Your booking software should treat marketplaces and direct bookings as channels feeding one availability calendar, so a seat sold anywhere comes off everywhere at once. Beyond that, its job is the same whatever the source: build the manifest, assign guides, collect waivers, handle weather cancellations, and recognise the customers who come back to you directly.
Marketplaces are a channel you keep. The aim is to stop them being a separate operation run from a separate screen.
One calendar, every channel
Double bookings happen when availability lives in more than one place: the booking system, a marketplace's own admin screen, a paper diary by the phone. The fix is one source of truth that every channel reads from and writes to, whether through a direct connection or a channel manager. These are things to test, not assume.
- How quickly a direct booking reduces availability on each marketplace, and the reverse.
- What happens to the last two seats when two channels sell them in the same minute.
- Whether shared resources are understood: one boat used by two tour products, or one guide who cannot be in two places.
- Whether cut-off times can differ by channel, so a marketplace stops selling earlier than your own site.
- Whether a phone booking entered by staff takes effect as quickly as an online one.
- What staff see when a connection fails, and how they find out.
The day of the tour
The guide does not care where a booking came from. The manifest should be one list per departure with names, party sizes, pickup points, dietary or medical notes and balance due. Marketplace bookings can arrive with less detail, perhaps only a lead name and a relayed contact address, so the system needs a way to collect the missing information before the day.
Guide assignment belongs in the same place: who is qualified for which tour, who is available, and a roster the guide can see on a phone. Waivers should attach to each participant, not to the booking, so that the four friends of the person who booked each sign their own, and the guide can see at the meeting point who has not.
When the weather turns
A cancelled departure is the hardest test. For a direct booking, you want to offer a new date or a refund in one message and let the customer pick. For a marketplace booking, the cancellation and refund may have to go through the marketplace under its rules, so your system should at least mark those bookings clearly and tell staff what to do for each. Rebooked customers should move to the new departure with their waivers and notes intact, and the freed seats should return to every channel.
Recognising repeat direct customers
Someone who found you on a marketplace last year and books on your own site this year is the best outcome of using marketplaces. Your software should notice. It should match on name and contact details and show the guide that this guest has been out with you before.
Since marketplace bookings may come with masked contact details, a waiver or check-in form that asks for an email, with consent, can be the only moment you get to start that relationship. Check each marketplace's terms on contacting its customers before you use that information for marketing.
Where the money fits in
Marketplace commission pays for reach, and it stays. What is worth checking is what your booking system charges on top for direct bookings, which came to you unaided. Put that fee and your direct booking count into our free calculator for per-booking and monthly software bills to see three years of it.
If the total is out of line with what you use, our page on what tour and activity operators rent and what can be rebuilt describes how Hiro builds the calendar, manifest and direct checkout around the marketplaces, never in place of them. The guide to owning your software explains running a new system beside the old one on real departures before relying on it.