What Actually is Commission?
We've tried our best with BookingNinja to be clear about our pricing. We don't hide it behind sales calls, we don't try to judge how much we can extract from you before setting you a price - it's right there and instantly viewable for everyone to see. We started BookingNinja because we had our own hospitality venue and trying to break through the countless sales calls or weirdly complicated pricing structures was both stressful and costly. We clearly have
No Commission on Deposits & Payments for Bookings. You will however pay a Payment Gateway fee to Stripe (a third party service, we don't earn *anything* from using them, they are just the best in the space) of around 1.5%. The majority of online payment gateways are around or more than this, and ultimately at the rates that the likes of Mastercard and Visa charge you won't find a huge difference in comparing rates
As a side note: you may think "hey, I've got 0.8% in my venue that's a lot less", but you'll need to compare "Card Not Present" rates, which are often much higher - If your looking at a rate of less than 1% then you almost certainly are not looking at the right rate for online payments, as they'd be losing money every time you made a sale!)
So put plainly with BookingNinja when you take a booking payment you'll be paying just Stripe, and that will be around 1.5%. That's it. No fee applied by BookingNinja, no extra 'Payment Processing' fee. Zilch.
Comparing Commission & Payment Rates
So it should be simple to compare how much you'll be paying across all the different booking platforms right? Well - no. Frankly speaking it's an incredibly frustrating minefield of misinformation, and obfuscation that makes comparison much harder. Let's take an example of one of our competitors and industry veteran - ResDiary.
If you visit their home page right now you'll be presented with this lovely banner
Opaque Commission
At least ResDiary show this information, albeit hidden in the legal text at the bottom of the pricing page. We more often than not see companies instead be completely opaque about their pricing. Take for example Booked It (Which we think we're a great alternative for). If you visit their pricing page you're presented with, well, very little details about the pricing you'll be paying, even going as far to say the 'core of the product is free'
