Announcing a better way to showcase your tour schedule

We were never completely happy with how our booking form worked for tours with few dates of operation. While it worked well for a tour available on most days of the week/month, it wasn’t ideal for something like a 10-day Culinary Tour of Europe with a few fixed departures. We had a plain old calendar that showed the operational/sold-out dates to travellers. They’d have to click around a lot to discover dates actually open for booking. What’s more, we didn’t clearly spell out how many seats were actually available or remaining. Here’s what our calendar looks like:

The old date picker involved a lot of clicking around to find dates open for booking.

Upcoming schedule in a list

Well, we’re happy to announce that this is no longer the case. Today we are launching a new way to showcase the upcoming schedule of a tour. Here’s what it looks like:

The spiffy new alternative view to publish your tour schedule.

  Here’s what it can allow your customers to view at a glance:

• Upcoming tour options (or time slots) in the form of a list along with advertised prices for each option
• Number of spots available and booked
• Whether the departure is guaranteed (i.e. if you have already crossed the minimum number of confirmed participants required to operate it). How many more spots required to guarantee the departure
• Quickly jump to tour dates in a particular month
• Filter departures that are guaranteed for X participants (or more)

There are two versions of this “widget”, one for a single tour, the other for multiple tours (eg. all tours in India, or all “adventure” tours). The multiple-tour version packs some extra filters to help your customers quickly find what they’re looking for. And while we were at it, we gave the trusty old calendar a minor upgrade as well. It now shows a lot more information for each departure/time-slot: at-par with what is shown in the new widget.

The calendar is still there and has seen a minor upgrade.

Control what is displayed - Settings

We’ve also added a bunch of knobs & settings to the tour backoffice to let you control how much information you want to share on the booking forms:

Control how you want to showcase your schedule on your booking forms - list or calendar. Control what information is visible to your customers.

  Here’s how you can generate an upcoming schedule widget for a bunch of trips, probably to put on your home page, or a destination-specific landing page:

Customize almost everything in your widget. Click to see larger image.

  You can control pretty much everything about the widget, for example:

• Pick which tours to display the schedule for
• Put a promotional message on top of the widget to highlight a special deal or coupon code
• Pick which filters to enable for your users

Give it a spin and let us know what you think. We’re sure we can make this even better. Let us know in the comments below. We’re all ears.