Bókun, a Tripadvisor companyReviews of bokun.io

So sad after spending so much time on this booking platform with many hickups. You don't know when the helpdesk will help and they have "Upgraded" their prices to a sky high level. I hope to find another solutions to stop this robbery. They changed their prices twice in 2 years, no escape! Now they block my bookings. They operate on a system that is called blackmail!

Doesn't and hasn't ever worked well. Always having problems with bokun which makes things difficult. Customer service is almost non-existent. Don't risk payments or your bookings for your travel business with bokun, you will regret it.

Can‘t believe they come up with a monthly cost of 49 USD in the time of pandemic when there is no Travel/Activity booking world wide. Just had to laugh. Also the fact that they automatically move everyone to PRO, and that the users have to log in and administer themselves to spend time and opt out if not want the monthly charge. It‘s User Unfriendliness at a maximum level! And every email you send, the reply comes like this: „I don‘t know about this topic so let me bring a colleague to solve this problem“ - so you end up talking to different person with each email 🤯 The way they do business is basically shooting on their own feet. ☠️

Terrible company. Avoid at all costs

Absolute rubbish. The software is packed with bugs and has always been a pain to use. We forgave it when they charged 0.1% commission, but then they upped their price 2900% to 2.9%. Now covid-19 has appeared, they've suddenly moved to a subscription model which further kicks small operators when they are down. It's going to work out around $200 per month (even without any sales) +1.5% commission. This is a TripAdvisor company so you'd think they would treat their customers better than this. They will say that they have a 'free' version - however this still charges a higher commission on sales and the version is so striped down on features it won't work for any operator. As the travel industry continues to be chaos and things don't look like they are going back anytime soon, we will be leaving to a different booking system.

They get you in their system for 0.1%, then after a year raise the price to 3% and now they raise the prices again to a monthly fee. This all in times of Corona when nobody books a tour and they are promoting this as more value for money. Using the system for 2 years and we got a lot of bugs, problems with connections to TripAdvisor and Viator, guests who booked and never got into our systems etc etc. For our other company we started using FareHarbor, and the service they offer is so much more than Bokun, less bugs, faster and your own account manager. For us the reason to leave Bokun.

I will be honest, I originally signed up to Bokun due to their really low prices. At one point in time they charged 0.1%! Which was great for a startup, however they soon raised to 2.9% which is still the lowest in the industry but it quite a markup! At 0.1% I could let a lot of things go, but paying 2.9% for each online booking I have higher expectations. After they do a release there seems to be several issues that come from it, which is likely due to poor testing. In the past I have had the menu bar disappear on my page (apparently this was due to a problem in an update they did) it got fixed within a few days but caused the system to be unusable for that time. Additionally in March this year following another release all the invoices for customers disappeared from our account. After spending hours speaking with support, I was told I would manually need to go into each customers account, click a button off an on again and each invoice would appear for each customer. This would have caused hours of work, so after another few days of back and forth emails their support team (someone higher up) agreed they would the issue on their end. It was resolved quickly but it would of been a whole lot better if they had offered to solve it anyway, as it was caused by their mistake. Generally I do find support hit and miss, some of the more basis questions can be dealt with very quickly (within a few hours), some of the more complex ones take days and you get passed between people. It is all done over chat as well, no number to call, sometimes it may take 5 mins to explain something instead of waiting several hours for an answer for which sometimes they have misunderstood and you have to start over again (if you dont respond back within several hours the ticket gets closed). One of the big downsides of Bokun is its lack of direct integration with anything outside of some Icelandic software. You can use Zapier and webhooks but you have to know exactly what you are doing to get these working well. For a widely used product you would expect integration with popular (non Icelandic) accounting software and something like Google Docs. I know the company is Icelandic but it has been owned by TripAdvisor for some years now. Some of the functions are limited, deposits are not that easy to setup, and in fact if you look up deposits on their help system you get to a page that does not mention them at all, it is possible to do but you have to implement a work around. The setup process is fairly complex as well, again once you get your head around it its OK but Bokun is a fairly steep learning curve. Some of my biggest issues are with their newest releases. They brought out BokunPay which is meant to compete with Stripe and PayPal, on the surface it looks great but under the hood you release the 2.9% card fees are passed onto the booking customer and there is no way around this, as an admin I cannot decide to absorb this fee. They have also brought out a website builder...which has been marketed heavily! Even after I contact customer support, and regardless of if they have solved by problem or not I ALWAYS get a follow up to say "have you looked at this extra thing which will cost you more". Even if I say no the next time I speak with them I will get more product pushed at me. Overall Bokun is an OK system, I think it would be a lot better if the company focused on adding features to the core product and not additional chargeable features. If you are or have access to a tech person, they have an open API and the use of webhooks is pretty handy, so you can do some fairly advanced things. If you are a beginner I think this would also be pretty good, I originally really liked the software, but now the company has grown and I have some unique requirements I keep hitting walls and limitations with what Bokun can do which causes frustration.

Just like another reviewer mentioned below, Bokun doesn’t have the authorization and capture code written for third party credit card processing companies. Most other booking engines (Peek, Fareharbor, etc.) have this code that enables you to authorize fund availability but delay fund capture. This is very important for cancellations so you don’t get charged the ~2.9% processing fee. However, we’ve been talking to Bokun for over 1.5 years about this and they still won’t prioritize this matter, which shows us that they don’t really care about their customers and how much this hurts us. During the Covid19 crisis, many customers have to cancel their bookings and although we have to refund our customers fully, we’re penalized with the fee on Bokun’s side just because they won’t hire programmers who can write this code that everyone else seems to have. This is really not fair to their customers and Bokun shouldn’t be operating until they fix these fundamental and basic issues.