estimates from tour guides and workshop facilitators, each booking takes between 10 and 15 minutes to handle.
Do the maths using the lower estimate of 10 minutes: just 6 manually managed bookings already amounts to 1 full hour of your time! If you receive 6 bookings every day, that's 30 hours a month swallowed up by admin alone. And that's the conservative figure! Some bookings are more complex — rescheduling, adding or removing participants. All tasks that are a real headache to handle by hand.
By using a booking system like Explorates, customers book their tours and activities themselves, and the time spent on follow-up is drastically reduced. For example, cancelling one participant from a group takes just a few clicks! Even better: the software also handles invoice generation on your behalf, in compliance with French regulatory requirements.
All the time lost to essential admin would obviously be far better spent creating new offers and developing new products.
2/ A massive loss of revenue
But it gets worse than the bookings themselves! Simply not having a booking system on your website — forcing customers to email you so you can handle the reservation by hand — will cost you an enormous amount of revenue.Following the time-honoured principle that "laziness always wins", a large proportion of potential customers simply won't bother emailing you to ask whether an activity is available and whether they can book it. Customers are online; they want to find the activity they're looking for and book it instantly before moving on.
You'll also lose every last-minute booking, for the simple reason that you have to read, process, and reply to emails. In the meantime, the customer has already booked with your competitor!
With Explorates, customers can book your activities and guided tours in real time, instantly and without any input from you. The system displays only available time slots, and customers can book and pay immediately on the spot.
3/ Manual bookings are error-prone
Relying solely on a scrap of paper and a pencil also carries a significant risk of mistakes. You have to manually check that a time slot is actually available, and if something slips through, you may find yourself having sold a booking that can't actually be fulfilled. This is especially critical for activities that require equipment for each participant — a cookery class, for instance, or harnesses for a rope-adventure park.With manual bookings, you also risk double-bookings if you sell your activities anywhere other than your own website. The same customer could easily send a booking request via your site while also requesting the same experience through one of your resellers. The unpleasant surprise of realising it's the same person is entirely avoidable.
Mistakes aren't just a waste of time and a source of stress either. Errors can also be extremely damaging to your brand image! Reviews of your activity or guided tour may ultimately boil down to a negative comment about the booking process and your lack of professionalism.
Managing bookings by hand means constantly checking availability across every date and juggling multiple tools or platforms. The risk of error is enormous — as is the mental load and stress that come with it.
4/ The inability to grow
If you remain locked into a manual booking system, you will never be able to grow your customer base at scale. In today's market, activity sales are increasingly concentrated on major international platforms such as Get Your Guide and Viator. Yet it is impossible to sell your activities on these platforms and on your own website without adopting a booking system that incorporates what is known as a Channel Manager.What exactly is it? Channel Management is a powerful feature built into the Explorates booking system. It allows you to sell your activities on your own website and on major platforms without having to manage availability and pricing on each one separately. Everything is handled automatically!
You simply define the details of your offering — the days, the number of available spots, and your pricing. This data is then shared in real time with the platforms. So if a customer books 3 spots on your website, those 3 spots are immediately removed from sale on Get Your Guide and Viator. Like magic!
Thanks to Channel Management, your offering will reach a far wider audience and you'll attract a much broader customer base. Ultimately, the question isn't "how much does a booking system cost?" but rather "how much is not using one costing me?" At Explorates, we firmly believe that asking the question is already half the answer!
