Through Viator or GetYourGuide
Four seats at $85$340.00
Commission (25 %)−$85.00
Card paymentincluded
You receive$255.00
Direct booking websites for tour operators
The 25 % Viator takes could stay in your account.
We build the booking website for your tours — on your own domain, with your own dashboard and your own payment account — and we keep it running every day. Guests pick a departure, pay by card, and the money goes straight into your bank: it never passes through us.
Rather see it first? Open the dashboard yourself — no signup, nothing to install — or look at a finished example: boat trips, diving, ATV tours or kayak rental. Then work out what direct booking would save you.
The same four seats, two different routes
Through your own website
Four seats at $85$340.00
Booking commission$0.00
Card payment (2.9 % + $0.30)−$10.16
You receive$329.84
+$74.84
difference on one boat with four people on it. Two direct bookings a month and the website and its upkeep are paid for several times over.
Which channel you sell through changes the number, not the direction. Viator defaults to 25 % and pushes toward 30 % with paid placement. GetYourGuide starts new operators at 30 % and adds 2 % for fortnightly payouts. Klook runs 15–25 %, Airbnb Experiences a flat 20 %. Card processing is billed by the payment provider, never by us. These figures are an example: put your own price and volume in the calculator and see your number.
The fee you cannot see
“It’s free” usually means your guest is paying
The booking systems most operators use charge you nothing per month. They charge the guest instead — around 6 % added at checkout. It never shows up on your invoice, so it is easy to believe it isn’t there.
What the guest actually pays
Your $340 boat trip arrives at checkout as roughly $360. Same boat, same captain, same two hours — about $20 more than the identical trip sold anywhere else. You never see that $20, and neither does your bank.
Why it matters even if you don’t care
A guest comparing you against the operator on the next dock is comparing the checkout total, not your list price. A booking fee makes you look more expensive than you are, on the one screen where the decision is made.
What we charge the guest
Nothing. There is no booking fee on the sites we build and no technical way to add one. The guest pays your price; you pay us a fixed amount a year, whatever you sell.
The other kind charges you. Bókun is about $49 a month plus 1.5 %; Rezdy runs $49–249 a month plus a percentage by plan. Against those, we are better above a certain volume and worse below it — the calculator will tell you which side you are on, including when the answer is that you shouldn’t buy this.
Try it now
Open the real dashboard. No signup, no card, nothing to install.
One click gives you your own private copy of a finished tour operator’s website — real departures, real seat counts, real booking engine. Change the colors, rewrite the headline, add a departure time: the site next to the form updates as you type. It is the dashboard our clients use every day, not a video of one.
- Your copy is yours alone. Nobody else is editing it while you look.
- Nothing is published, and no email is ever sent from a playground.
- It deletes itself after two hours. Nothing to cancel and nothing to uninstall.
Headline
Sunset cruise in Destin
Brand color
Price per seat
$85
updates as you type
It's yours, not ours
Not a profile inside a platform. Your own website.
You are not joining a marketplace and we are not giving you a corner of a site of ours. You choose your domain — .com, .co or whatever you prefer — and the website lives there, in your name, as if you had commissioned it outright.
Your address
emeraldcoastcharters.com
Never this
emeraldcoast.someplatform.com
Your domain, in your name
You buy it with your own card, for around $12 a year. We tell you exactly which two settings to change and that's it. It is never registered in our name, which is precisely why we could not hold on to it.
Your dashboard, your login
You sign in with your email and run the whole website: tours, departure times, seats, prices per person, bookings, the passenger list for tomorrow morning, photos and text. It's yours, not a trimmed-down view of something shared.
Your payment account
You register with Stripe yourself, under your own tax ID and bank account. You are the merchant: receipts, refunds and 1099-K reporting are in your name. We never ask for banking credentials.
Your guest data
The booking list, the passenger manifests and your guests' contact details are yours and you can export them whenever you like. We don't use them for anything else and they are never mixed with anyone else's.
Your content
Photos, tour descriptions and meeting-point instructions remain yours. If you leave, you take them exactly as they are, along with the domain and the booking history.
No lock-in
There is no contract tying you down. We invoice up to the current month and that's the end of it. If you had to be forced to stay, the service wouldn't be worth what it costs.
The money
From the guest to your bank, in a straight line
- The guest Picks a departure on your website and pays by card, at your price.
- Your Stripe account Registered under your own tax ID. The charge is made against your merchant account, not ours.
- Your bank The amount lands in your account on your own payout schedule.
We do not appear anywhere on that line. Your guests' money never passes through our accounts — not for a second, not in transit. We take no commission per booking and have no technical way of doing so: we invoice you the monthly fee, and nothing else.
What's included
A website that sells seats, not a brochure
Everything a guest needs in order to find your tour, see which departures still have room and book without calling you.
Departures and real seat counts
You set the rule once — “every day at 18:30, May to October” — and the departures generate themselves, with holidays and one-off extra sailings as exceptions. The guest sees how many seats are actually left, not a form that hopes.
One boat, two tours, no double booking
Your sunset cruise and your snorkel trip share the same boat. Book one and the other closes, automatically, including the turnaround time before the next trip. This is the part generic software gets wrong.
Prices per type of person
Adult, child, infant, driver, passenger — each with its own price, its own age range and its own rules. An infant on a lap is on the passenger list but does not take a seat. A quad passenger pays, but does not need a second machine.
Capacity from your guides, not a guess
Diving at one guide per six? Then three guides is eighteen places, and twelve on the day one of them is out on a course. You never type that number in; it follows from what you have.
Seats held while the guest pays
From the moment they hit pay, the seats are yours to sell to nobody else for thirty minutes. On a boat with two seats left in August, that window is the difference between one sale and one refund.
Payment straight to your account
You are the merchant, not us. The money goes into your bank account, and receipts, refunds and tax reporting are in your name. No booking fee is ever added to your guest's total.
Private charters and whole-boat bookings
Priced per group with bands — “up to 4 people: $650” — and one booking takes the whole departure, however many come. Your passenger list still shows the real number of people on board.
The passenger list for tomorrow
Names, phone numbers and how many of each type, per departure, ready for the dock. The infant is on it even though they took no seat, because the harbour master counts people.
Visible on Google
Departures are rendered on the server, in the page itself, not fetched afterwards by the browser. That is what lets Google index a tour with its real dates and its price, instead of an empty page.
Several languages
English and Spanish today, each with its own address so it ranks separately. Useful anywhere your guests are not all locals.
Booking closes when you say
Your guide needs the headcount before heading to the dock, so bookings close a set number of hours before departure. You set it per tour; some operators sell right up to the gangway.
Inquiries from day one
Even if you don't want to take payments online yet, the inquiry form works from the moment we publish. Plenty of operators start that way and switch payment on later.
Local rules
What the rules ask of you, put where it belongs
Activity operators carry obligations a rental owner never sees. We are not attorneys and we don't replace your CPA, but the website comes ready for what has to reach the guest.
Waivers
Signed before arrival, tied to the person
Diving, canyoning, quads and anything airborne need one. What holds up is not the signature but the trail: which version of the text was shown, when, and from where. A family of four is one booking and four signatures, and for a minor it is the parent who signs. That is how the record is kept.
Age and supervision
Rules that are checked, not just written
Minimum age per tour, “a child cannot come alone”, at most two infants per booking, at least one adult. These are set once and enforced at checkout — not discovered at the dock, which is where they are usually discovered.
Tax
The rate follows the tour, not just the country
The same operator in Spain has a guided tour at 10 % and a kayak rental at 21 %. The rate is set on the site and can be overridden per tour, and whether it is shown inside the price or added at checkout follows your market — inclusive in the EU, added in the US.
Personal data
Your guests' data belongs to you
Limited to what the booking requires, deletable and exportable on request. You are the controller of that data and we are the processor — the split that state privacy laws and, for European operators, the GDPR expect.
How it compares
Where we fit, without the spin
Marketplaces, booking systems and web agencies each do a different job. Here is what each one saves you and what it costs — and who actually pays.
| Viator · GetYourGuide | FareHarbor · Peek | Bókun · Rezdy | Own Your Tours | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | 20–30 % of every booking | $0/month + ~6 % | $49–249/month + 1.5–3 % | $890 setup and $149/month |
| Who pays the fee | You, out of the sale | Your guest, added at checkout | You | You, a fixed amount — and never your guest |
| Commission per booking | Yes, that's the model | Yes, on the guest's total | Yes, on top of the subscription | None, and there is no technical way for there to be one |
| Who sets it up | You list; the page is theirs | You do, and it lives inside their widget | You do, 15–20 hours of configuration | We build it; after that you run it |
| Whose guest is it | Theirs. They rent them to you per booking | Yours, but the checkout is theirs | Yours | Yours |
| Shared boats and guides | Not their problem | Yes | Yes | Yes, included |
| If you stop paying | You disappear from the marketplace | The booking widget stops | You lose the setup | You keep domain, content and bookings |
Keep listing on the marketplaces. Viator and GetYourGuide bring you people who have never heard of your town, let alone your boat, and that is worth paying for. Your own website is the channel for the guest who comes back, the one the hotel concierge sent, and the one who searched for you by name — precisely the guests you shouldn't be paying 25 % for.
Maintenance
The monthly fee is not “web hosting”
A site that sells seats and takes payments isn't a brochure you upload and forget: it's a system that has to be standing at eight in the morning when someone books the nine o'clock trip. This is what you pay for each month.
- Servers and network
- Infrastructure spread across hundreds of cities, with the security certificate renewed automatically and no outages when a peak of visitors arrives in high season.
- Monitoring
- We check that the site responds and that payments complete. When something fails, we usually fix it before you notice.
- Backups and versions
- Every time a change is published the previous version is kept. If something goes wrong, we roll back in seconds.
- Departures kept ahead
- Every night the selling window moves forward a day, so the schedule you set in March is still bookable in September without you touching it.
- Updates
- Security, changes at Stripe, browser changes. It happens underneath, with nothing for you to approve and nothing extra to pay.
- The dashboard kept working
- Photos, text, prices, departure times and policies you change yourself, whenever you like and without asking anyone. We keep the dashboard working and make sure what you change gets published properly.
- Support
- You write to a person, not to a ticket form, and we reply the same business day. If something won't go your way, or you would rather we did it that once, we just do it.
Pricing
One price, whatever you sell
No bands, no per-tour charge and no percentage. An operator with three tours and a full season is not worth less to us than one with twelve half-empty ones, so we stopped pretending the number of tours is the thing to charge for.
Everything
Any number of tours
$1,490/ year
or $149 a month
2 months free paying yearly
- Every feature in the list above
- Unlimited tours, departures and ticket types
- Shared boats, guides and equipment
- Payment straight to your account, no booking fee for your guest
- Full dashboard for you to run it
- Changes and support, same business day
$890
One-time setup fee. Covers the design, loading your tours, prices, departure times and equipment, configuring the domain and the payment account, and two rounds of changes. The setup fee is invoiced once you have approved the website and is non-refundable; the subscription can be canceled at any time and is invoiced up to the current month.
The headline price is the annual one: you pay for ten months instead of twelve. Monthly exists for those who prefer it, and over a year works out 20 % more because it carries a good deal more admin. No minimum term either way — if you leave, we invoice up to the current month. Prices are in US dollars and are what you are invoiced: we add no sales tax and no VAT. The domain (about $12 a year) you pay directly to the registrar, in your own name. Stripe's processing fees are charged by Stripe and never pass through us.
What you need
Three things, about forty-five minutes
We do the rest. These three we cannot do in your name, because by definition they are yours.
-
A domain in your name
About $12 a year. You buy it with your own card so that it is registered to you, and we tell you exactly which two settings to change. If you'd rather not wrestle with the registrar, we'll do it together on a call in five minutes — but always with you as the registered holder.
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A Stripe account
Registered in your name, with your SSN or EIN and your bank account. You get a link and Stripe itself walks you through it: identity, business activity and bank account. It's usually approved the same day. We never see or store any of it.
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Your tours, as you actually run them
Photos, a description of each tour, what it costs for an adult and for a child, how long it lasts, where people meet you, and which days and times you go out. If two tours share a boat, tell us — that is the part worth getting right. The website takes two days; the photos usually take three weeks.
How it works
First you see it working. Then you decide.
Nothing has to be set up in advance. The order is deliberate, so that you never have to take a promise on trust.
No commitment
You send the content and we publish it
Photos, tour descriptions, prices and the times you go out. Within a couple of days your website is live at a temporary address of ours, with real departures and the inquiry form working. No domain to buy yet and no payment account to open. You look at it, ask for whatever changes you want, and see whether inquiries come in.
Once you've seen it
Your domain and your payments
You buy your domain, register the Stripe account — about forty-five minutes for both — and we move the website to its final address. From then on guests book seats and pay you directly, and the monthly fee begins.
Questions
What people usually ask
Do I have to leave Viator and GetYourGuide?
No, and we don't recommend it. They bring you people who have never heard of your town, and that's worth what it costs. Your website is one more channel — yours, with no commission — for the guest who comes back, the one the hotel sent, and the one who searched for you by name.
I already use FareHarbor and it's free. Why would I pay you?
It isn't free; it's about 6 % and your guest pays it at checkout. Your $340 trip arrives as roughly $360, which makes you look more expensive than the operator next door on the one screen where the decision is made. If that doesn't bother you, and it genuinely doesn't bother some operators, then FareHarbor is a reasonable choice and you should stay on it. We'd rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Two of my tours use the same boat. Does that work?
That is the part we built first. You tell us which tours share which boat, guide or set of quads, and a booking on one closes the other for as long as it needs the boat, including the turnaround time afterwards. If capacity comes from your guides — one per six divers — the number of seats follows from how many guides are free that morning, and you never type it in.
What about private charters?
Priced per group with bands, and one booking takes the whole departure however many people come. Your passenger list still shows the real number on board, because those are two different questions. Charters can also be set to need your approval while your other tours stay instant — most operators want exactly that.
Can two people book the last two seats at once?
From the moment a guest hits pay, those seats are held for thirty minutes and nobody else can take them. If a payment lands hours later — some European payment methods do that — the seats are checked again before the booking is confirmed, and if the boat filled up in the meantime the guest is refunded automatically rather than turned away at the dock.
What if the weather cancels a trip?
You cancel the departure in the dashboard, the seats are released and everyone on it is refunded. Boat trips get cancelled in ten to fifteen per cent of shoulder-season departures, so this is not an edge case — it has to work without calling us, and it does.
Who charges the guests?
You do, directly. The Stripe account is registered in your name and the money arrives in your bank account without passing through ours. We are not a party to the transaction between you and the guest: receipts, refunds and cancellations are yours.
What about waivers?
Guests sign before they arrive and the record keeps what actually matters in a dispute: which version of the text they were shown, when, and from where. It is tied to the participant, not the booking — a family of four is one booking and four signatures, and for a minor the parent signs. Signed waivers never appear on the public site.
What if I'm no good with the dashboard?
It's built for someone who runs boats, not for a developer. You pick what you sell — “boat trip with fixed departures”, “guided tour”, “private charter” — and the duration, seats and ticket types are filled in for you. What's left is the name, the price and the photos. And if you get stuck one day, you write to us and we sort it.
How long does it take?
Two days from the moment we have the photos and the text. What usually causes delay isn't the website — it's the photos. If you have them to hand, it moves fast.
Is there a minimum term?
No. We invoice up to the current month and you take the domain, the content and the booking list with you. If you have to be tied down to stop you leaving, something isn't working.
You're based in Europe — does that matter?
For the website, no: it runs on infrastructure with locations across the United States, so your guests load it from the nearest one. For you, it means email rather than a phone call at 9 a.m. Eastern — we reply the same business day and we schedule calls in your time zone, not ours. Everything we build is in English, priced in dollars, and set up for US payments and taxes.
What happens if you disappear?
It's the right question and it deserves a straight answer. The domain is in your name, so nobody can take it from you. The content and the bookings can be exported at any time and we hand them over without conditions if you ask. The site runs on a major provider's infrastructure, not on a server under a desk. We can't promise we'll be here forever, but we can promise that if we're not, you won't be locked in.
Why is this cheaper than an agency?
Because we don't start from scratch for every client. The booking engine, the shared-resource logic and the payments are already built and are the same for everyone; what changes is the design, the content and the configuration. What takes an agency forty hours of programming takes us two days of setting up.
Get in touch
We'll build a demo of your tours
Send us your Viator listing or your current website and we'll build a demo with your photos, your tours and your real departure times, so you can see how it would look before deciding anything. No commitment and no cost.