Most operators pick their booking software the same way they chose their first point-of-sale: someone recommended it, they signed up during a busy week, and they stuck with it until the pain of switching felt smaller than the pain of staying. That's not a buying process — it's a default.
Before you sign anything, there are six questions worth sitting with. The answers will tell you more about a platform than any feature matrix.
1. How does pricing actually work at volume?
There are two dominant pricing structures in booking software: flat monthly subscriptions, and percentage-based booking fees (sometimes layered on top of a subscription). At low volume, the difference is small. At A$500k in annual bookings, a 3% booking fee is A$15,000 per year — a number that tends to surprise operators who signed up when they were running ten bookings a month.
Ask the vendor: "What does my monthly platform cost look like at A$300k, A$1M, and A$3M in bookings?" If they can't answer that question clearly, or if the answer changes based on a percentage, that's useful information.
Fee exposure at A$1M revenue
A$30,000/yr
A 3% per-booking fee on A$1M in annual bookings, before payment processing. For context, that's more than many operators spend on staff training all year.
2. Who handles payment processing, and who pays for it?
Booking software and payment processing are two separate things, but they're often bundled in ways that obscure the real cost. Some platforms route all payments through their own gateway and take a margin on the spread. Others pass through your Stripe or Square fees directly and charge only the platform fee on top.
The questions to ask:
- Does the platform charge a separate processing fee, or is it bundled?
- If bundled, what is the effective card rate versus what I'd pay on Stripe directly?
- Can I bring my own payment processor?
If the platform routes all payments through itself and won't let you see the card processing rate separately, you're paying for something you can't audit. That matters when you're reconciling end-of-month financials.
3. Does this platform depend on OTA distribution?
Some booking platforms are built primarily as distribution tools — their value proposition is getting your experiences listed on the major OTA marketplaces. That's a legitimate model if OTA traffic is how you acquire guests.
But if you have direct demand — returning guests, your own marketing, referral traffic, partnerships — an OTA-first platform will keep nudging you toward commission-paying channels even when direct is cheaper. Ask: "What percentage of the bookings on your platform come through OTA channels vs. direct?" The answer tells you whose economics the platform is optimised for.
See also why some operators skip OTAs entirely — not right for everyone, but worth understanding the tradeoffs.
4. Who owns the customer data?
This one is underrated. When a guest books through your software, whose CRM does their email address live in? Can you export your full guest list at any time, in a standard format, without a support ticket?
The answer matters for two reasons. First, if you ever switch platforms, portability of your guest list is the difference between a clean migration and starting from zero. Second, some platforms use aggregate booking data from across their operator base for their own marketing — guests who booked with you see ads or recommendations from the platform, not from you.
Ask for the data portability terms in writing. Any platform that hedges on this question is telling you something.
5. What does lock-in actually look like?
Lock-in in booking software is usually more subtle than a long contract. It shows up as:
- Proprietary widget code embedded on your site that only works with the platform
- Booking URLs that point to the platform's domain, not yours
- Guest communications sent from the platform's email domain, not your brand
- No bulk data export, or exports that require a premium tier
The practical test: "If I decided to switch today, what would I need to do, and what would I lose?" Walk through that scenario with the sales team before you sign. If they can't answer it cleanly, that's the answer.
6. What happens when something goes wrong?
Support quality in booking software is often only visible when there's a problem — a double booking, a payment failure, a guest who can't check in. Ask what the support SLA is, whether there's a phone number, and what the escalation path looks like for a payment dispute that involves a guest.
The platforms that invest in support documentation and real response times are usually the ones that have been through enough edge cases to know what breaks. That institutional knowledge is part of what you're buying.
Look for public-facing help documentation — it's a proxy for how much the platform has thought through the operator experience. A sparse help centre usually means a sparse support team.
Putting it together
No platform is perfect on all six dimensions, and the right answer depends on your business model. A tour operator doing 90% OTA distribution has different needs than a yoga studio with a loyal direct membership base. The goal isn't to find the highest score across every category — it's to identify which dimensions matter most for how you actually run your business, and then ask the right questions before you're locked in.
The pricing calculator can help you model what different fee structures cost at your actual booking volume. It's worth running before any platform comparison conversation.
Check our FAQ for specific questions about how Sojournii handles payments, data portability, and support response times.