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Hot to connect Bokun to GuidesUnited
How to link your Bókun account to GuidesUnited with an OCTO token so both calendars share one set of dates and seats, plus what syncing does and what to know.
If you sell a tour through Bókun and list it here as well, you can connect the two and keep one calendar instead of two. The video shows every click. This is the same walk written down, with what happens once the tours are matched.
What connecting does
Once a tour is connected, Bókun keeps its dates and its seats, and we follow them. We copy what Bókun says is left, and we stop selling a departure the moment Bókun says it is full. A booking taken here is sent to Bókun as a booking, so it takes that many seats there too. The same seat is never sold twice.
Before you start
- The tour in Bókun needs a set departure time and a limited number of seats. A tour with unlimited capacity, or one that runs on opening hours, has nothing to keep in step, and the page tells you so.
- The tour here should use the same traveller categories as the tour in Bókun: adult, child and infant. A booking with a child on it cannot be sent to a Bókun tour that has no child rate.
- Keep two tabs open: Bókun, and your GuidesUnited dashboard.
The steps
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Create a booking channel in Bókun.
In Bókun's settings, open Booking channels and add one. Call it GuidesUnited, so the bookings we send appear under that name in your Bókun reports, apart from your other sales.
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Create an API key for that channel, with OCTO switched on.
In Bókun, go to Settings, then Connectivity, then API keys, and create a key. Choose the booking channel you just made, tick "enable OCTO", and switch on "Allow offline payment", the option that lets the key book without a payment provider in Bókun. Travellers pay here, so Bókun must not expect a payment of its own, and without that option a booking from here is refused. The key then shows three values. The one you need is the OCTO token: not the access key and not the secret key, which belong to a different Bókun API and will not work here. Copy the OCTO token.
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Paste the token on your Connections page.
In your GuidesUnited dashboard, open Connections, paste the OCTO token and press Connect Bókun. You may be asked for your password first: confirm it, then paste the token again. We check the token with Bókun on the spot, so a mistyped one fails right there with the reason, and a good one shows the name of your Bókun account.
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Match each tour to its Bókun tour.
Under Connect a tour, pick one of your tours here, pick the tour in Bókun it matches, and press Connect this tour. Its dates come across straight away, and the page says how many departures arrived. Do the same for every tour you sell in both places. A Bókun tour with more than one rate is listed once per rate, so choose the rate you sell. A draft can be connected too, so you can match a tour before you publish it.
What is OCTO? It is an open standard that booking systems use to talk to each other about seats, so that a seat sold in one place is taken in the other. Bókun speaks it and so do we, and the OCTO token is what lets the two talk about your account.
Once the matching is done
- Your availability is synced. Every hour we ask Bókun what is left on each departure and copy it. The Connections page shows when we last checked, and Check now asks straight away, for instance after you have opened new dates in Bókun.
- A booking here closes seats in Bókun. When a traveller books a connected tour, the booking is sent to Bókun under the channel you created, with the traveller's first name and email and our booking number as the reference. It takes that many seats in Bókun. If the booking is cancelled here, the seats go back.
- We ask Bókun before we sell. Just before a booking is taken on a connected tour, we ask Bókun whether there is still room on that departure, so a seat you sold somewhere else in the last hour cannot be sold again here.
- That tour's dates are now managed in Bókun. The availability step in the tour editor says where the dates come from and no longer offers to add or remove them here. Change them in Bókun, and they follow within the hour. Dates you had opened here by hand stay in your calendar but close, because the seats now come from Bókun.
Good to know
- What it costs. Bókun charges its own booking fee on bookings that arrive through its API, and ours do. Here nothing changes: same price, same platform cost shown on every booking. We never read your prices in Bókun and never change your products there.
- You can stop at any time. On the Connections page, Stop following beside a tour hands its dates back to you, exactly as they are. Disconnect detaches the whole account; you type a word to confirm, because every connected tour stops following at once.
- If the token stops working, for instance after the key is deleted in Bókun, the Connections page says so at the top, and the connected tours keep the dates they had until you paste a new token. Nothing is deleted.
If a Bókun tour will not connect, or the two calendars do not agree, write to us through the contact form and name the tour, and we will look at it with you.
