Built by someone who’s run the boat.

I grew up in St. Martin, and I mean that pretty literally. My parents sailed our 43-foot sailboat from South Africa to the Caribbean, and the water has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

When we settled, my parents started a charter and tour company called Eagle Tours. Today it’s one of the top operators in St. Maarten, with more than five boats running tours and charters across St. Maarten, Anguilla and St. Barts. I grew up working in it. Deckhand first. Then first mate. Then captain, running cruise ship excursions and hotel-guest charters out to the beaches, the reefs and the islands next door.

So I know an operator’s day from the inside. The early crew brief. The activity desk calling at 8:55am about a guest they “definitely told you about yesterday.” The weather day. The Saturday where everything has to go right. And cleaning the boat at the end of it.

The booking that broke me

In 2012 I launched a website called SXM Deals. The idea was simple: let a tourist book any tour in St. Maarten from one place. Back then hardly anyone was doing that. The catch was that almost no tour operator had a booking system. Most had nothing at all.

The site grew, and so did my problem. Every booking that came in, I had to forward to the operator and wait for a confirmation. Some answered in five minutes. Others took forever, because a lot of these businesses are one-man shows. They run the boat all day, come back, clean it, eat, and go to bed.

Then one booking broke me. A big one, with a lot of money on the table. I didn’t want to charge the guest without a confirmation, and the operator just didn’t answer. It took about two days. By then the guests had booked something else and the whole thing was gone.

That should have taken two minutes. It was just stupid, and it was the moment I decided to fix it.

Why we built Junglebee

I went to every tour company owner I knew with one question: what if we built a single system that connects all of you to the agents, the hotel activity desks, and websites like mine?

Everyone was interested. The top four tour companies on the island came in as investors, and in 2016 we built the first version of Junglebee.

The second big problem was payments. On the mainland you plug in Stripe or PayPal and you’re done. In most of the Caribbean, neither one actually connects to local banks. So even when we could give an operator a booking widget, there was often no way to take a card on it.

That’s why we built JB Pay, our own card processing. An operator in the Caribbean can sign up, give us some basic company details, sign an agreement, and start taking card payments on their own website, with payouts going to their local bank on their own island.

I’ve watched it change real businesses. Aquamania was a big, well-run operation that ran entirely on paper, and we digitized the whole thing. Eagle Tours, the company I grew up on, moved its entire operation onto Junglebee and its growth took off.

We also learned a lot from operators along the way. I originally wanted to charge a monthly fee. Operators pushed back hard, and they were right. Seasonal businesses and small crews shouldn’t be paying for software in the months the boat isn’t busy. So we don’t charge a monthly fee.

Where we are today

Junglebee has processed more than $18 million in bookings for tour and charter operators across the Caribbean.

And we’ve just rebuilt the whole platform from the ground up. Bookings from your website, your agents and the hotel desks now land in one place, along with check-in, guest records and payments. It’s built around how things really work down here, from weather days to marine park fees to getting paid into a local bank.

Pricing is simple. No monthly fee. We take 4% per card payment, plus the card processing fee.

I still write and build this stuff because I’ve been on the operator side of the desk. If you run a tour or charter business and want to swap notes, find me on LinkedIn or email me at michael@junglebee.com.