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Collecting extra information with a tour booking
Sometimes when taking a tour booking there is additional information that needs to be collected beyond just the date, time and quantities. Some possible approaches for this are:
- 1. Multiple departures
- Where a selection has a price impact, limited spaces, or where distribution of the choice to OTAs is important, creating a
separate departure for each choice is the way to go. Use the Product note field to communicate the difference between two otherwise identical departures to the customer.
A common example for this would be tours that run with different tour guides for different languages.
Fully supported in the hosted booking engine, API and best supported approach for OTA distribution.
- 2. Customer note
- When adding a product to a booking a multi-line free-text note can be added alongside. When booking airport transfers this is the recommended approach for storing flight and hotel information, see point 8 on the API checklist for the suggested format.
Fully supported in the API and a recommended approach for agents reselling airport transfers.
- 3. Tour Questions
- New to TourCMS functionality, specifically designed for collecting additional data that does not have an impact on availability or price such as passenger weights for helicopter bookings, meal choices or other preferences.
Questions can have both public and shorter internal descriptions, placeholder text and it's possible to specify whether information is mandatory and if answers should be provided per person or per booking.
Fully supported in the API, however limited implementation by Agents. Support in the TourCMS Hosted Booking Engine soon.
Read more about Tour Questions »
- 4. Options
- "Options" can be used to configure a wide range of ancillary products, charges or discounts. The solution library has walkthroughs creating some of the most popular types,
each also includes suggestions on further tweaks and enhancements.
Some Option types supported in the API, however limited implementation by Agents and cannot be mapped for Viator/Expedia bookings.
- 4a. Options with Questions
- An extension to Options, allowing additional text to be stored by the customer against their Option purchase. Option questions are not supported in the API, thus has no support for OTA integrations. In future this functionality is likely to be deprecated, generally speaking using separate Departures and/or Tour Questions is the recommended approach.
Not supported in the API or OTA distribution. No longer recommended.