Bókun, a Tripadvisor companyReviews of bokun.io

Quiero agradecer especialmente a Zakaryia Khan por su ayuda y apoyo durante todos estos meses para yo poder realizar cambios y arreglar cosas que yo sola nunca hubiera podido. Zakaryia no solo ha sido un gran profesional, si no que siempre ha hecho un gran trabajo, con mucha paciencia, una amabilidad enorme, estoy muy agradecida por el soporte prestado.

I booked a call with client support to enhance my usage of Bokun, and was assisted by Bushra who went over and beyond my expectations providing an excellent service and managing to solve previous unsolved issues. That was not always my experience, but when you have someone like this on the team the company service can only get better. Very happy to use Bokun so far.

As soon as I logged into the system via Viator, Bokun started spamming my inbox every second. They sent me over 200 emails in just a couple of minutes. It seems like they’ve started sending me all my orders from the entire history of the company’s operations on Viator to my email.

Tanmay Ghule on the Customer Success Team was incredibly patient with my various requests from a Bokun supplier-side perspective. He answered all questions and was very careful to ensure all information he provided was as accurate as possible for all of my inane requests. Very great experience on a customer support level, from someone who also works in the same field! Thank you!

Where do I start. The platform is simply not fit for purpose. The UI feels decades behind anything else we use. It is genuinely difficult to believe this is a modern system that businesses are expected to rely on. We were paying around $500 per month. The fee itself is not the issue, it aligns with the pricing model. The issue is value. At that level, you expect meaningful return. In reality, it is difficult to justify even a fraction of that in terms of what the platform actually delivers. To be clear, the people are not the problem. Every interaction we have had has been polite and professional. However, politeness does not solve problems. Calls follow a predictable script, repeated phrases of understanding, then escalation. There is never a resolution on the call. Issues are passed to a technical team “for feedback” and then disappear. No follow-up, no accountability, no outcome. The platform focus is completely misaligned. Effort appears to go into surface-level changes while the checkout, which is where revenue is won or lost, remains fundamentally flawed. This is where the real damage happens. The booking widget is inserted as an external HTML element. The moment a customer enters it, you lose visibility. You cannot see behaviour, friction points, or drop-off reasons. From a conversion and optimisation standpoint, this is a critical failure. Analytics are equally unreliable. Data is incomplete, events are not tracked correctly, and reporting can be significantly inaccurate. You are effectively making decisions on numbers that do not reflect reality. For a paid platform, this is unacceptable. The result is misleading abandonment rates, no insight into actual customer behaviour, and no ability to properly optimise conversion. Despite claims that the checkout is optimised, there is no evidence, no session visibility, and no meaningful support to validate or improve performance. Operationally, the platform is reactive, not proactive. Problems only exist once you report them. System status will show everything as fully operational, even when it clearly is not. This creates a false sense of reliability that does not reflect real-world performance. The time cost is significant. If you are a small business or solo operator, expect to spend hours every week managing issues. Realistically, you would need someone dedicated to dealing with the platform just to maintain stability. That is not a sensible use of resources. Pricing adds further concern. The percentage fee may appear low, but when measured against profit, it becomes substantial. In contrast, we pay significantly more to other providers and receive clear value in return through product quality, innovation, and usability. That contrast is stark. We recognise that we are not the ideal customer profile for this platform. However, the platform also struggles to support businesses that scale quickly. As volume increases, the gaps become more visible, not less. The final incident, where incorrect tour dates appeared within the checkout and were not recognised as a critical issue, made the decision clear. We are now migrating away. This will cost us time and revenue in the short term, but it is necessary. If you are considering this platform, proceed with caution. It may function at a basic level, but the limitations become increasingly costly over time. Once embedded, migrating away is a major task. For us, the conclusion is simple. The platform does not deliver the value required to support a serious, growing business.

I CAN T RECOMMAND AT ALL BOKUN, which is owned by VIATOR. I have been a client for 3 years now. I am extremely disappointed. The setup process was tedious because you have to figure it out on your own. Granted, their customer support was responsive, but Fareharbor, for example, set up all the products on your dashboard for you. I was satisfied with Fareharbor. But I switched providers because my intern wasn’t very proficient in English. So I went with a French provider, Elloha. That was a big mistake because I ended up with double bookings, and customer service couldn’t figure out why. I wanted to go back to Fareharbor, but they couldn’t handle my case because they already had a lot of requests. So I switched to Bokun, believing it was a reliable company since it’s owned by Viator/Tripadvisor. As I said, I managed to set up all my products on my own. At first, customer service was technically competent and very responsive to common issue. But when it comes to a difficult problem or an unusual situation, don’t expect a response, any help. THEY ARE PLAYING DEAD. No one will call you, and even after multiple inquiries, you’ll receive a form letter—probably written by a bot. I love the way the email ends, implying that they can’t do anything for you, but they don’t say it outright. I lost 80 euros on a canceled reservation (Bokun’s transaction fee plus Stripe’s bank fees charged at the time of booking), and I’ll now have to pay another fee for the bank charges associated with the refund. Total loss, in my estimation: 119 euros on this case and the time spend with a pile of exchanes between Bokun and the client. If only the story ended there. My client purchased insurance through Bokun for approximately $120. She submitted a claim to the insurer Protect/Refund Me for reimbursement. It’s been three weeks already, and she hasn’t heard back from this insurer, which has a terrible reputation on Trustipilot. How can Bokun work with this kind of provider? The customer naturally turns to Bokun to see if they can intervene. Bokun responds that the claim must be resubmitted to Protect. But the matter doesn’t end there. That would be too easy. Because I can’t cancel this reservation for my two days because then this lady wouldn’t be able to get reimbursed for her other related expenses out of my control, like the museum tickets she bought. So for three weeks now, those two time slots in my booking system have been blocked so the insurer can compensate my client. And the insurer can even take its time because it can reimburse her after the date of the canceled trip. In the end, I’m going to issue the refund to this customer myself. I’ll lose my €119 because Bokun won’t reimburse me for at least the booking and cancellation fees. With Stripe, that’s obviously not possible. But by doing this, I’ll at least be able to free up my two time slots to put back on sale. So I’m going back to Farehabor. They handle the entire setup process from start to finish. There are no fixed monthly fees, unlike with Bokun ($40), plus Bokun’s transaction fees on every transaction processed through your site—1.5% (except for Get Your Guide and Viator, which have no fees)—and Stripe’s fees of 2.39% for Visa/Mastercard and 3% for Amex. In Fareharbor, no monthly subscription, the transactions fees and bank fees included are 6%.My client also feels ripped off for having paid 100 euros for insurance. My company’s reputation is taking a serious hit. The client thinks I don’t even know how to choose a good service provider for bookings and suspects I’m involved in this matter to avoid refunding her. If you think that you can manage everything on your own (to control your dashboard, implement all your products, the refund of your client and have the time to read all their instructions), you have the good profile for BOKUN. I will reconsider my position if my transactions fees will je refunded or not.

Very helpful and highly professional service. I spoke with Mohammad, who consistently followed up and supported me in resolving all my synchronization issues.

Imagine if you had the most entitled people with the worst possible software and the highest limitations, paired with terrible support. Everything broke all the time, you lost money, and then they would blame you. They made every small thing that should be easy difficult for no reason and randomly locked you out of your account for no reason. We lost so much time, money, and effort that it ended up being better to literally build our own reservation system.