Tour guide booking form template

Template notice: This is a copy-and-adapt booking form template to help you decide what to collect from guests. Adapt the fields to your experience, and only gather personal data you genuinely need, in line with UK data protection rules.

A booking or enquiry form is a balancing act. Ask for too little and you lack what you need to run the trip safely and profitably. Ask for too much and you lose bookings to a long, off-putting form. Research on checkout abandonment consistently shows that every extra field costs completed bookings, and the effect is sharper on mobile, where most tour and activity bookings now happen. A good form captures enough to confirm the sale, contact the guest, apply the right price, and prepare for the day, and nothing more. Everything else can wait for a follow-up.

The template below lists the fields worth considering, grouped into essential and optional, with short notes on why each earns its place. Start from the essentials, add optional fields only where they genuinely serve you, and move detailed information to a later step.

The template: fields to include

Essential fields

These are the fields almost every operator needs to take and fulfil a booking. Keep this section as tight as you can.

• Experience and departure (essential): which tour, activity or attraction, and which date and time slot. This should be chosen from live availability rather than typed, so guests cannot book a sold-out or non-existent departure.
• Group size and ticket types (essential): the number of guests broken down by type, such as adult, child, concession or family. This drives both your pricing and your remaining capacity, so it has to be accurate.
• Lead guest name (essential): the person making and responsible for the booking.
• Email address (essential): for the confirmation, reminders and any manage-booking link.
• Mobile number (essential): for time-critical updates, particularly for weather-dependent or outdoor experiences where you may need to reach guests quickly.
• Payment details (essential): handled securely by your payment provider at checkout, never stored by you directly.

Optional fields (include only where they earn their place)

Each of these is useful in the right context and clutter in the wrong one. Add them only if you will actually use the answer.

• Pick-up point (optional): if you offer selectable collection locations, let guests choose one rather than typing an address.
• Dietary requirements or allergies (optional): essential for food and drink tours, unnecessary for most walking or sightseeing experiences.
• Accessibility or access needs (optional): where the experience can be adapted, this helps you prepare and set expectations honestly.
• Add-ons (optional): equipment hire, refreshments or upgrades offered alongside the main booking.
• Occasion (optional): a birthday, anniversary or celebration lets you add a thoughtful touch on the day.
• How did you hear about us? (optional): useful marketing insight, but keep it optional and never mandatory.
• Special requests or notes (optional): a free-text box for anything that does not fit a set field.

Consent and terms

• Agreement to cancellation terms: shown and accepted before payment is taken.
• Marketing consent: a clear, unticked opt-in if you want to email or text guests later. Keep email and SMS consent separate where you can, so guests choose each channel deliberately.
• Waiver: for activities that require one, collect it separately before arrival rather than burying it in the booking form.

Notes on getting it right

Keep it short

Every extra field costs you bookings. Ask only for what you truly need at the point of booking, and gather anything else afterwards. A guest is far more likely to finish a short form on their phone at a bus stop than a long one. As a rough test, if you cannot say how a field changes what you do, remove it.

Collect per-guest details later where possible

For group bookings, you rarely need every guest's full details at checkout. Take the lead guest's information to confirm the booking, then collect the rest, such as individual names, waivers and dietary needs, before the day through a follow-up message. This keeps the initial form quick and the conversion high.

Only collect what you use

Under UK data protection rules, you should only hold personal data you have a genuine reason to keep. If a field never influences a decision, drop it. This makes your form faster, your data handling cleaner, and your record-keeping easier to justify.

Let the system do the work

A capable booking system removes most of the reasons to build a form by hand. It shows live availability, applies the correct pricing, takes payment securely, records consent and sends confirmations automatically. When your booking flow captures the essentials as standard, you rarely need a separate document to chase.

How Experiqo captures this at checkout

With Experiqo, most of this template is already built into the standard booking flow. Guests choose an experience and departure from live availability, select their group size against your defined ticket and price types, and pay securely, so your capacity and pricing stay correct without manual work. Where you use them, guests can pick a pick-up point at checkout, and your team can add or amend bookings from the back office when enquiries come in by phone or email.

Consent is tracked as part of the booking. Experiqo records agreement to your terms and captures marketing and SMS consent, so you have a clear, timestamped record of what each guest agreed to. A notes field lets you or the guest capture special requests, dietary needs, access requirements or occasion details against the booking, which covers most of the optional fields above without a bespoke form.

One honest caveat: a fully custom question builder, where you design your own bespoke fields per experience, is on the roadmap rather than live today. For now, we recommend leaning on the standard checkout fields, ticket and price types, pick-up points and the notes field to capture what you need. That combination handles the vast majority of what this template covers. If you would like to see how it maps to your specific experiences, take a look at our solutions by operator type or book a demo and we will walk through your booking flow with you.

Use this list to design a form, or a checkout, that collects what you need and nothing more. Start from the essentials, add optional fields only where they earn their place, and move detailed information to a follow-up step.