April 6, 2026
Both Peek Pro and FareHarbor will tell you they are the obvious choice for your tour business. They cannot both be right. And I say that as someone who actually sat through the demos.
I trialed both when I was building out my own booking software. Not the marketing tour - the real thing. I built test trips, pushed bookings through, poked at the support teams with questions only a Caribbean operator would ask. The two platforms are genuinely different under the hood, and the differences matter. What I found was that which one is "better" depends entirely on what you are trying to build.
Neither charges a monthly subscription - that is the pitch. What they do charge is 6-8% per online booking, plus payment processing on top. Peek Pro runs about 2.3% + $0.30 per transaction. FareHarbor is around 1.9% + $0.30. Real cost per booking: somewhere between 8 and 11% of the booking value.
On a $100 tour that is $8-$11 gone before you pay a captain or buy fuel. At $100,000 in annual bookings, you are writing a check for $8,000-$11,000 in software fees. At $200,000 that doubles. No volume discount.
Both pass the booking fee to the guest as a visible surcharge at checkout. For a Caribbean operator where a cruise passenger is already comparing three catamaran operators on their phone while standing at the dock, a $6 surcharge on a $75 snorkel trip is real friction at exactly the wrong moment.
Peek's real play is not the software. It is the Peek.com marketplace. They have processed over $7 billion in bookings and built a consumer-facing OTA off the back of it. When you sign onto Peek Pro, you get listed on Peek.com and that consumer network. If you have zero marketing budget and need bookings from somewhere, that is genuinely appealing.
On top of that, Peek Pro has things FareHarbor does not:
FareHarbor has been around since 2013 and was acquired by Booking Holdings in 2018 - the same parent as Booking.com, Priceline, and Kayak. That backing shows up in a few real ways.
The support is the thing people notice first. Twenty-four-seven phone support, consistently praised. When you are running a 7am snorkel run out of Simpson Bay and a booking issue surfaces at 6am, having a person who picks up is worth something. Peek Pro's support works but it is not FareHarbor's reputation on that front.
FareHarbor also has:
The downside is FareHarbor can feel old school in the interface. It is capable but not beautiful. And their pricing is not public - you have to talk to a sales rep to get numbers. For a small operator trying to decide before a sales call, that opacity has a real cost before you have paid a cent.
The Peek.com marketplace idea is genuinely clever. If you have no marketing budget and no direct booking traffic, plugging into a network that already has consumers looking for tours is a fast path to revenue. I understand why operators sign up for it.
But I know an operator - good operation, solid boats, runs day trips out of a marina on the Dutch side - who switched off Peek after two years because his direct bookings had dried up. Not gone. Dried up. Guests who had been booking directly through his website were now finding him on Peek.com and booking there instead. He was paying a booking fee on customers he had already acquired. His email list stopped growing because Peek owned the booking relationship, not him.
That is not a bug in the system. That is the system working as designed. Every time a guest books through Peek.com, Peek gets the data. Peek gets the relationship. The marketplace pitch is genius if you have no marketing budget. But it trains your guests to book through Peek next time, not you. That is a tax on every future booking, not just this one.
Peek Pro makes sense if: you have minimal marketing budget and want OTA-style distribution volume, you are in a high-demand destination where dynamic pricing will earn you more than the fee costs, and you are willing to trade some customer ownership for booking volume.
FareHarbor makes sense if: you run a mainland US operation with phone-first booking culture, you want 24/7 live support as a hard requirement, and your operation is complex enough to need the FHDN reseller network.
Neither makes sense if: you are a small Caribbean operator where payment processing into a local bank is not optional, where margins do not survive 8-11% software fees, or where you are building a direct booking business and do not want a marketplace sitting between you and your guests.
For a small fleet in St. Maarten or Antigua or Barbados, both platforms rely on Stripe-based processing that was not designed for Caribbean banking. Currency conversion fees stack on top of the booking fee. We built Junglebee around exactly that gap - payments that land in a local Caribbean bank, in the right currency, no overseas detour required.
Both platforms work. The question is not which software is better - the question is what kind of business you are building.
If you want OTA volume and you are okay trading guest ownership for it, Peek is the smarter choice. If you want rock-solid phone support and reseller distribution, FareHarbor is more reliable. But if you are building a direct booking business where guests come back to you, not to a marketplace, the distribution model of both platforms is working against you from day one.
Run the math on 8-11% of your projected annual bookings. That number will tell you more than any demo will.
