Answers first, quotations later
Three long pieces written for the person who has not decided anything yet. No feature list, no comparison table where our column happens to win, and at least one honest case in each where the right move is to spend nothing.
Why this section exists
Most of the questions we are asked arrive too late. An operator has already signed for a system, already paid for a site, already spent a season paying commission on bookings that were never at risk — and then asks whether that was the right call.
These pages are the answers we would have given before the signature. They are written for the owner or the manager of a travel business, not for a developer, and they assume you can read a contract but not a database schema.
Nothing here is a pitch. Each guide names the situations where the correct decision is to keep what you have and spend the money on something else.
Read the one that matches the decision in front of you, not all three. Each guide ends with a conditional conclusion — if your situation looks like this, do that — rather than a recommendation that pretends every business is alike.
The three guides
Direct booking or OTA
Whether to sell through marketplaces or on your own site. The answer is almost always both, and the useful question is which bookings you are paying commission on twice.
Choosing a booking engine
Seven questions to put to any supplier before you sign, written so you can use them on us as well. Plus the cases where a spreadsheet is still correct.
What a travel website costs
Why quotations for the same brief differ by a factor of ten, which of the three cost groups actually breaks budgets, and what year two looks like.
They overlap on purpose. The cost of a website depends on whether it has to take bookings; whether it has to take bookings depends on how much of your demand is already yours rather than rented from a marketplace.
What these guides assume about you
- You sell travel — tours, transfers, rooms, activities, packages — and you sell at least some of it to people who are not standing in front of you.
- You have a budget that is real but not large, and a season that decides when you can afford to break something.
- Somebody in your office is already doing the job by hand, and the question is whether a system would do it better or simply cost more.
- You are not looking for a technology strategy. You are looking for the next correct decision.
Questions we have not written up yet
These come up often enough that we have an answer ready, but not often enough to justify a page. Send the question and you get a written reply from someone who has done the work, not a call from a salesperson.
- Should we move our tour catalogue out of Bokun, or build around it.
- Our channel manager and our website disagree about availability — which one is lying, and how would we prove it.
- We have a WordPress site that is slow. Is that a hosting problem or a rebuild.
- We take deposits by bank transfer. What actually changes if we take cards.
- We run two brands from one office. One site or two, and what does that cost us in search terms.
- Our agents want an API. Is that a real request or a wish, and how do we tell.
- We are being quoted for an app. Do we need one, or do we need our site to work on a phone.
If your question is not on that list, it is still worth sending. The ones that come back three times become the next guide.
When the answer is to buy nothing
It is worth saying plainly on the page that introduces the others. There are seasons and sizes where every option on this website is the wrong purchase.
- Your bookings arrive from a handful of long-standing agents who will keep sending email whatever you install.
- The bottleneck is the person answering enquiries, not the tool they answer with. Software does not shorten a reply that nobody has time to write.
- You are three months from a season and cannot afford anything breaking. Buy in the quiet months.
- Nobody in the business will own the new system. An unmaintained platform is worse than a maintained spreadsheet.
Ask the question directly
Describe what you sell and what you are trying to decide. You get a written answer, including the answer that says do nothing for now.
What travel operators ask us most
Are these guides selling Under2 products?
Each one mentions an Under2 product once, at the end, in the section that says who it suits and who it does not. The rest is written to be useful whether you buy from us, from a competitor, or from nobody.
If a guide would be more honest by telling you to keep what you have, it says so.
How current are they?
The commercial mechanics — commission, parity clauses, gateway approvals, the cost of content — change slowly, and these pages are written to stay true rather than to chase this month's platform news.
Anything that depends on a specific supplier's current terms is flagged as something to check in your own contract.
Can we get one of these as a document for our board?
Ask and we will send the relevant guide as a plain document, with the sections that do not apply to your business removed.
We do not charge for that and it does not commit you to anything.
Do you write guides on request?
We answer specific questions by email as a matter of course. Turning an answer into a public page happens when several operators ask the same thing.
If your question involves your own numbers, an email is the better format anyway.
Read next
Tell us what you are trying to run
What you sell, what you use today, and what is breaking. You get a written answer with an approach and a price range - not a brochure.