If you’re part of a business that offers many different tours and activities, this one’s for you! 

Having many offerings without any organization on your website can cause your customers to get lost in their booking process, which could lead to fewer reservations. Luckily, on your Dashboard, you have the option to create booking flows to rectify this issue. 

This guide will cover what booking flows are as well as some tips to maximize your conversions with this feature.

Please note, we recommend reaching out to Support to set up or edit your booking flows to ensure everything is set up properly.  

What Are Booking Flows?

Booking flows allow you to organize your items (tours and activities) into categories or groups which helps your customers better navigate your offerings.

For example, you could categorize your items into “Multi-Day Tours” or “Summer Activities” to make it easier for customers to quickly find what they are looking for. 

Benefits of Booking Flows:

• They improve the customer experience by making the booking process simpler and faster. 
• Booking flows can maximize your conversions by eliminating decision fatigue. 
• You can make your offerings more appealing by adding engaging, high-quality pictures to each item.
• It’s easy to highlight your bestsellers by putting your most popular activity front and center in your flow. You can even make it larger than other activities on the flow.
• Customers can explore your offerings by item or date. In the first case, they see all your products. In the second case, they see an overview of available dates and times. The ability to search by date is great for customers who will be in your area for a limited time and want to see what’s available during their stay.
• Customers may navigate through each flow without losing their place by using the breadcrumbs feature (shown below).

Breadcrumbs at the top of the booking process

How to Organize Booking Flows into Categories

The best way to display your full array of activities is by breaking them down into categories within the booking flow. You have a few options on how to do this. Categories can be organized in the following ways:

• Locations
• Various groupings of your offerings (e.g. rentals, charters, tours)
• Private and public options
• Retail items and regular items

Pro Tip: Think of your categories like folders you save your files in. You can have multiple smaller folders within the main folder, which helps categorize things neatly. 

How to Design Booking Flows

You can increase bookings of certain offerings by making your booking flows more aesthetically pleasing. All booking flow ‘cells’ can be adjusted by size. A cell represents an individual item.  

As a rule of thumb, you would want your more popular tours to be a larger size than the others since these items bring you more revenue. On the other hand, you could also make your newer items larger to better market them to your customers. Whichever item(s) you want to promote more heavily should be emphasized in your booking flow.

To learn how to manage your booking flows, refer to these Help Pages.

A Few Booking Flow Best Practices:

Follow along with these guidelines to optimize your booking flows.

Do:

• Keep your booking flow clear and structured. Go through each flow as a customer to ensure it is easy to navigate. 
• Make sure all images displayed are high-quality, clear, and reflect the tone of the offering. 
• Add headlines to give any additional information about the activity (e.g. starting price, age limit, etc.) or make an item more appealing (e.g. add a note that it’s your best seller, that there is limited capacity, or another identifying characteristic). 
• Organize items into folders, especially if you have a lot of them. These are also known as blocks. 
• Update and highlight seasonal activities if you have them. You can do this by making the pictures bigger and putting them at the top of the page.
• Use different shapes and sizes to make your flow look more interesting.

Don’t:

• Include a lot of text in your item’s pictures or headlines.
• Lose track of the cell sizes. Cells are the way you structure your flow, so be sure to keep them organized and avoid sporadic sizes.
• Forget to add a picture to an item or a block. This results in displaying a gray box which can discourage conversions.
• Have blocks that cover the entire page, which creates blank spaces in the flow page.

Pro Tip: Try to identify your bestsellers and highlight them. If you are not sure what your bestsellers are, you can run a bookings report to see how many bookings you had per item in a chosen time period.

Bonus! Use Suggested Items to Drive Sales

When you set up the Suggested Items feature in your Dashboard, additional offerings and add-ons will appear as customers check out. This will allow the customer to book multiple items at once under a single order. 

This can boost your sales as the customer is possibly more inclined at checkout to select additional options. This feature works especially well in conjunction with retail items, where customers can purchase your merchandise as a souvenir. 

For more detailed information on how to set up booking flows, please take a look at our Help Center article or reach out to FareHarbor Support with any further questions.