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The booking fee your guest pays, and you never see

Commissions Published June 25, 2026 3 min read

This is the most quietly expensive thing in the industry, and it is expensive in a way that never appears on an invoice. The booking systems that cost you nothing are charging your guest, on your checkout page, under your name.

FareHarbor is free to the operator. So is Peek Pro on direct bookings. Both fund themselves with a fee added to the guest’s total at checkout — around 6 % in North America, sometimes 6 to 8 %.

You never see it. It is not deducted from your payout and it does not appear on a statement. From where you sit, the software really is free.

What it looks like from the other side

A guest is choosing between two boats leaving the same marina at the same hour. Yours lists $340 for four people. Theirs lists $340 too. At checkout yours becomes about $360 and theirs stays $340, because they are on a system that charges the operator instead.

Nothing about your trip changed. You are simply $20 more expensive on the only screen where the comparison actually happens.

Roughly $29 on a $120 family booking. Four people, $120 total, 6 % is $7.20 — small. But an operator doing $200,000 a year direct is asking guests for around $12,000 they do not know they are paying.

The other model: the fee is yours

Bókun charges about $49 a month plus 1.5 %. Rezdy runs $49–249 a month plus a percentage by plan. Those are honest about who pays — you do — and against them the comparison is straightforward arithmetic rather than a hidden variable.

That arithmetic can go against us. Below a certain volume a subscription plus 1.5 % is cheaper than a flat annual fee. The calculator says so when it is true, which is the only reason to trust it when it says otherwise.

When staying put is the right answer

If your guests are booking on the day, at the dock, on price alone, and you are not competing with the operator next door on a comparison screen — the guest-paid fee may genuinely cost you nothing. Some operators are in exactly that position and should stay where they are.

The point is not that the model is dishonest. It is that it is invisible, and an invisible cost is one you cannot decide about.

What this means for your website

There is no booking fee on the sites we build, for the guest or for you. The guest pays your price and nothing else; Stripe’s processing fee comes out of your side, as it does everywhere.

Look at a finished example and add up the checkout: it is the price on the page.

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