Why Operators Choose the Wrong Booking System

With over 300 booking systems on the market, choosing the right one can feel paralyzing. And for nearly half of small operators globally, the overwhelm has led to a default solution: don’t choose at all. According to the latest Arival research, 46% of small operators are still taking bookings through manual methods like email and spreadsheets.

But even among operators who have made the leap, many end up in what Meredith Rangel, founder of Bookable Tourism, calls the “one and done” trap.

“They go, ‘oh, so and so up the road uses it for their business, I’ll just put in the same platform,'” she explains. “They do a demo, go ‘oh, that’ll do,’ and then a few months after implementation they go, ‘oh, it’s actually not doing what I really need it to do.'”

Rangel co-authored Arival’s latest State of Booking Tech report and spends her days helping Australian tour and attraction operators find the booking or ticketing tech that is the best fit for their needs. In a recent episode of The Best Part of Travel podcast, she shared a practical framework for cutting through the sales pitches to find your best booking tech fit.

The 80-20 Rule: Identify Your Needs

Here’s the thing about booking systems, Rangel says: most of them do what they say on the box. Around 80% of functionality is consistent across platforms. It’s the remaining 20% — the user flow, the distribution connectivity, the mobile experience, the specific features your business actually needs — that determines whether a system is the right fit.

The problem is that most operators start shopping before they’ve identified what their 20% looks like. “A lot of businesses still don’t actually know what they need before finding a booking system,” Rangel says.

Her advice: before you look at a single platform, sit down and write a detailed list of your actual requirements. Not just “I need an online checkout” — but what kind of checkout? Do you need a widget or an iframe? Does it need to work seamlessly on mobile? Can you apply your own branding? Does it integrate with your analytics tools? The more granular you get, the easier it becomes to evaluate your options.

Three Simple Criteria for Best Fit

Once you know what you need, Rangel narrows the evaluation down to three things:

1. Business needs: Does it cover your critical 20%? A system that handles your specific requirements — whether that’s resource management, distribution API connectivity, or dynamic pricing — is worth more than one with a long feature list that doesn’t address your actual operations.
2. Ease of use: Tourism is a transient industry. Staff change, guides come and go with the seasons. “We need systems that are easy to train new staff that are only going to be with us for three or four months,” Rangel says. If onboarding requires locking new hires in a room for several days to train them on your booking platform, that’s a problem.
3. Intuitive design: Closely related to ease of use, but worth considering separately. As a new generation of operators and employees enters the industry — people who grew up with smartphones — the expectation of what “easy to use” means is changing. Newer platforms are meeting that bar. Older ones that fail to innovate are not always keeping up.

One More Thing: It’s a Business Tool, Not a Cost of Sale

One mindset shift Rangel encourages is to stop thinking of booking tech as a transaction cost and start treating it as a business investment — like a CRM or an email platform. “It is a tool,” she says. “A piece of technology should be making your life easier, not harder.”

And if you find yourself unsure after a demo? Ask for another one. There’s no rule that says you have to decide after one conversation with a slick sales person.

Listen to / Watch the Full Conversation

To watch the full discussion with Meredith Rangel — including her thoughts on mobile-first design, AI-powered forecasting, and the state of booking tech in Australia and the Oceania/APAC region — tune in to The Best Part of Travel podcast, available on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re in the region, come and meet Meredith and the whole Arival community in person at Arival 360 in Brisbane this June.