FareHarbor Pricing Guide: What to Know Before You Buy (2025)

FareHarbor appeals to tour operators with its subscription-free pricing model — no monthly fees or upfront costs sounds like a dream.

Yet, ironically, pricing issues remain one of the top reasons businesses leave FareHarbor. While the entry point appears free, the reality includes several less visible costs:

• FareHarbor charges some of the highest booking fees in the market — 2% on all API bookings and up to 6% on all direct bookings — which negatively impacts booking conversions. Tour operators can reach new customers but can’t win their business.
• They charge a merchant service fee per booking.
• FareHarbor charges for its website builder and maintains ownership of your site. If you ever decide to leave their platform, you’ll have to abandon the website you’ve invested in and start from scratch elsewhere.

As a Tripadvisor brand and a recognised leader in tour operator software, we’ve worked with numerous tour and activity operators who’ve left FareHarbor. Drawing on customer feedback and our industry expertise, we’ve created this FareHarbor pricing guide to help you make an informed decision before getting started.

We’ll also compare Bókun and FareHarbor’s platforms and pricing, so you can see how our solution stacks up. To try it out, you can start a 14-day free trial — no credit card required!

FareHarbor pricing breakdown

FareHarbor’s primary fees are listed below:

• Booking fees:
  • API bookings (from OTAs and partner sites): 2%
  • Direct bookings (from your website and offline): Variable, up to 6%
  • All booking fees are passed on to the customer
• Merchant service fees: 1.9% plus 30 cents per ticket
• Subscription fees: $0

Variable booking fees

Fees typically depend on how much you charge for your tours — with FareHarbor taking a higher percentage from your more expensive offerings. Fees are also higher for international transactions.

Many tour operators find variable rates riskier, as they don’t know what the booking brand will charge or how fees will impact customer costs and conversion rates. Tour operators who’ve left FareHarbor often want more predictable, flat-rate fees. (The option to pass or absorb the fees is also a perk.)

FareHarbor Sites

If you use FareHarbor’s website building service, you’ll pay $5k annually (or $499 per month).

FareHarbor also offers two SEO add-ons:

• Silver package: $2.2k/year
• Gold package:  $5k/year

FareHarbor overview

Founded in 2013, FareHarbor has become one of the most popular online booking solutions for tour, activity, and attraction operators worldwide. It’s a Booking.com brand that has partnered with Expedia and Viator to help its users reach a broader customer base and earn more bookings.

The FareHarbor platform offers a competitive, all-in-one feature set, with a full range of tools to streamline operations and improve the customer experience, including: online booking capabilities, distribution and channel management, staff management, customer portals, and more.

Pricing aside, FareHarbor receives good user feedback. The platform earns 4.7 stars on Capterra and 3.8 stars on G2, with customers typically praising its comprehensive feature set, user-friendliness, and helpful customer support team.

However, recent reviews highlight concerns about high booking fees (and reduced sales), platform glitches (leading to users dropping off at checkout), and unhappiness with FareHarbor’s unclear pricing.

One reviewer expressed strong dissatisfaction after 6 years, citing declining customer service, extra charges, high commission fees, and outrageous website prices. They suggested FareHarbor prioritizes revenue over customer retention.

Check out FareHarbor’s features and other user feedback below.

FareHarbor’s notable features

• Website-building services
• Online booking widget
• Customisable booking calendar
• Connections with OTAs & channel management
• Reseller network
• Product management
• Availability management
• Staff management
• Native POS
• Payment processing via Stripe, Apple Pay, or Google Pay
• Integration center & API
• Customer portals
• Fast check-in features & online waiver tools
• Options to sell memberships
• Reporting
• Mobile apps
• Reviews of FareHarbor’s booking software

Positive reviews of FareHarbor’s booking platform highlight:

• The platform is easy to learn and use for both staff and customers.
• Their mobile apps are user-friendly.
• FareHarbor’s toolset and automation save time and improve efficiency by reducing time spent on admin tasks, allowing business owners to focus on bigger-picture initiatives.
• 24/7 online support is invaluable during setup and onboarding, with quick responses to any questions.
• FareHarbor offers many customisation options to tailor the booking engine, confirmation emails, and more to your brand.
• The reporting dashboard helps you understand sales channel performance and gain insights into your customer base, giving you the data needed to invest in what works and target your ideal customers.

“FareHarbor is easy to use as an app on my mobile device or desktop computer. It’s responsive and gives me data in real-time, and this is helpful when clients are making changes so I can react accordingly. Usage is intuitive, so no real training is needed.”

• FareHarbor offers strong scheduling tools for managing equipment, staff, and inventory.
• The platform offers dozens of handy integrations.
• FareHarbor’s reseller network opens new avenues for tour operators to earn bookings and add revenue streams.
• The Booking.com, Expedia, and Viator partnerships earn customers extra benefits when selling on those sites.

Negative reviews of FareHarbor say:

• Booking fees are very steep; travellers booking tours often complain about the high costs at checkout.
• High fees lead to customers dropping off and abandoning their carts (though some tour operators say they still get customers calling to book directly).
• FareHarbor doesn’t allow tour operators to absorb fees; they are passed to customers by default.
• The booking engine can be slow to load, especially when customers purchase add-ons with experiences.
• The website building service is overpriced. FareHarbor creates and maintains a basic WordPress site for you, unless you purchase an SEO upgrade. However, you could create and maintain the same type of WordPress site yourself for under $100/year (saving yourself thousands).

A review from March 2025 notes, “Our customers are complaining about extremely high booking fees. Our sales have dropped by 25% since joining due to a 14-second spinning wheel of death our customers experience going through the booking process.”

• FareHarbor makes it challenging and costly to leave after you’re locked in (due to website ownership issues).
• Despite its user-friendliness, some operators find that the back-end system has a steeper learning curve than alternatives.
• On that note, setting up and amending settings can be difficult and require the help of FareHarbor’s team.
• Users say that the reporting tool can be complicated, and it lacks customisation options to pull necessary insights.
• Some users have also reported issues with payment holds and delays in receiving funds.

You can find more reviews of FareHarbor’s reservation system in the links below:

• Capterra: FareHarbor Pricing, Alternatives & More
• G2: FareHarbor Pricing

Bókun vs. FareHarbor

Bókun is a preferred FareHarbor alternative because:

• Our platform offers the same all-in-one toolset to support booking management and back-office processes. Bókun even includes a one-click website builder where you can easily design a branded booking site. (This is included in the subscription fee, and we cover the costs to secure your domain and push your site live.)

• Bókun is highly flexible and scalable, evolving with your business; you never have to migrate systems. We include all of Bókun’s core features in our entry-level plan (START) and provide an app store where you can purchase extras and build out Bókun to meet your specifications. We also offer enterprise-level packages that bundle more advanced tools with our core features.

• Pricing is affordable, transparent, and predictable — with a flat subscription fee (starting at $49/month) and the lowest booking fees in the industry (1% to 1.5%, depending on your package). Our system is accessible for all teams; we work with small one- and two-person teams, enterprises and international teams, B2B tour operators, nonprofits, and more. Check out pricing here.

• We give you greater control over booking fees. You can choose to cover the fees or pass them to the customer. And they remain the same unless you change packages — eliminating the unpredictability that frustrates many FareHarbor users.

• Bókun offers a vast partner Marketplace (over 27K travel partners) and an impressive range of partnerships — including Viator, GetYourGuide, and Google Things to do — to strengthen our customers’ online presence and digital performance.
• As a bonus, our Viator partnership includes money-saving perks: Bókun booking fees are waived on Viator reservations, and you’ll get 12, 24, or 48 free subscription checks per year, depending on your package.

Take a look at how our pricing compares:

We score especially well for:

• Range of features and functionality (4.6 stars)
• Value for money (4.7 stars)
• Ease of use and deployment (4.5 stars)
• Ease of setup (4.4 stars)
• Customer service (4.7 stars)

Users consistently highlight their positive experience with our brand as a key reason for choosing Bókun.

We offer a 14-day risk-free trial to help you explore our platform and ensure it’s the right fit before committing. Users appreciate the platform’s intuitiveness, ease of use, and smooth migration process after the trial period. Plus, our team is easy to reach if you have questions.

We can help you configure Bókun to maximise the benefits of our system and ensure your success. Enterprise customers also receive a free yearly consultation to discuss objectives and ensure Bókun is optimised for current goals. Our system supports you no matter how far you grow.

Ready to explore Bókun further? Redeem your 14-day free trial.

You can also continue reading about Bókun vs. FareHarbor in this guide.

Related reads:

• Best tour operator software (Buyer’s guide)
• Online booking system pricing comparison guide
• Best free tour booking software