reservation system for museums and heritage sites

Museums, castles, stately homes, and historic landmarks welcome tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world every year. Seasonal peaks, guided tours in multiple languages, themed nighttime events, or summer knight festivals – each of these situations involves complex logistics. Today, an online booking and ticketing system is becoming just as essential to the modern operation of historic sites as electricity and Wi-Fi.

What needs to be managed ...
  • Online ticket sales for guided tours in multiple languages.
  • Managing admission capacity to prevent overcrowding in historic exhibition spaces.
  • Ticket sales for events – historical festivals, summer concerts, nighttime tours, markets, or theater performances.
  • Coordinating group visits – school trips and organized tour groups.
  • Pricing for different visitor categories – families, seniors, students, and international tourists.
  • Digital admission without the need to print tickets or wait in line at the ticket office.

Historic sites face specific challenges that ordinary businesses do not encounter – seasonality with very short peak periods (school holidays, public holidays, weekends), limited capacity due to the need to protect historic spaces, and, at the same time, the need to make maximum use of opening hours. Operating castles or stately homes without online ticket sales today means knowingly losing part of your revenue while also exposing visitors to unnecessary disappointment when they arrive only to find that a popular tour is sold out. A system that can sell tickets in advance, monitor capacity, and notify interested visitors about available places is not a luxury – it is essential for a successful tourist attraction. International visitors, who make up an ever-growing share of the audience at castles and stately homes, expect digital booking as standard, and its absence may deter them from visiting before they even arrive.

Large-scale cultural events – from castle nights and medieval markets to summer open-air concerts in courtyards – attract hundreds or even thousands of visitors at once, and managing them involves entirely different requirements from day-to-day operations. Ticket sales with predefined capacity, a visual seating map for seated events, or the option to choose group or family packages are exactly the features that turn a large-scale event into a smoothly organized experience rather than a chaotic queue. A digital ticket in a mobile wallet makes admission at the gate easier, automatic reminders before the event reduce the number of people who forget or miss it, and post-event feedback surveys provide operators with valuable insights for planning the next edition. The result is more professional operations, happier visitors, and better-attended events – whether it is a summer program for families, a museum night, or an exclusive evening tour with historical commentary.

Key features for museums and heritage sites

The booking system covers the entire journey, from a visitor’s initial interest and ticket purchase to admission at the gate. Its features are designed to handle both the day-to-day operation of a tourist attraction and special large-scale events with many attendees – without unnecessary administration and with multilingual support for international visitors.

Online payments

Being able to pay for a reserved service through an online payment gateway is now the standard. Customers today are used to paying quickly and securely in online shops and expect the same comfort when booking or ordering services online.

Online payments

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Let customers pay for their reservation or tickets online right away, before the service is provided – faster, more convenient, and with the certainty that the reservation will be paid, and therefore used.

The reenio system allows you to require prepayment as part of the booking process, so a customer's reservation only becomes valid once paid. You decide yourself whether online payment is mandatory, or whether you leave it up to the customer to pay on site. With mandatory payment, you can set a deadline by which a new reservation must be paid, otherwise it is automatically cancelled and the slot is released for another customer.

For online payments you can choose from several supported payment gateways. The reservation system then handles the technical connection and communication with the chosen gateway, but all business and formal matters are handled directly with the payment gateway provider – you keep the money you receive under your own control, in your own merchant account.

  • GoPay

    An online payment gateway offering a wide range of payment methods, from card payments to fast bank transfers, Apple Pay, or Google Pay.

  • Comgate

    Another Czech payment gateway that also operates in other European countries. Its payment methods vary and cover common needs.

  • Stripe

    A global payment gateway that is becoming increasingly popular. It offers fast integration and approval, so you can start accepting payments within minutes.

  • Bank transfer

    A special type of payment method where the reservation system itself can generate a QR code for payment and then automatically verify and match received payments.

After a successful payment, the system automatically marks the reservation as paid and generates and sends the customer a payment document. The reenio system offers a wide range of options and features for working with payments, including exports, refunds, and more. However, it should be noted that reenio itself is not an accounting system.

Event: One single event

The easiest event type to set up and use, offering a booking for a specific, fixed time from and to, including an optional capacity limit. A customer always books the entire listed event.

Event: One single event

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Offer customers a reservation for a fixed time slot with a limited capacity – ideal wherever more than one person needs to be able to attend an event, but not more than you're able to serve.

With the Full single event type, a customer always books the whole event as set, i.e. a fixed time slot from – to, with no option to choose a custom time. This is typically an event with a higher capacity, taking place at a fixed time – suitable for sports events and lessons, seminars, lectures, concerts, exhibition openings, one-off courses, workshops, or tours.

For this type you can also enable a so-called waiting list, where a customer can still express interest in booking even after all available capacity has been used up. This event type also supports creating recurring reservations and supports online events.

Tickets

Even though the reservation system works with the concept of a "reservation", it can just as well handle everything related to tickets. A ticket is simply a specific form of what a reservation means within a particular business.

Tickets

A reservation in the reenio system doesn't have to mean just a booked slot in a calendar – it can also mean a ticket. It's just a different way of looking at what you're offering customers, what they're buying, and how the whole process then unfolds.

Every reservation carries everything you'd expect from a ticket – a unique code, a QR code for quick check-in, and information about the time and exactly what it can be used for. From this perspective, selling tickets is a fundamental way of using the reservation system. A ticket is often understood as a document that, for example, matches the visual identity of an event and also contains additional information. All of this can also be provided in the reenio system, where you can create your own design for the reservation confirmation = the look and content of the ticket.

The customer receives their ticket by e-mail right after payment, can save it to their Apple or Google Wallet, and you simply scan it with the mobile app at the entrance. If you want to sell tickets for events, it's really nothing more than a reservation with online payment and a custom confirmation design.

Multi-language support

The system supports several languages, both in the administration and on the reservation page. This lets you tailor the booking process for customers from different countries, in different languages at the same time.

Multi-language support

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Reach and communicate with your customers in their own language, whether they're booking from your home country or from abroad – the reservation page and the entire administration can run in multiple language versions at the same time. 4 supported languages are available for the administration, and 7 languages are available for localizing the reservation page.

Custom content that you enter into the system yourself (terms and conditions, resource descriptions, event names, homepage information, etc.) needs to be translated and provided by you. The system offers a clear way to manage information across multiple languages.

Google and Apple Wallet

Today's customers are used to having everything quickly available at hand. Thanks to support for Google and Apple Wallet, they can save a ticket, reservation QR code, or coupon directly to their phone without needing to print a document or search for an e-mail.

Google and Apple Wallet

Offer customers the option to save their ticket, reservation, or coupon directly to their phone, in an app they already know and use – Apple Wallet or Google Wallet.

The reenio system lets customers add the QR code for a reservation or ticket directly to their Apple or Google system wallet, so the customer doesn't need to look up a confirmation e-mail or print a document – the code is saved right on their phone, where they can easily find it when they arrive.

The same option can also be used with coupons – meaning QR codes for gift coupons, discount codes, and punch cards. For a coupon that's drawn down gradually, this solution has one huge advantage: the customer can see their current balance directly in their phone's wallet.

For the customer, this is primarily about convenience and a lower risk of losing or forgetting a ticket or coupon – for you, it means a somewhat smoother and faster check-in process for tickets and coupons.

Event: Seat reservation

Even though the name of this event type sounds limited, the opposite is true. It's a type with a wide range of possible uses, where the customer visually chooses specific spots on a map, either as a one-off or within a time interval.

Event: Seat reservation

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Give customers the ability to choose a specific spot directly on a map of a hall, restaurant, or car park – whether for the entire event, or just a selected time period.

This event type lets you create a map of specific places and other elements, from which the customer chooses for themselves where they want to sit, stand, park a car, and so on. There are then two ways to book: either for the whole event at once (a classic ticket sale for an event with a specific seat), or for any time period, where the customer chooses a specific time from and to together with a place (e.g. booking a table in a restaurant or a parking spot). It's suitable for concerts, balls, theatres, cinemas, restaurants, room rentals, shared offices, or parking spaces.

A strong feature of this event type is also its pricing, where the price depends on the category of the place on the map, to which price variants or conditional prices can also be added. Combined with generating a separate reservation code for each booked place, a separate ticket is then always created for each place, labelled with its specific location on the map, so individual attendees can easily be checked in separately.

Event: Interval

This event type allows opening hours to be split into regular time slots. Customers book one or more consecutive time slots according to their own needs. One of the most widely used and most efficient event types.

Interval event type

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If you offer services in regular time slots (60 minutes, 90 minutes, etc.), this is the ideal event type, offering a simple and clear booking process.

The Interval event type lets you define a time range within a single day and split it into smaller, regular chunks. On the reservation page, a customer chooses these specific time slots, which can also follow on from one another, extending their reservation according to the defined rules.

This event type is typically suitable for sports facilities and sports complexes, consulting and advisory services, wellness, or a sauna.

Mobile check-in app

The mobile app for Android and iOS is a significant addition for running your business efficiently and making full use of the reservation system – especially if you're using QR codes for reservations and tickets. Checking and checking in a reservation then becomes a matter of seconds.

Mobile check-in app

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The reenio mobile app (Android and iOS) is mainly used for quick and easy on-the-spot online check-in of individual reservations and tickets. It also includes an overview calendar of reservations and a customer list, so a reservation can be found even without knowing the specific code.

The app is therefore intended for administrators or other users (e.g. temp staff, front-of-house staff, receptionists) who need fast, hands-on access to data and information. This also means that a user doesn't need access to the full system administration to log into the app – a special authorization QR code can be used to log in instead.

A reservation code is primarily scanned as a QR code using the mobile device's camera, but it can also be entered manually or looked up. For larger numbers of visitors, it's a good idea to get a mobile device with a hardware laser code scanner – scanning is significantly faster and more reliable. Combined with automatic check-in mode, where, if everything about the reservation/ticket is in order, the code is automatically marked as checked in a moment after scanning, this becomes a very fast helper.

The app can also check in individual places within a single reservation (e.g. specific seats), and besides reservations it can also handle redeeming coupons or punch cards by scanning their code.

Cash register and payment terminal

When online payments aren't enough and you need to accept payments on the spot, the cash register feature comes in handy – issuing and printing a receipt, processing a card payment through a terminal, and so on.

Cash register and payment terminal

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Handle payments received in person on the spot too – mark a reservation as paid, generate an accounting document, and print it directly on a POS printer, or accept a card payment right away through a connected payment terminal.

The cash register feature lets you mark a reservation as paid directly in the administration, even when the payment took place outside the online payment gateway, for example in cash at reception. The system can then issue a corresponding accounting document for the payment received this way, respecting the configured document numbering, and so on.

For card payments, the system can also be connected to a payment terminal (SumUp, GP Tom, Comgate), which means a payment request can be sent to the terminal directly with a button in the reservation detail, and after a successful payment the system automatically marks the reservation as paid, creates the payment and document, and sends the customer a confirmation by e-mail, just like with payment via the online gateway.

Also suitable for your business

Auto repair shop Sightseeing Tours Bridal salon Sports Complex Museums and Landmarks Theater performance Zoo Test Drives Exhibitions and Galleries Photography Studio Self-Service Gym Picking Up Orders

Are you wondering if an online reservation system is right for you? Check out the FREQUENT QUESTIONS or the DOCUMENTATION pages and try out the reenio system.