Frequently asked questions
Get the most from your business, with the TripWorks platform. Booking software made for tour and activity operators, by tour and activity operators.
Dynamic pricing gives you more control over your prices. Instead of watching and waiting to see if your tours and activities are priced effectively, you can change prices within minutes, with near-instantaneous results. Dynamic pricing can save you money because it involves the collection and use of data to make intuitive changes in prices quickly.
TripWorks comes with a library of 50+ pre-designed reports to help you measure, analyze, and report on your activity. These reports include sales, finance, tax, product, inventory, gift card, marketing, reseller, affiliate, customer, and waivers. Custom reports can be designed, saved, and shared, as well.
The TripWorks platform is designed to help you and your team stay informed in real time. You can choose to receive alerts (by email, in-app notification, or text) when critical events occur. For example, you can receive alerts when a new booking arrives, an e-com purchase is abandoned, a booking is canceled, a refund is processed, a payout is sent to your bank, or a new review arrives.
From the Manifest View, you can see at a glance which travelers are checked in for upcoming tours or activities, along with many other details (who still needs to sign waivers, which equipment has been assigned to each guest, etc.). As guests arrive, you can update their status to show that they are checked in, right there from the manifest. If needed, you can also print a copy of the manifest for the tour guide, making it easy for them.
Dynamic pricing is a strategy of pricing products based on various factors, including current market demand, the season, supply changes, and price bounding. Dynamic pricing changes can occur in real time. The main idea behind dynamic pricing is that it is flexible and based on real-time data.
There are multiple types of dynamic pricing methods that a tour or activity can use. Here are a few examples of how operators can change their prices with TripWorks:
- Seasonal Pricing: Ticket prices are higher during peak seasons. For example, if you offer tours on holiday weekends, you can charge more for them during the holiday season.
- Advance Window Pricing: Lower ticket prices for shoppers who book more than X days in advance. This can be a powerful incentive for out-of-market travelers to book before they arrive in market.
- Last-Minute Window Pricing: Raise ticket prices for shoppers who book within X hours of an activity. This encourages out-of-market travelers to book before they arrive in market, and allows you to charge more for highly motivated travelers.
- Channel-Based Pricing: Segment prices based on channel — walkup, e-commerce, phone, or OTAs.
- Time of Day Pricing: If you have fixed inventory, charge less for less popular timeslots and more for popular timeslots. Get higher utilization for your resources.
The TripWorks platform is uniquely designed to capture customer information the moment it is entered online. That way, even if the shopper abandons the purchase, the platform has the details needed to help complete the booking. Or, you can contact the guest directly by phone or text, answer questions, and complete the booking process.
No. The platform supports several waiver models.
- You can include a link in the booking confirmation message, requesting that each guest complete a waiver before arrival. You can automatically send additional reminders.
- When guests arrive, you can send them an individual link by text or email. With this link, they can complete the waiver on their own device.
- When guests arrive, you can send their booking to a tablet device at your facility, such as a tablet physically mounted on a desk in your facility. The guest will see their booking information and can complete their waiver.
- When guests arrive, you can direct them to a tablet device to complete an unattached waiver. Unattached waivers can be connected to the guest booking.
We will never try to keep your data from you. It is yours to take with you. Should you choose to leave TripWorks, we will give you up to 30 days to export, and collect your data firsthand, before your account is archived. Our team will always send any additional data needed upon request.
When a new booking is made on your platform, a unique customer profile is created. This dramatically simplifies the process for return guests, and eliminates the need to re-enter contact and payment information. You’ll also get a view of each customer’s lifetime spend, payments, signed digital waivers, and you can quickly identify your most loyal customers.
No. There are no additional monthly backup fees, or per-waiver fees, with TripWorks.
Yes. Customers are prompted to sign digital waivers electronically as part of the booking process. And — to encourage all travelers to sign before their arrival — email reminders are sent in advance up until their activity takes place. Best of all, your team can easily see who still needs to sign waivers simply by viewing the manifest.
Yes. You may create multiple templates and assign a template to one or more activities. For example, you can create a waiver template and use it for your Hiking Activity and your Climbing Activity. You can create a second waiver template and assign it to the Swimming Activity.
The Calendar View is packed with features to help you understand your business. You can view your calendar of upcoming tours by day, week, or month; filter out tours that are full, unavailable, or empty; and even make new bookings.
The Manifest View is another tool to help you see your bookings and resource usages for a specific day. It’s an efficient way to help your team see today’s activity, at a glance.
Yes. Our dynamic pricing features give you the power to set ticket prices based on a wide range of criteria. You can raise prices for last-minute bookings, offer discounts to certain types of customers (veterans, senior citizens, children, etc.), offer Happy Hour pricing for specific times of day on specific days of the week, and so much more.
The TripWorks platform dramatically reduces labor costs, thanks to smart self-serve rebooking tools. If you need to cancel an event or activity, simply pull up the manifest, and optionally use the platform to notify all travelers by email or text. Customers can rebook to a new date and time in their customer portal.
Depending on the complexity of your business, you can typically get up and running in a few days.
No, we want to help you grow. There are no additional fees for utilizing our gift card or voucher program.
The platform offers a powerful collection of booking widgets that you can seamlessly embed into your website, marketing emails, social media campaigns, and more. Whether you want to initiate the booking flow through booking calendars, booking links, or “Book Now” style buttons, the platform makes it easy to customize your widget to fit your needs.
You can create a new tour, activity, or availability in your account at any time. Any changes made are published in real time to your website and any connected OTA partners (such as Expedia, TripAdvisor, and GetYourGuide).
Our award-winning support team is always available to assist.
We offer discounts to businesses that qualify for our Enterprise Plan! Book a demo or chat with us if you’d like to learn more!
Yes. The TripWorks platform lets you charge tips with card readers, via iPad, and against saved cards on file.. Tour guides can use the TripWorks platform on their phone or tablet, hand the smart device to the customer, and ask them to close out their trip. The customer is taken to an easy “Add tip?” prompt, which charges their selected tip amount to the credit card on file. Our clients have reported as much as a 160% increase in tips using this technology.
Yes. Additional team members can be added at any time to your TripWorks account. A robust security permission model is used to make sure that the right team members can see the right information.
The TripWorks platform accommodates both physical and digital gift cards. You have the option to choose a pre-made template or upload your own design. Digital gift cards are immediately available for purchase through the platform, and you can order any physical gift cards you want to sell in-store.
Our Resource Management features are designed to help you make sure that you have the right equipment in the right place at the right time. For each tour or activity in your catalog, you can create automations that will automatically assign the appropriate equipment to customers at the time of booking, manage return times, and much more.
Yes. The TripWorks voucher (or ‘gift certificate') program allows customers to pay in full for an experience today, but choose the event date & time later. It is ideal for customers who want to gift an experience rather than a gift card, or personally return on an unknown future date. Once the voucher is paid for, the person who will participate in the tour or activity simply redeems their voucher code on an available time slot of their choice.
You can create rules so that specific messages will appear when the criteria you define for that rule are met. For instance, you can configure the platform so that your website displays an “Only 2 seats left!” message when a timeslot is down to 2 tickets available for purchase.
Refunding customers is simple. You can process a full or partial refund via credit card, cash, check, or wire transfer. Built-in workflows allow you to optionally notify the guest by email or text message, with the details of their refund.
Yes. Many of our clients choose to adjust the messaging associated with their oversold timeslots. For example, maybe you want a timeslot to show a “Call to Book” message when it reaches full capacity, and to give your team the ability to sell additional tickets, even on an oversold timeslot.
Yes, it can. Booking restrictions allow you to operate your business in a way that makes sense for you. Choose the minimum number of travelers and advance booking window. You can even set a minimum number of guests for empty dates & times, and have a different minimum number of guests for dates and times that already have at least one booking. This protects your team from running tours for a single traveler when it is not cost-effective to do so.
Automated messages can be set up for both emails and text messages. These are some of the most popular automations used by our clients:
- Confirmation emails. These are emails that send a confirmation message and virtual receipt to the customer who booked the trip.
- Tour/activity reminders. Usually sent in advance of the tour or activity, advising the guest of equipment to bring, location, etc.
- Abandoned cart emails. Abandoned cart workflows are designed to bring e-commerce shoppers back to your site, encouraging them to complete their booking.
- Request for review emails. By default, customers will receive emails 24 hours, 48 hours, and 72 hours following an experience, each of which asks them to leave your business a review.
Absolutely! You can create as many offer codes as you'd like. Simply choose which experience(s) they’ll be redeemed on, maximum number of uses, date availabilities, blackout dates, and more. Our advanced offer code panel allows you to customize your promotions in various ways. For instance, you could create a promo code that is applicable to a minimum of 2 guests, 3 hours before they book, and make that promo code applicable to only 1 of your 5 activities, that’s redeemable only on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Yes, you can. Extensive options are available. For example, you can require:
- A single deposit per group
- A deposit for each guest
- A fixed amount per ticket
- A percentage per ticket
- Full payment at checkout
These options offer maximum flexibility, particularly for higher priced tickets.
Yes, you can. Seasonal businesses often need pre-sale window limits. This setting comes in handy for businesses that want to set their ticket prices and related settings now but not make the tickets available for purchase until the specified time arrives — whether it’s the start of your busy season, the grand opening of a second location, or an event you’ve been promoting to your customers (e.g., “Tickets go on sale at midnight!”).
Yes! Booking cutoff times are one of many settings you can define using our Booking Restriction feature. Simply specify the minimum amount of time your team needs to prepare, and the platform will automatically stop accepting new bookings.