Today, I’m excited to introduce our new booking platform, TourCheckout, to the tour operator community.

As industry veterans, we’ve seen firsthand how the tour operator industry has struggled with underwhelming software options. Despite the increased availability of business software, the solutions out there for tour operators still don’t provide enough value to justify for their cost 🤔.

Many booking platforms charge about 6% of your revenue. You might hear from a salesperson that their software is “free to use” because you can pass this fee on to your customers at checkout in the form of a “booking fee.” However, this 6% fee on every transaction is real revenue you’re missing out on—so it’s hardly free. Imagine a world where you get to keep most of that 6%.

That’s why we developed TourCheckout. Our goal is to provide top-notch software that helps tour operators like us run their businesses more effectively while retaining more revenue. We only charge 1% of revenue, and you maintain the flexibility to set your own customer booking fee percentage at checkout.

How much difference is 6% vs. 1%?

Most tour operators currently charge their customers a 6% booking fee. By switching to TourCheckout, you have the option to maintain your desired booking fee—also known as “Taxes & Fees” at checkout—but you’ll only need to allocate 1% of your sales to our platform. This setup allows you to retain the remaining 5% as additional revenue for your business. Alternatively, you could choose to reduce the booking fee to 4% or even 3%, helping to put a lid on inflationary pressures while still enhancing your profit margins. A win-win for you and your customers!

Let’s do some simple math and see how much money you are letting go by paying an astounding 6% of revenue.

Suppose you have an annual revenue of $100,000. At 6%, you (or your customers) are currently paying $6,000 each year to your booking platform. By making the switch to TourCheckout, you’ll be keeping $5,000 per year of that for yourself! Now, if your annual revenue increases to $500,000, by making the switch, you would add $25,000 each year to your top-line. That’s a lot of money!

We created this sliding calculator to help you visualize the difference for your business:

In the next post, we will talk about some of the features that makes TourCheckout the most capable booking platform for tour operators.