Booking software for your kind of trip

Every operator on this list runs the same Samba. What changes is which part of it you lean on hardest. A city walking tour doing six departures a day lives in the departure calendar and needs a checkout fast enough for a phone on a street corner. A trekking company selling one 12-day route needs a deposit taken now, a balance collected over the following months, and passports gathered long before anybody reaches a trailhead. Both are booking problems. They are not the same booking problem, and a tool built for only one of them quietly makes the other half of the job harder — which is usually how an operator ends up with a booking widget on the site and a spreadsheet doing the real work behind it.

By business type. The two broad pages come first, and most operators see themselves in one of them. Multi-day tour operators covers trips that run over days or weeks: payment plans, participant details, and the back office that comes with a high-ticket booking you take months before anyone travels. Day tour operators covers the opposite pace — recurring slots, adult and child pricing, and capacity that cannot oversell. Between them they cover most of what turns up on a booking page.

By activity. The eight activity pages go narrower, because the detail that trips you up is specific. A food and wine tour needs every allergy collected before the first tasting. Rafting and kayaking needs boats and guides that can never be double-booked. Boat and sailing trips need to sell either a seat or the whole vessel, and yoga and wellness retreats need a deposit taken months out on a room that is only ever going to be sold once. Walking and city tours, cycling and bike tours, trekking and hiking, and safaris and wildlife each have their own version of that. None of it is a different product — it is the same features, shown doing the job you would actually ask of them.

If you run more than one of these — a rafting outfitter that also sells a half-day hike, a food tour company that puts on a week-long culinary trip once a season — you are the normal case, not the awkward one. Nothing in Samba is scoped to a vertical. Trips, departures, pricing, and payment settings are configured per trip, so a two-hour tasting and a ten-day route sit in the same account and show up in the same booking list. Pick the page that matches the trips you sell most of, and treat the rest as extra reading rather than a decision you have to get right first time.

What is underneath all ten. The pieces don't change from page to page. Trip pages and online booking take the sale, departures holds the calendar, participants collects the traveler details and turns them into a manifest, and payments and finance handle the money — paid into your own Stripe account rather than sitting on somebody else's balance sheet. If you would rather read the product by capability than by trip type, features is the same list from the other direction.

Each page is built the same way: the jobs that kind of operator does in a week, the parts of Samba that do them, and links through to the features underneath. They are meant to be skimmed. If you are three minutes in and nothing sounds like your problem, you are on the wrong one, and the grid above will get you to a better fit faster than reading to the end.

You don't have to pick the perfect page. They overlap on purpose, and they all end up in the same place: one record of every booking instead of a spreadsheet, an inbox, and a payment link that disagree with each other. Start with whichever one sounds most like your week, and check pricing for what it costs — the booking engine and payments are on the free plan from day one.