April 28, 2026
The first time a hotel concierge at a big resort in Philipsburg handed me a rate sheet - meaning he told me what he expected to earn on every guest he sent my way - I did exactly what most operators do. I looked at my retail price, subtracted his cut, and accepted the gap as the cost of doing business with hotels.
That's the wrong way to think about it. And it quietly kills margins for years before most operators figure it out.
Hotel activity desks in St. Maarten typically want 15% to 20% commission. OTAs like Viator or GetYourGuide want 20% to 25%. A wholesaler or receptive doing group business will ask for 25% to 30%. Those are real numbers, and they're not going away.
But most operators get this wrong: they treat those percentages as a cut out of their existing retail price. So a $150 snorkel trip becomes $120 after a hotel referral, and $112.50 after an OTA booking - and suddenly the same trip is paying the captain the same wages, burning the same fuel, and netting you 25% less revenue with no change in the cost structure underneath.
The fix isn't to fight the concierge over his commission. The fix is to build your retail rate so the commission band is already inside it. Set your net first. Then set retail on top.
Three terms that get used interchangeably when they mean completely different things:
Net rates matter because your wholesale partners want to control the guest-facing price while knowing their margin is locked in on their end. That's fine. That's normal travel industry structure. What's not fine is building that structure backward - starting from your current retail and carving out the partner's cut.
At Eagle Tours, I watched my parents handle this the right way without ever calling it "rate management." They knew exactly what it cost to run a trip - fuel from the marina, crew wages, dock fees, the little things like ice and towels - and they knew the minimum number that made the day worthwhile. Every price they quoted, to a guest, to a hotel, to a cruise ship agent, started from that floor. The channel's cut came out of the space above the floor, not out of the floor itself.
That's the right order. Start here:
Once you know your deal space, retail is arithmetic. If your most demanding partner wants 30% and you need $100 net per trip, retail has to be at least $143. Not $120. $143.
I see operators in St. Maarten renegotiate rates with the same hotel concierge four times a year. It's a total waste of time for both parties. The travel industry runs on standard commission bands. Use them.
The typical ranges that actually hold in the Caribbean:
Build one rate sheet that covers these bands, put your net for each tier on it, and hand it over. If a partner asks for more than the top of the band, the answer is no - because you've already done the math and you know what no actually means in dollar terms.
And keep your retail rate consistent across channels. If the hotel is showing your tour at $150 and your own website shows $130, you've just trained guests to book through the hotel, and you've cut your own direct margin in the process. Your website should always show retail, never less.
Your direct booking - website, phone, walk-up at the dock - costs you less than any partner channel. There's no commission, no voucher to reconcile, no partner email thread when a guest reschedules. That channel deserves to win, but not by undercutting your own retail.
Add value to direct, not discounts:
The deposit piece matters more than people think. A guest who's paid a $50 deposit shows up. A guest who booked through a partner on free cancellation terms sometimes doesn't. And on a cruise ship day in St. Maarten when you've got a full boat and 45 minutes between docking and departure, a no-show from the hotel voucher pile is an expensive problem.
Let the partner work inside your net. Not the other way around.
Your retail rate is yours. Your cost floor is yours. The commission band is an industry convention, not a negotiation where the other side gets to define the terms. If a channel partner wants a number that only works if you start from your retail and subtract, hand them your rate sheet and explain that the net is what it is because it has to be.
The concierge in Philipsburg who hands you a rate expectation on his schedule isn't your boss. He's a distribution channel. Treat him well, pay him on time, make sure his guests have a great day - and give him a net rate that you calculated, not one he extracted.
Once you have clean retail and net rates, the execution side matters. You need a booking system that holds channel pricing rules so your staff doesn't quote the wrong number on a busy cruise ship day. On Junglebee, we built channel-specific pricing so the direct rate and partner nets are set once, applied consistently, and visible in reporting by channel at month end. I've watched operators treat high-volume OTA channels like wins right up until they pulled the per-trip numbers and found zero margin on every OTA booking. A full boat isn't profit. The structure you set on the rate sheet - that's profit.
