Retreat Booking Guru FAQs

Retreat Booking Guru is a retreat management platform that can handle all aspects of retreat planning. You will have all the features you need to manage your retreats such as program and room booking, online registration, financial reporting tools and more. Find out more.

You can start right now! But it might make sense for you to see a demo first. To schedule a live demo where you can ask questions, click here. If you’re ready to try the software now, Email us to get a 30-Day free trial of Retreat Booking Guru.

Retreat Booking Guru is a behind-the-scenes control panel to manage your administrative processes, so it does not need to replace your current website. Its function is to replace your existing administrative systems with one single tool so that your registrations, financial transactions, room status, and databases can all interact seamlessly together. Retreat Booking Guru connects directly to your website, so all registrations that happen through Retreat Booking Guru just seem like part of your website.

Absolutely! Regardless of what platform your website is built on, we can integrate a beautiful programs catalogue on your home page and/or any page of your website.

If you don’t have a website, we will create an extremely simple website for you (at no extra charge) that is hosted on Retreat Guru where your participants will be able to see all of your programs and register for them.

Yes, Retreat Booking Guru and Retreat Guru are inseparable. Any registrations that come from Retreat Guru automatically go into your Retreat Booking Guru database of registrations, and all of the new retreats that you list in Retreat Booking Guru will be automatically added as listing on Retreat Guru so you only have to manage your retreats in one location.

Retreat Booking Guru is cloud-based, which means that you and your staff can access it anytime, anywhere, from any computer, smartphone, or tablet.

Many of our clients are in exotic or remote locations where internet connectivity is sometimes patchy, so we have designed Retreat Booking Guru to be fast and lean, which means that it doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth to run smoothly.

Retreat Booking Guru is a project of Retreat Guru. We are a team of coders, meditators, and yogis based out of Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. Retreat Guru’s previous incarnation was Blue Mandala Communications, founded in 1998 by Cameron and Deryk Wenaus, which focused on building websites and web services for spiritual retreat centers and teachers. Find out more about the team here.

Not to worry! The best way to get technical support is to login to your Retreat Booking Guru account, or start a conversation in the chat box on Retreat.Guru. If you would prefer to use email, you contact us at support@retreat.guru. You can also try the trusty telephone and call us toll free at 1 (888) 881 0404.

Retreat Booking Guru showcases your programs beautifully through a catalogue feature. In addition, you have the ability to feature very important programs directly on your homepage, or any other page, of your website. View an example here: Retreat Booking Guru Demo Site

Our system is very flexible. Most customers prefer to pay with their credit card, so that is usually the default option, however we can also allow guests to pay via Bank Transfer, PayPal, or to even to mail you a cheque! This is all up to you, and we will discuss your unique payment processing needs.

There are three ways that we save our clients money 1) Reducing staff time on repetitive administrative tasks such as sending confirmation emails, assigning rooms, and processing payments (our system does this automatically). 2) By no longer needing to receive individual bank wires and high foreign credit card costs, you save oodles of money. 3) Web development costs – you no longer need to pay your web person to list each new retreat on your website because we will update your list of upcoming retreats automatically.

Yes, time is illusory, but it is still precious. By having all your participants, registrations, room inventory, and payments in one system, you save time. PLUS we automate a bunch of things that you do on a daily basis like: sending emails for registration and payment, printing guest statements, financial reporting, room scheduling… and so much more.

Many of our clients tell us that their registrations have gone up substantially as a result of using Retreat Booking Guru. We believe the reason for this is that it is so easy for people to register when they are activated and ready to book their retreat, instead of having to email back and forth to book and pay. There is also marketing element to Retreat Booking Guru insofar as it is actually inseparable from Retreat Guru. When you enter a new program into the Retreat Booking Guru, it will automatically be listed on the Retreat Guru website.

All of your programs that you enter automatically are optimized for search engines using the latest SEO standards. In addition, it works seamlessly with Google Analytics, AdWords, Double Click and other tools.

That depends on your payment processor. Most major processors allow you to request your funds be transferred to your bank account within a matter of days of receiving them. If you use Retreat Guru as your merchant on record, we will send the funds as a direct wire to your bank account twice per month or whenever you request them. Read our Payout Policy.

Yes, you can easily create a general booking form where visitors who are not participating in programs can book a room. Your room inventory will know exactly how many rooms you have free so that you can avoid any overlap.

Currently, you can choose one currency for your Retreat Booking Guru account. We support US dollars, Canadian dollars, British pounds, Euros, Mexican Pesos, and Australian dollars.

Yes, it is very easy to do this by generating a report. You can collect this data, PLUS more information than you can imagine! Important: you can send a batch email out to everyone who has a payment pending.

Absolutely. We have many clients who host retreats in various locations, and our system can even manage the room inventory in each location. For example, maybe you rent rooms in four different resorts in various locations. You will be able to track your room blocks in Retreat Booking Guru, and view who is sharing rooms, and guests can check your website to see accurate availability and book the lodging type of their choice.

We take security very seriously and as a top priority.  We have an in-house development team, we are hosted on Amazon AWS, host all registration pages on HTTPS connections and certified with trusted SSL certificates. pass each iteration of code through over 1000 tests before launching, and have not had a security breach in the history of our company.

In terms of security for your guests’ financial data – we do not store any credit card information on our servers. We connect directly with PCI compliant payment processors that store data securely, and this allows you to charge guest credit cards without having access to their credit cards directly.

Our software is hosted on Amazon AWS, and we have daily back-ups of all client accounts. We also have mirrored versions of our software so that if one should fail the other will automatically kick-in with zero downtime. In the history of our hosting with AWS we have had zero downtime.

Yes. You can have an unlimited number of users in the system at the same time without issue.

Yes. Retreat Booking Guru was built to require very little bandwidth to run smoothly, so even our clients in remote locations are able to use the software effectively.