GMC Tours · Excursion booking system for Joomla + WordPress, 0% commission

Tour booking engine

GMC Tours

Sell excursions, rentals and activities from your own CMS with 0% platform commission, Stripe checkout and a calmer direct-booking workflow.

Buy Booking Engine - €399/year Docs FAQ

What is included

Tour catalogue and availability flow
Stripe-ready checkout
Works for Joomla or WordPress delivery

Booking Engine

€399/year

Choose GMC Tours or GMC Booking. Annual licence, updates and support included.

Buy Booking Engine

Direct Booking Pack

€699/year

GMC Tours + GMC Booking together for one annual direct-booking stack.

Direct Booking Pack

Docs

Docs and implementation notes

Use this page as the quick start: choose the engine, complete checkout, then send your CMS platform and preferred booking flow so delivery can be mapped cleanly.

Docs FAQ

FAQ

Everything included

98 real features, grouped by area — the full depth of the GMC Tours booking engine, nothing hidden.

Booking engine & availability

Scheduled departures — publish each tour with fixed date-and-time departures, each with its own seat capacity.
Per-person bookings — a customer books one departure for N participants, with a live per-departure seat counter, not a clumsy per-night calendar.
Overbooking-proof seat hold — seats are locked in a database transaction at checkout, so two people can never grab the last seat on the same departure.
Timed checkout holds — seats are reserved for a configurable window (default 15 min) while the customer pays, then released automatically if they don't.
Automatic hold release — a background task returns seats from abandoned or expired holds, so inventory never gets stuck.
Booking cutoff / lead time — stop sales a set number of minutes before departure (per tour, with a per-departure override), enforced even under a race.
Min / max party size — enforce group-size limits server-side.
Recurring-departure generator — bulk-create repeating departures from a schedule instead of adding each one by hand.
Waitlist — customers join a waitlist for full departures and are promoted automatically when a seat frees up.
Departure viability auto-cancel — automatically close departures that never reach a minimum viable group size and refund those bookings.
Whole-departure cancel + refund cascade — cancel an entire departure in one action; every booking on it is cancelled and refunded automatically.

Product types & options (variants)

Four product types — timeslot, open-date, private and multiday, so one engine sells fixed-time tours, undated vouchers and private hire.
Open-date / skip-the-line vouchers — sell undated tickets that take no seat and are redeemed on arrival (gate capacity), distinct from the scheduled seat hold.
Product options / variants — sell the same tour in several variants (e.g. shared vs private, morning vs sunset), each with its own price, capacity and rules.
Flexible per-option pricing — per-person, a flat buyout unit price, or a percent/fixed modifier over shared tiers — whichever fits the variant.
Front-end option selector — a segmented picker on the tour page filters departures and pricing to the chosen variant, cheapest preselected; works with or without JavaScript.
Option snapshots — the booked variant label is frozen onto the booking so later edits never rewrite a customer's record.

Pricing, tiers & discounts

Per-person price tiers — Adult / Child / Senior… each with its own price, age band and party-size band.
Live price quote — the total and availability update instantly as the guest changes departure, quantities, option or gift card.
Volume breaks — larger parties automatically get a cheaper per-person price.
Add-on extras — optional paid extras, charged per booking or per person.
Multi-currency — set the selling currency per tour.
Tax / VAT — configurable rate and label, inclusive or exclusive, carried onto invoices.
Deposits & balance collection — take a deposit now and collect the balance later with an automatic pay link and reminder, or allow pay-on-arrival.
Discount coupons — percent or fixed, with a minimum-party gate, validity window and usage cap; reserved race-safely so a coupon is never over-redeemed.
Gift cards — sell and issue store-credit gift cards redeemed at checkout, with optional expiry; a card that covers the whole amount skips the payment step entirely.
Sequential invoices — numbered invoices with a configurable prefix.

Payments

Stripe built in — embedded Payment Element with a signature-verified webhook as the source of truth (raw REST, no bulky SDK).
Stripe hosted checkout — an alternative "Pay now" redirect (Checkout Session) mode.
PayPal built in — PayPal Smart Buttons alongside Stripe; the customer chooses the provider at checkout (none / Stripe / PayPal / both).
Test & sandbox modes — validate the whole flow before going live.
Refunds — full or partial, wired into cancellation and provider-aware (refunds the Stripe intent or the PayPal capture automatically).
Tiered cancellation-refund policy — set refund percentages by time-before-departure, per tour, with an all-or-nothing fallback.
Reconciliation-grade ledger — an append-only charge / refund / deposit / balance record per booking, with Stripe fee and net figures for payout reconciliation.
Double-charge protection — idempotency keys mean a webhook replay or page reload never charges twice.
Demo confirm mode — take bookings with email confirmation before you've connected a payment provider.

Guest / customer experience

Tour catalogue — a browsable list with thumbnails and a category filter.
Nearby / radius search — surface tours near a location, distance-sorted.
Rich tour page — gallery, meeting point, duration, difficulty, languages, what's included and excluded, and the cancellation policy.
Departures list + ticket picker — pick a departure and per-tier quantities inline.
Map embed — an OpenStreetMap meeting-point map with no API key or extra JavaScript library.
Verified reviews & ratings — reviews are accepted only from real confirmed bookings, with an average rating and admin moderation.
E-ticket / QR voucher — a printable voucher for each confirmed booking.
"My bookings" self-service area — customers see their booking history and re-access their e-tickets.
Self-service cancellation — cancel and get refunded per the tour's policy.
On-site check-in — a token-secured check-in page for the day of operation.
Guest ↔ host messaging — a booking-scoped message thread between customer and operator.
Clean SEF URLs — human-readable tour links.
Configurable contact band — a "Questions? Talk to us" block that can be full contact details, a single WhatsApp-concierge CTA, or hidden.

Marketplace (Portal mode)

Two modes, one licence — run as Single (sell your own tours) or Portal (a commission marketplace) from the same product.
Host self-registration — external operators sign up themselves, with optional auto-approval and KYC gating.
Host dashboard — each operator gets their own KPI dashboard and recent-bookings view, scoped to their listings only.
Host self-service listings — approved operators create and manage their own tours, departures and price tiers from the front end — no admin access needed.
Listing approval queue — new host listings stay pending until published (publishing is the approval), or auto-publish if you prefer.
Commission model — earn a configurable commission on every booking (10% default).
Automatic Stripe Connect payouts (Joomla) — commission is split atomically at settlement via destination charges, with a payout ledger and Connect onboarding + KYC sync.
Ownership isolation — every host-scoped action is IDOR-guarded so operators can never see or touch each other's data.

Admin & operations

Operations dashboard — live KPIs for tours, departures, bookings, confirmed, active holds, revenue, waitlist and pending host listings.
Full CRUD — tours, departures (capacity, price, guide, meeting-point override, cutoff), price tiers, coupons, gift cards and product options.
Bookings management — cancel + refund, mark completed, check-in, mark no-show (with undo), collect balance, and an invoice link, per booking.
Back-office booking creation — staff can create a booking directly, not only via public checkout.
Per-departure manifest / day-sheet — a printable manifest plus a CSV participant roll-call for each departure.
Day-of-operations dispatch board — a purpose-built board for running the day.
Departures calendar — a month-view calendar of all departures.
Sales reports — revenue, bookings, pax, average order value, refunds and net over any date range, with a prior-period comparison.
Payout reconciliation report — reconcile the multi-row payment ledger against provider payouts, with CSV.
CSV exports — bookings and a participant registry (the foundation for ES SES.Hospedajes / parte de viajeros reporting), UTF-8 so accented names survive Excel.
Waitlist management UI — view and manage waitlist entries and promotions.
Resource allocation — assign guides / vehicles to departures with overlap-conflict blocking.
Liability waiver capture — record waiver acceptance and version on the booking.

Emails & notifications

Booking confirmation emails — to customer and admin, including the meeting point and the e-ticket / manage / cancel links.
Configurable email intro & footer — brand outbound emails with your own intro text and signature.
Pre-departure reminders — automatic reminder emails ahead of each departure.
Balance reminders — automatically chase outstanding deposit balances before the departure.
Abandoned-hold recovery — a one-time recovery email nudging customers whose checkout expired.
SMS / WhatsApp notifications — optional Twilio or WhatsApp Cloud sends alongside email (best-effort, off by default).

Integrations & developer API

Reseller / public REST API — resellers can read the catalogue, check availability and create bookings, authenticated by hashed, scoped API keys; off by default.
OCTO (octo.travel) supplier API — a read-only products / options / units / availability surface for OTA and channel-manager pulls, on its own independent toggle.
Outbound webhook — HMAC-signed booking events pushed to your endpoint for automations.
iCal export — publish each tour's departures as an .ics feed that Google Calendar / Outlook can subscribe to.
Booking-source tracking — every booking records its channel (web / api / admin) plus UTM parameters.
Analytics injection — GA4, Google Tag Manager and Meta Pixel tags with ecommerce events, built in.

Automation (scheduler)

Built-in scheduled tasks — release expired holds, send reminders, run departure viability auto-cancel, send balance reminders, and sync Stripe Connect (marketplace) — as Joomla scheduled tasks and WordPress WP-Cron jobs.

Security, privacy & GDPR

Token-gated bookings — bookings can only be viewed or confirmed with their secret token, so customers never see each other's data (no IDOR).
CSRF protection — every state-changing form is token-checked.
Signature-verified webhooks — payment webhooks are HMAC-verified with replay protection, never trusting the browser.
GDPR consent capture — consent is recorded at booking time.
Stored-XSS guard — host-submitted descriptions are HTML-filtered.
Hashed API keys — keys are stored SHA-256-hashed and shown in full only once, at creation.
Self-hosted data — all bookings and customer data live in your own database.

Localization

English, Italian and Spanish out of the box — admin, front end and scheduler plugins fully translated, respecting your site's multilingual setup.

Trust & licensing

GPL-licensed software — released under the GNU GPL.
Self-hosted, you own the data — no third-party marketplace sits between you and your customers; payment providers use your own credentials.
Annual licence, one site — includes the official build, one-click licensed updates and support.
One-click updates — the extension checks the GMC / FuerteventuraTV update server automatically (Joomla ~24 h, WordPress ~12 h) and offers updates while your licence is active.
Download key by email — entered once to unlock licensed updates.
Lapsed-licence safe — if the licence lapses the installed product and existing bookings keep working; only updates and support stop.
Proven in production — this exact build powers the live tours catalogue and checkout on fuerteventurasurfcamp.com.

Joomla & WordPress

Joomla — requires Joomla 5.0+ or 6 and PHP 8.1+ (J6 target 8.2), MySQL 8 / MariaDB with InnoDB; the single pkg_gmctours package installs the component, the scheduler task plugin and the web-services API plugin; automated Stripe Connect marketplace payouts are available.
WordPress — requires WordPress 6.0+ and PHP 8.1+; delivered as shortcodes + REST routes + WP-Cron with the identical seat-hold booking engine. Honest gap: no automated Stripe Connect payouts on WordPress — commission is tracked on each booking, but paying hosts is a manual admin step (Joomla has automated payouts).

FAQ

Is there any per-booking commission?: No. The plugin does not add a per-booking fee. Stripe fees remain Stripe fees.
Joomla or WordPress?: The licence can be delivered for the CMS version agreed after checkout.
Can I buy both systems?: Yes. Use Direct Booking Pack when you want tours and accommodation booking together.