Everything it takes to run a trip

Tour and activity operators don't really buy features — they buy their way out of a mess. A website that can't take a deposit, a spreadsheet that decides how many seats are left, a group chat where somebody's passport number is hiding, and an accountant asking for a total nobody has. Each page below closes one of those gaps, and all of them run on the same record of the booking, so closing one doesn't quietly open another.

Selling. Trip pages are the storefront: drag-and-drop blocks, your branding, live availability. If you already have a site you like, you don't have to replace it — embed a booking button, a departures list, or a calendar widget on the pages you have. Online booking is what happens next, and it handles all three ways bookings actually arrive: travellers who self-serve at 2am, phone-and-email customers you enter by hand, and bespoke dates you quote with request-to-book. However it comes in, it lands in the same place, already organised — which is the point. A checkout that only covers self-serve just moves the mess to the half of your business that isn't.

Running the trip. Departures is the difference between a booking widget and booking software that actually runs the operation: a calendar of scheduled departures with seat limits and recurrence rules, so you set the season once instead of editing availability every week — whether that season is a 9am departure every day or six itineraries a year. Seats come off the count the moment somebody books, on every channel at once, which is how you stop selling the same seat twice. Participants covers everything that has to happen between the sale and the departure: passports, dietary needs, and emergency contacts collected automatically after booking, and a clean, printable manifest for whoever is meeting the group at 6am. Nobody chases fifteen people for the same document twice.

Money. Plenty of bookings are never paid in one go, so Payments is built around the deposit-then-balance pattern rather than bolted onto it: payment plans on a schedule, automatic reminders when a card fails, and payouts straight into your own Stripe account instead of a middleman's float. Once the money moves, Finance keeps the paperwork honest — invoices, receipts, tax, refunds, credit notes, and revenue reporting drawn from the bookings themselves. That is the reconciliation most operators still do by hand every month, and it disappears entirely when the booking tool and the ledger are the same system.

The back office. Almost nobody runs a trip alone. Collaboration brings guides, office staff, and partners in with role-based access, so a guide sees the manifest for their departure without seeing your revenue, and one login runs one brand or several. And none of this asks you to abandon the tools you already depend on: integrations connect Samba to your payment provider, the sales channels you list on, and the website you didn't want to rebuild.

You don't have to adopt all of it at once. Most operators start where the pain is loudest — usually taking deposits online, or getting the departure calendar out of a spreadsheet — and grow into the rest at their own pace. The full booking engine and payments are on the free plan from day one; see pricing for what it costs and what's reserved for Enterprise. Pick the page above that matches your bottleneck and start there.