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TourCMS Booking Engine

The following pages outline how the "off the shelf" booking engine within TourCMS can be configured to meet your needs.

Key points about the booking engine:

• The booking engine sells based on live availability
• You can setup multiple booking engines (the free account comes with 2 possible configurations). Each booking engine can have different look & feel, functionality, text, language, sales tax, markup, products....
• There is one booking engine per Channel. To add a second booking engine, go to the Channel Manager section, and add a one there
• Just because the booking engine functionality is referred to as a booking engine - you could use the same system to take enquiries, quote requests etc

Basic setup

• Linking to the TourCMS Booking Engine - Adding and configuring links to your Tours
• Design look & feel - Use the colour pickers to match your website, upload a banner
• Confirmation emails - Configure emails to be sent to the customer once booked, deposit paid etc

Advanced techniques

• Linking to the TourCMS booking engine:
  • "Iframe" guide - Load either just Step 1 or the entire booking engine inside an inline frame
  • "Popup Window" guide - Open the booking engine in a popup window
  • Standard link vs Iframe vs Popup window - Explanation of the key differences
  • Additional querystring parameters - Override some of the default settings

• Design look & feel:
  • Custom HTML & CSS - Add background images, change fonts etc with CSS and add site navigation etc with HTML
  • Progress indicator - Use custom HTML & CSS to add a more advanced progress indicator to your booking engine

• Additional settings & tweaks:
  • Step 1 functionality - Screenshots of calendars vs tables etc
  • Tracking & analytics - Standard TourCMS agent/affiliate tracking and Tracking with third party solutions
  • "Alternative Tours"
  • General suggestions / final checks before going live

• Building your own booking engine using our API
  If you've assessed the off the shelf booking engine and can't configure it to meet your needs (we'd love to hear what you couldn't do with it!) it's entirely possible to hire a web developer to build a custom booking engine which sits on your own webserver, requesting product availability from TourCMS and passing in the complete booking. Learn more.

Frequently asked questions

Can we use our own domain name for the booking engine?

Not for the standard hosted booking engine, no. The booking engine must be on the TourCMS infrastructure using the TourCMS.com domain.

This has the following advantages:

• No need for you to buy and manage an SSL security certificate
• The booking engine will sell based on live availability
• We can support you if you have any problems
• The cookie, set on our domain, can be accessed - hence online marketing tracking will function correctly

However, if you use the iframe method of integration, you can hide the TourCMS.com domain from your customers.

Additionally, if you have the budget (or the technical resources in-house) you could build a custom booking engine using our API, not for the faint hearted and generally not required.