Booking software for tour guides: how the main platforms actually price out

Once a guide decides to stop running everything through an OTA or a shared calendar, the next question is usually "well, which one?" Every vendor's pricing page is built to make that hard to answer at a glance. This lines up five real platforms side by side: what they actually charge, who pays it, and where each one is genuinely built for a team rather than for you.

Pricing, side by side

Rezdy and Bokun both go up in monthly price and down in percentage on their higher tiers. Worth checking against your own volume before assuming the cheapest-looking tier is the cheapest in practice.

What that costs at real volume

Same 20 bookings a month, $80 average tour ($1,600 in bookings) across all five:

• All my tours: $0. No commission either side, but the platform doesn't collect payment for you yet, so you're still settling with each traveller directly.
• Xola: $44.24 (2.39% × $1,600 + $0.30 × 20).
• Bokun Start: $73 ($49 + 1.5% × $1,600).
• Rezdy Foundation: $97 ($49 + 3% × $1,600).
• FareHarbor: $0 to you, roughly $96 added across your guests' checkouts. Not directly comparable to the others, since the fee lands on the traveller rather than your revenue, but it's real money leaving the transaction somewhere.

Run this with your own average price and volume. The ranking changes at different numbers, and a slow month looks very different from a peak one.

The trade-off underneath the price

None of this is free money left on the table. Each platform's price buys something the others don't:

• FareHarbor and Bokun both connect to real OTA and Booking.com distribution: a genuine reach advantage if resellers already bring you bookings.
• Rezdy leans into multi-channel resale and has real phone support in three countries. Useful if you're fielding agent bookings, less so if you're not.
• Xola covers an unusually broad vertical range (helicopter tours, ziplines, escape rooms) with POS and waiver tooling built in. Features aimed at a walk-up, multi-staff operation.
• All my tours gives up payment processing, OTA distribution and staff or resource management in exchange for the free page and no commission. The honest trade is depth for simplicity, not a missing feature you're being tricked out of.

Built for an operator, not necessarily for you

Here's the part most comparisons skip: check who each vendor actually says the product is for, not just what it charges. Rezdy's own positioning is distribution and reseller-first, "aiming at larger operators rather than solo guides." FareHarbor and Xola both frame themselves around teams, staff scheduling and multi-vertical operations at scale. Bokun's free plan is a channel manager, not a real booking page. You need the $49 Start tier before you get one. None of that makes them bad tools. It means the pricing tier that looks cheapest on paper is often still built for a bigger business than yours, complexity included.

If you're comparing because you're currently paying an OTA's commission and wondering whether owning your booking system is worth it at all, read why direct bookings matter and which OTA is actually best for a solo guide first. The OTA-versus-own-system decision is a different question from which owned system to pick.

How to decide

1. Estimate your bookings per month and average tour price, then run the sum above with your own numbers.
2. Decide whether you actually need OTA distribution, staff or resource scheduling, or built-in payments today, not eventually.
3. If none of those apply yet, weigh the no-subscription options (All my tours, Xola) against each other on what they collect for you versus what they cost.
4. If they do apply, read the individual comparisons: All my tours vs FareHarbor, All my tours vs Rezdy, All my tours vs Bokun, for the fuller feature-by-feature picture behind these headline numbers.