October 14, 2026
Every time a guest pays with a card, a fee comes out before the money ever reaches you. Most operators see one number on a monthly statement, shrug, and file it under the cost of doing business. But that one number isn't one fee. It's a stack of three, and only one of them is anyone's to negotiate.
The bill has gotten heavier, too. According to The Motley Fool, U.S. merchants paid a record $198.25 billion in card processing fees in 2025 — more than triple the $62.1 billion paid in 2009, per Nilson Report data cited by the Merchants Payments Coalition. The average combined Visa and Mastercard credit interchange rate hit 2.36% in 2025, up from 2.02% in 2010.
If you take deposits online and balances at the dock, it pays to know exactly what you're paying for. Here's the whole stack, in plain English.
An interchange fee is the slice of every card transaction that goes to the bank that issued your guest's card — the issuing bank. Not to your processor. Not to Junglebee. To the guest's own bank.
It happens on every single card payment: every swipe, every tap at the dock, every online charge through your booking widget. There's no version of accepting a card where interchange doesn't apply. It's set by the card networks (Visa and Mastercard), collected by the issuing bank, and it's the single biggest piece of what you pay.
Think of a card payment as passing through three sets of hands before it lands in your account:
The first two together are often called the "base cost," and according to Finix they typically make up 70–90% of your total card fee. The processor's markup is the remaining 10–30%. Here's the part that matters: only that markup is negotiable. As AllayPay notes, interchange and assessment rates are identical no matter which processor you use — the networks set them, and nobody can shop them down. The markup is the only piece that actually varies between booking tools.
Visa and Mastercard publish updated interchange schedules twice a year, in April and October, according to Adyen. And interchange is never a single flat rate. It's quoted as a percentage plus a small flat fee — for example, Host Merchant Services lists a standard consumer Visa card-present rate of 1.51% + $0.10 per transaction. The exact rate shifts with the card type, how the card was taken, and your merchant category code (MCC) — the industry code that tags you as a tour operator.
This is the smallest layer. Swipesum puts 2026 assessments at roughly 0.14% for Visa and 0.1375% for Mastercard on most transactions, generally landing between 0.13% and 0.165%.
Small as it is, it's a favorite hiding spot for sketchy billing. Merchant Cost Consulting warns that some processors "pad" this line — charging you 0.28% when the real network assessment is 0.14%, then listing the inflated number on your statement as if it came straight from Visa. Unless you know the published rate, it's almost impossible to catch.
This is the layer that's actually up for grabs — and the one where booking-software fee structures genuinely differ from each other. Two operators can pay the exact same interchange and assessments and still end up with very different statements, because the markup is where the processor makes its money. How that markup is presented (or hidden) is the whole ballgame, which is where we're headed.
Let's run a real operator scenario. A guest books a sunset cruise: a $500 deposit online today, with the $1,200 balance due closer to the date.
The $1,200 balance, tapped at the dock. This is a card-present transaction. Using that standard example rate of 1.51% + $0.10, interchange works out to about $18.22. Add a Visa assessment of roughly 0.14% (about $1.68), then the processor's markup on top. The fees are modest, but they stack.
To see how they compound on a bigger charge, HighRadius walks through a $5,000 Mastercard payment at 1.43% + $0.10: after interchange, the network's assessment, and a processor markup are all deducted, the merchant nets $4,902.60. Three small layers, one not-so-small bite.
The $500 deposit, taken online. Because the card isn't physically present, this one carries a higher interchange rate than the dock tap — more on why in a second. And if that same deposit gets phoned in and you key the card number by hand, it can tip into "non-qualified" territory at around 3.15% + $0.10, per Chargebacks911. That's roughly $15.85 on a $500 deposit — nearly as much interchange as the entire $1,200 dock tap, on less than half the money.
The difference comes down to fraud risk. As Stripe explains, card-present transactions (physically dipped, tapped, or swiped) carry lower interchange than card-not-present ones like online and phone orders, because when the card isn't in front of you, the odds of fraud go up — and the networks price that risk straight into the rate.
That's why the online widget deposit sits above the dock swipe, and why a manually keyed phone payment — "non-qualified" at around 3.15% + $0.10 — is the most expensive way to take a card there is. The card type matters too, along with your MCC. Tours and charters often get sorted into categories the networks treat cautiously, which is also a big part of why tour and charter operators get coded as high-risk merchants. The fix is almost always to take cards the clean way: through a proper online widget that fully authorizes the card, rather than keying numbers off a notepad.
Two things are reshaping interchange right now.
First, a 2025 Visa/Mastercard antitrust settlement. Per Optimized Payments, it trims the volume-weighted average effective interchange rate on U.S. credit transactions by 10 basis points for five years, and caps interchange on Standard Consumer and most Premium Consumer credit cards at 125 basis points for eight years. The catch: commercial cards and some premium cards — which Optimized Payments notes account for about 85% of Visa and Mastercard consumer credit volume — are mostly left untouched. So the relief is real, but narrower than the headline suggests.
Second, debit. Under the Durbin Amendment, debit and prepaid cards issued by banks with $10 billion or more in assets are capped at a regulated interchange rate of 0.05% + $0.21 per transaction (plus a small fraud-prevention adjustment), according to Adyen. Debit interchange is federally regulated; credit interchange is not. In practice, a guest paying a big balance on a regulated debit card can cost you a fraction of what the same charge costs on a rewards credit card.
How a processor shows you these numbers tells you most of what you need to know.
Interchange-plus (sometimes written interchange++) itemizes all three layers as separate, visible line items — interchange here, the network's assessment there, the processor's markup on its own line. Helcim calls it the most transparent pricing model for exactly that reason: you can see the markup, so you can judge it.
Blended or flat-rate pricing does the opposite. It bundles interchange, assessments, and markup into one rounded number. Simple to read, sure — but you can't tell how much is the real base cost and how much is markup. And remember, the base cost is the part nobody can change, so a blended rate mostly hides the one number you'd actually want to compare.
Here's a confession. When we launched Junglebee, we actually wanted to charge operators a flat monthly fee — honestly, because it's simpler for us to predict our own revenue. But tour operators pushed back. They didn't want a monthly bill hanging over a seasonal business. They wanted to pay only when they were actually making money. So we changed it.
Today there's no monthly fee and no setup fee. We charge one clear per-transaction booking fee, and only on bookings where a card payment is actually processed. No card charged, no fee. That's the whole model — you can see it on Junglebee's flat per-transaction pricing page. (This is built for short-term tour and charter bookings — day tours, charters, and excursions — not long-term term charters.)
The point of all the math above is this: the base cost is fixed, the markup is where tools differ, and a hidden markup is the easiest place to quietly overcharge a small operator. One visible fee, charged only when you get paid, is just the honest version of the same thing. If you're weighing who absorbs that cost, we've written separately about whether you should let the customer pay the booking fee.
Is it legal to pass a card fee on to the guest?
In many U.S. states, yes — but surcharging is regulated, and a few states and card-network rules restrict it. Before you add a line to a guest's bill, check the credit card surcharge laws by state for the current rules where you operate.
Can you avoid interchange entirely?
Not if you take cards. Interchange is baked into every swipe, tap, and online charge, and it's set by the networks. Cash and bank transfers sidestep it, but for most tour and charter operators, taking cards online is what wins the booking in the first place.
What's a "good" interchange rate for a small operator?
It's a slightly unfair question, because you don't control interchange — the networks do, and it's the same for everyone. What you can control is the markup. Ask any processor to show you interchange, assessments, and their markup as three separate numbers. If they won't, that reluctance is your answer.
