Work out what your booking platform really costs you a year

Every operator I have asked knows their monthly fee. Almost nobody knows the annual total, because it arrives in four or five places and only one of them is an invoice.

The five parts

The subscription. The one you know. Check whether booking volume has quietly moved you up a tier, because it usually has and nobody notices.

The percentage. Booking fee, service fee, platform fee, whatever it is called. Twelve months of online revenue times the rate.

Card processing. Separate from the above. If your platform handles the money, you may be on their rate rather than one you negotiated. Look at what you are actually charged per transaction, not the headline on their website.

The per-venue multiplier. More than one site usually means a full subscription each, plus something for whatever joins them together. Multiply it properly.

The hours. Reconciling exports. Retyping things between systems. The phone call from a customer whose booking did not come through.

Nobody tracks this, so here is how to get a rough figure. Think about the last month. How many times did you or someone on your team export something and join it to something else. How long did each one take. How many customer calls came in because a booking did not arrive properly.

Multiply the hours by what an hour of your time is worth. Most operators land somewhere between a few hundred and a couple of thousand dollars a month, and it is the only line on this list that does not appear on any invoice.

Do it as one sum

Annual subscription times venues. Plus whatever the multi-venue layer costs. Plus online revenue times the platform percentage. Plus online revenue times whatever your processing rate is above what you could get direct. Plus hours a month, times twelve, times your hourly cost.

That is what it costs.

What should you compare it against?

Not another platform's monthly headline. The same sum, run on their model.

A platform at $99 a month taking nothing else is cheaper than one at $39 taking six percent, the moment you pass about $10,000 a month online. Nearly everyone reading this is past that.

One thing to watch

Booking caps. Several platforms limit monthly bookings by tier. If you are near one, your cost is about to step up regardless of anything else, and that step is not in the sum above.

The calculator does the arithmetic if you would rather not, and our own ceilings are on the pricing page.