No monthly fee.
But read the fine print.
FareHarbor is free to sign up — and they'll even migrate your data for free. What they don't lead with: a ~6% fee on every transaction, a Booking Holdings parent with competing interests, and an exit that's deliberately hard. Spotinga is genuinely free, with zero hidden fees and data you actually own.
No transaction fees. No contract. No Booking Holdings.
FareHarbor is owned by the same company that runs Booking.com, Priceline, and Kayak
Booking Holdings acquired FareHarbor in 2018 for ~$250M. Your booking platform is now operated by the parent company of the OTAs that compete with you for customer eyeballs. That's not a conspiracy theory — it's a structural conflict of interest worth understanding.
The fee is framed as a "customer service fee" added at checkout — but it still comes out of your pricing power and competitive positioning.
Post-acquisition, operators consistently report longer wait times, less personal account management, and support that's more ticket-queue than relationship-based.
You cannot use Stripe or your own merchant account. FareHarbor controls payment processing, which limits flexibility and increases switching costs.
Booking Holdings owns the OTAs competing with you for bookings, and owns your booking platform. How those interests are balanced is not in your favour.
"No monthly fee" still costs real money
At 6% per transaction, FareHarbor's fee scales directly with your success. The more you earn, the more you pay — with no cap.
Easy to get in. Deliberately hard to leave.
FareHarbor's onboarding is genuinely excellent. They migrate your data, set up your products, and train your team — for free. Operators on Reddit call this the "golden handcuffs" moment: by the time you realise the 6% fee is material, leaving feels operationally painful.
Exporting your booking history, customer data, and product configurations is possible but not designed to be smooth. And since they run your payment processing, switching payment providers adds another layer of friction.
"We tried to leave after the acquisition and it took us three months to fully migrate. The data export tools are buried and the support team made it feel like we were doing something wrong by leaving."
r/TourOperators — operator experience threadExporting booking history, contacts, and product data is possible — but deliberately non-trivial. Several operators report it taking months when leaving.
FareHarbor controls your payment processing. Switching means re-signing merchant agreements, updating integrations, and informing repeat customers.
FareHarbor handles your GTTD connection. Leaving means re-establishing that connection elsewhere — a process that can take weeks.
Transparent pricing. Your data. No corporate parent with competing interests.
Spotinga takes nothing on direct bookings. Your payment processor (Stripe or Razorpay) charges their standard rate — that's all.
Google Things To Do connectivity is built into the free plan. No extra fee, no dependency on a third-party aggregator.
Export your bookings, contacts, and product catalogue any time. No hoops. We're not in the business of holding your data hostage.
Spotinga is independent. We have no OTA sibling competing with you for bookings — our interests are aligned with operators, not platforms.
Use Stripe, Razorpay, or PayPal. You own the merchant relationship, the funds flow, and the payout speed.
Every booking creates a contact you own. Email, segment, and market directly to past guests — without a per-contact fee.
Free shouldn't mean "free until it isn't."
Spotinga is free — no subscription, no transaction fee on direct bookings, no corporate parent owning your data. Go live with Google GTTD publishing and a full booking engine in under 48 hours.