A half-finished booking sits in your account with nothing to show for it. The guest found you, picked a date, started the form, and stopped.
Booking abandonment is not one vague conversion problem. It’s actually six specific problems in your checkout, and most of them are settings you can change this week rather than a redesign you cannot afford.
Where booking abandonment happens in your checkout
Three of the six problems below come straight from Baymard Institute’s research on why shoppers leave a checkout, and each maps to something in a booking flow you control.1 The other three are particular to selling a date and a time rather than a product off a shelf.
Set your expectations against the right benchmark, or against none at all. Baymard’s average documented cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, drawn from 50 separate studies.1 That number covers online retail rather than tours and activities, and no equivalent published benchmark exists for this industry. Treat it as evidence that abandonment is normal and large, not as a grade for your own checkout.
1. You cannot see which guests quit
Most operators work from a hunch here, because the guests who leave do not send an email about it. Checkfront gives those guests a status. A Pre-Booking holds a booking until payment is completed after a customer submits the form, and pre-bookings stay in the system for 30 days.2
The people who quit are already listed in your account, with the date they wanted and the products they picked.
The change: filter your booking index by Pre-Booking status and read through the last two weeks. Look at which products appear, and which day of the week. A pattern in that list tells you which of the five problems below is yours.
2. The total price arrives too late
Extra costs are the single largest documented reason people abandon a checkout, at 40%, and a further 12% leave because they cannot see or calculate the total order cost up front.1 Together that is more than half the abandonment you are dealing with, and both are the same failure: the number on the final screen is not the number the guest had in their head.
Tax, a booking fee, an equipment charge, and a per-person surcharge each look small on their own. Stacked at the end, on a screen where the guest is already holding a card, they read as a bait and switch.
The change: show the all-in price where the guest first sees the product, not at the payment step. If you take a deposit rather than the full amount, label the deposit and the balance separately, and say when the balance is due.
3. The form asks for more than the trip needs
A checkout that runs too long or too complicated costs 17%, and a site that demands an account costs a further 18%.1
Checkfront splits what you collect at checkout from what you collect afterwards. The Booking Form takes what you need to hold the booking. Guest Forms are one way to gather per-guest detail once the booking exists.3 Waivers are a separate tool, in Waivers and Documents, available on supported plans, and it does not depend on guest forms being switched on.4
The change: list every required field on your Booking Form and ask which ones you genuinely need before the guest arrives rather than on the day. Move the rest to whichever post-booking tool fits your setup: a guest form, a waiver, or your own follow-up email.
Accounts deserve a separate look. Customer Accounts are optional in Checkfront, so a guest can complete a booking without creating one. If you require one, check that the reason still holds. Membership pricing, repeat-customer records, and account-level billing are real reasons to keep the requirement. Leaving it on because it was switched on years ago is not.
4. Checkout collapses on a phone
Mobile is the fastest-growing way activity travelers book. Arival’s research on outdoor adventure and activity travelers puts mobile at 28%, up from 11% in 2019, with 27% on a computer and online booking passing 50% in 2023.5
Nearly three in ten bookings on a small screen is enough to matter, and phone checkout fails in ways a desktop test never catches. Date pickers open below the fold. Guest-count steppers land under a thumb. A form that reads cleanly on a wide monitor stacks into a column the guest has to swipe through.
The change: complete a real booking on your own phone, on cellular data rather than office Wi-Fi, and count the taps from product page to confirmation. Then do it again on the oldest phone in the building.
5. Availability the guest cannot read
Baymard’s list does not include this one. It is specific to tours, activities, and rentals, where the thing being sold is a date and a time rather than a box on a shelf.
A calendar that greys out dates without saying why sends the guest somewhere else to find out. Sold out, closed for the season, below minimum numbers, and outside your cutoff window all look identical to someone staring at a grey square.
You cannot give each date its own explanation. Checkfront has one Sold Out label and one Unavailable label, and both apply across your booking page. You will find them under Manage, then Layout, then Booking Page.6
The change: rewrite those two labels so they work for every date they cover. “Unavailable” tells the guest nothing and ends the conversation. Wording like “Not bookable online, call us” gives them a next step and stays true whether the date is out of season, below minimum numbers, or past your cutoff.
6. The payment method they wanted was missing
Not enough payment methods is its own documented reason for abandonment at 9%, and distrust of a site with card details drives a further 19%.1 Familiar payment methods are how a guest resolves that, because a logo they recognize does the trust work that a paragraph of security copy cannot.
Checkfront Payments is powered by Stripe and accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and JCB.7 Apple Pay and Google Pay are auto-enabled on accounts using Checkfront Payments.8 PayPal is its own payment provider, not one of the methods inside Checkfront Payments. On supported plans it can run as a secondary provider alongside your primary one, which puts a Check out with PayPal button on the payment page.9 That trades a familiar logo for an extra handoff, because the guest is redirected to PayPal and back rather than staying on your booking page. Accounts on the Growth (Online Booking Fee) plan use Checkfront Payments as their provider, so check your plan first.7
Buy now, pay later is available through Flex Pay (formerly Uplift), which lets a guest spread the cost while you are paid in full immediately. Eligibility depends on your plan, your region, and how your merchant account is categorized, so treat it as a question for support rather than a setting you can switch on yourself.10
The change: open your own booking page as a guest and look at what is actually offered at the payment step. What your settings list as enabled and what renders on the page are not always the same thing.
Your checkout self-check
Run this in one sitting, in this order:
- Filter your booking index by Pre-Booking status for the last 14 days, and note which products repeat.
- Open your top-selling product as a guest and write down the price you see. Compare it to the total at the payment step.
- Count the required fields on your Booking Form, and mark the ones not necessary until the day of the trip.
- Check whether you require a customer account, and if you do, write down the reason.
- Complete a booking on your phone, on cellular data, and count the taps.
- Read your Sold Out and Unavailable labels and ask whether either gives the guest a next step.
- Reach the payment step as a guest and list the payment methods you are actually offered.
Our team will walk you through your booking flow and show you which settings are costing you bookings.
Sources
- Baymard Institute, Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics. baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate
- Checkfront Support, Understanding booking status types. support.checkfront.com
- Checkfront Support, Taking a look at guest forms within the booking flow. support.checkfront.com
- Checkfront Support, Activating Waivers and Documents. support.checkfront.com
- Arival, Online Booking and Search Surges For Activity Travelers, based on 2024 US consumer research. arival.travel
- Checkfront Support, Managing sold out and unavailable labels for booking page layouts. support.checkfront.com
- Checkfront Support, Setting up Checkfront Payments as your payment provider. support.checkfront.com
- Checkfront Support, Offering additional payment methods with Stripe and Checkfront Payments. support.checkfront.com
- Checkfront Support, Setting up PayPal as your Checkfront payment provider. support.checkfront.com
- Checkfront Support, Buy Now, Pay Later: Offering Flex Pay (formerly Uplift) as an additional payment method with Checkfront Payments. support.checkfront.com
FAQ: What is booking abandonment?
ANS: Booking abandonment is when a guest starts a booking on your website and leaves before paying. It differs from a browsing visitor because the guest has already chosen a product and a date, which makes them the closest thing to a confirmed customer that you did not convert.
FAQ: What is a normal booking abandonment rate?
ANS: No published benchmark exists for tours, activities, and rentals. The closest reference point is Baymard Institute’s average documented cart abandonment rate of 70.22% across 50 studies, which covers online retail rather than this industry. Track your own rate over time instead of comparing it to a retail figure.
FAQ: Why do guests abandon a booking form?
ANS: Baymard Institute’s research on checkout abandonment documents a longer list, and five of its reasons apply directly to a booking flow: extra costs are too high (40%), the guest does not trust the site with card details (19%), the site requires an account (18%), the checkout is too long or complicated (17%), and the total cost cannot be worked out up front (12%). In tours and activities, unreadable availability is a sixth.
FAQ: Does requiring guests to create an account reduce bookings?
ANS: A required account is a documented cause of checkout abandonment in 18% of cases. Customer Accounts are optional in Checkfront, so guests can book without registering. Some operators do require them, for membership pricing or account-level billing, so weigh the abandonment cost against the reason before you change the setting.
FAQ: Can I see abandoned bookings in Checkfront?
ANS: Yes. An unfinished checkout is recorded as a Pre-Booking, which holds the booking until payment is completed and stays in the system for 30 days. The inventory inside it releases after 15 minutes, so a stalled checkout does not hold a seat.
FAQ: Should I show taxes and fees before the payment step?
ANS: Yes. Extra costs that appear late are the largest documented cause of checkout abandonment at 40%, and a further 12% of guests leave because they cannot calculate the total up front. Display the all-in price where the guest first sees the product.
FAQ: Which payment methods does Checkfront Payments accept?
ANS: Checkfront Payments is powered by Stripe and accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and JCB. Apple Pay and Google Pay are auto-enabled on accounts using Checkfront Payments. PayPal is its own payment provider rather than part of Checkfront Payments, though on supported plans it can be added as a secondary provider so guests see a PayPal option alongside cards. Flex Pay eligibility depends on your plan, region, and merchant category.