April 27, 2026
I get this question a fair amount: Rezdy or Checkfront? Both are real booking systems. Both can run a tour operation. And for most operators asking, the honest answer is that neither was built with a Caribbean charter in mind - one is Australian, the other is Canadian - which is worth knowing before you spend three months configuring something.
So let me give you the actual comparison, not the version that exists to rank on Google.
Rezdy started in Australia in 2012. Its whole DNA is built around tour operators who sell through resellers and agents - tour desks, inbound travel agencies, the kind of distribution network that's common in the Asia-Pacific market and in parts of Europe. The agent network is Rezdy's real pitch. If you're already selling seats to wholesalers who send groups to you, or you want to be, Rezdy was built with that workflow in mind.
Checkfront is Canadian, out of Victoria, BC. Different instincts. It's been positioned more broadly - activity operators, rentals, hospitality - and its core strength is a clean direct-booking setup with a relatively simple back office. It's less about distribution machinery and more about a solid widget on your own site, good manifest tools, and a plan structure that's easier to explain to a staff member who isn't a software person.
Neither company has a Caribbean office. Neither platform grew up thinking about local bank settlement in Sint Maarten, XCD currency in the Eastern Caribbean, or what a force-majeure workflow looks like when a June hurricane disrupts your whole month. These are gaps. Not dealbreakers necessarily, but gaps you should price in before you commit.
On fees: Rezdy plans start at $49/month with a 3% fee per online booking. Checkfront runs $99/month, also 3% on online bookings, but explicitly charges nothing on offline bookings - walk-ups, phone reservations, dock sales, hotel concierge referrals.
That offline carve-out matters more than it looks. If you operate in the Caribbean and a meaningful chunk of your revenue comes from hotel activity desks calling you, guests walking up to the dock, or WhatsApp bookings you enter manually, then you're not paying a booking fee on any of that with Checkfront. With Rezdy, the fee structure depends on which plan and how you've configured it - worth getting specifics before you sign up.
The real question to ask yourself is: what percentage of my bookings actually happen through my website widget versus phone, concierge, or walk-up? A lot of operators assume it's mostly online until they count it. I've talked to operators in Barbados and Antigua who figured out that 40-50% of their revenue came through hotel partners and dock sales they were logging manually. At that volume, the offline-booking-fee difference adds up over a year.
Rezdy sells its reseller marketplace hard. It connects to thousands of agents and resellers globally, and if you sell to inbound tour companies, European travel agencies, or group wholesalers who need live inventory feeds, that connectivity is real and it works.
But if you don't currently sell through wholesalers and have no near-term plan to, you are paying for infrastructure you won't use. The agent network isn't a bonus feature that sits quietly in the background - it's built into the complexity of the setup. Configuring Rezdy for a reseller-heavy workflow takes real time. If your goal is just to get more direct bookings on your website and stop managing reservations over WhatsApp, you don't need that.
Checkfront doesn't lead with reseller connectivity the way Rezdy does. That's sometimes framed as a weakness. For a lot of Caribbean operators I've talked to, it's irrelevant. They want guests to book on their site, a clean manifest for the morning, and a deposit now with automatic balance collection later. Those are the things worth optimizing for.
Both platforms give you the core ops tools: real-time availability, booking confirmations, guest communication, manifests. Where they differ is feel and workflow depth.
Rezdy is more configurable, which means it's also more work to set up. Resource management, multi-channel rules, custom availability by tour type - it can do a lot. But "can do a lot" and "easy to use on a dock at 7:45am" are two different things.
Checkfront tends to get friendlier reviews on the ops side. The back office is cleaner for smaller teams, staff permissions work logically, and the learning curve is shorter.
For charters specifically - deposits, balance collection, waivers, capacity by boat - neither platform handles the Caribbean charter workflow as natively as you'd want. If you run a half-day catamaran out of Simpson Bay and you want guests to pay a 30% deposit online and auto-pay the balance 48 hours before departure, you're going to have to test whether either system handles that cleanly. Don't assume it works - ask the demo to show you the exact scenario.
This is the part that quietly drives me crazy about both platforms.
Rezdy and Checkfront both route payments through international processors - Stripe and similar. For operators in North America or Australia, that's fine. For operators in the Caribbean with a local bank account in Sint Maarten, Curacao, St. Lucia, or Antigua, it means your money lands somewhere else first and then has to find its way back home.
I've seen quite a few Caribbean operators doing this: they open a bank account in the US or Canada, run their booking payments through it via Stripe, and then wire money back to their island account. I genuinely don't understand how the tax reporting works. And it's completely unnecessary - it exists purely because the booking software they chose wasn't built for where they actually bank.
We built JB Pay specifically to solve this. Any Caribbean operator on Junglebee can process credit card payments and receive settlement directly to their local bank account on their island. That's what a payment system built for this region actually looks like. The pricing is on the page - no sales call required to find out what it costs.
Pick Rezdy if: you have an established or growing relationship with inbound travel agents and wholesalers, you want to connect to OTAs and resellers through one system, and you're willing to invest real time in setup and configuration.
Pick Checkfront if: your sales are mostly direct, you want a cleaner back office for a smaller team, and you do enough offline bookings that the no-fee-on-offline-sales structure genuinely saves you money.
But if you run boat-based charters in the Caribbean and you're banking locally, ask both platforms the payment settlement question before you get attached to the demo. Where does the money land? In what currency? On what timeline? If the answer involves routing through a US or Canadian account, you're managing two banking relationships instead of one - forever. That tends to cause more friction than any feature list ever saved you. Run the real scenario. Then decide.
