December 11, 2022
I still remember the afternoon I tried to set up one of the big booking systems for Eagle Tours. I was maybe an hour into the configuration when I hit the tax field. The system asked for a single VAT rate. I needed two - one for the French side of the island, one for the Dutch side. There was no second field. I emailed support and they told me to pick the closest one and round.
I closed the tab. That was the moment I decided to build something myself.
Before I built Junglebee, I spent a couple of years testing every booking system I could find. FareHarbor. Bokun. Checkfront. Peek Pro. Every one of them is a real product built by real engineers. None of them were built for a 12-boat operation in St. Maarten.
The problems were the same every time. One currency only, or multi-currency bolted on as an afterthought that still processed everything in USD before converting. No French TVA handling - and on the French side of St. Martin, TVA at the right rate is not optional. No Dutch-side tax logic either. And absolutely zero concept of a hotel concierge commission - the thing where the activity desk at a hotel sends you a guest with a little paper slip, and you owe them a cut of what you charge. That's how half the island books tours. It was invisible to every system I tried.
And then there were the fees. Most of these platforms charge a booking fee on top of your merchant processing fee. So you're paying twice. For a small operation running five or six tours a day at $80 a head, that math turns ugly fast. I ran the numbers once and just sat there.
Aquamania - one of the biggest operators on the island - was running their entire reservations on paper before they came on board with us. Call sheets, handwritten tallies per trip, a whiteboard for the week. The activity desks at the hotels would send guests over with a slip. Someone would log it. It worked, in a way. They were a well-run operation.
The problem wasn't that paper was chaos. The problem was that paper had a ceiling. A cruise ship day in Philipsburg - three ships dock at once and eight hundred people suddenly want the same afternoon snorkel run - you can't scale paper. You miss a commission payout because a slip got wet. You double-book a seat and two families are standing on the dock.
I'd watched the same thing at Eagle Tours. My parents' company. I grew up on those boats. I knew the paper ceiling personally because I'd been a deckhand writing boarding lists by hand at seven in the morning.
I went around to every tour company I knew in St. Maarten, explained what I was trying to build, and the top four operators on the island joined as investors. We built the first version together. Every feature came from something I personally needed. Multi-currency from day one - USD, EUR, ANG - because that's what the island actually uses. French TVA and Dutch-side tax fields, because you can't just pick the closest one and round. Concierge commission tracking, because if you don't pay the hotel desks correctly and on time, the referrals dry up fast.
Software built by people who have never stood on a dock at sunrise getting a catamaran ready - you can feel the difference within five minutes. The fields that are missing. The workflows that assume a payment processor that works in North America. The support team that has never heard of the Christmas Winds.
FareHarbor is a serious product. But it was built for a cycling tour company in Austin or a wine tasting room in Napa. We built ours for operators who live where they work, in places where Stripe doesn't work and the currency changes when you cross a road.
The first version was not a payment system. It was a booking confirmation system, because that's what was broken first. I'd been running SXM Deals, taking guest payments, then forwarding bookings to operators and waiting for them to confirm. Sometimes two days. Meanwhile the guest had already booked someone else.
So we built real-time availability and automated confirmation. Operator sets capacity per trip. Seat sells, it's gone. Instant. No email chain, no waiting for someone to climb off a boat and check their phone.
Then we hit the payment wall. Stripe won't set up a Caribbean operator with a local bank account. PayPal is barely functional here. I kept watching operators route card payments through a US or European account, then wire the money back to the island. And I get why - it was the only tool that existed. But it's genuinely crazy. I don't know how that survives a real tax audit. So we built JB Pay. Card payments that land directly in your local bank, in the right currency, on your own island. That's not complicated. It just required someone who actually cared enough to fix it.
I wanted to charge a monthly fee. I'll admit it. A flat monthly fee is simple to forecast and easy to explain. But when I put it to the operators we were building with, they pushed back hard. A monthly fee is just a tax on a slow August, they told me. They wanted to pay per transaction, and only on bookings where we actually processed the card. So that's what we do. You can see the full breakdown at junglebee.com/pricing because it's on a public page, which I consider the bare minimum for a vendor asking for your trust.
FareHarbor won't publish their pricing. Neither will a few of the others. For a small operator trying to figure out what software actually costs before you're on a sales call, that opacity is a real problem. I've been on the other side of that sales call. It's not fun.
Take whatever system you're considering and try to set up one real trip. Your trip, your currency, your tax rate, your agent commission structure. See if the fields exist. See if the payment processor can actually pay out to your local bank. Ask support what happens when the Christmas Winds blow out your morning run and you need to issue credits to forty guests before noon.
The answers tell you everything. Either the people who built it know what a cruise ship day is, or they don't. Either the system was designed around how your business runs, or it was designed for a US land-tour company and you're just the next market on someone's expansion slide.
I built Junglebee because I ran out of patience waiting for someone else to fix this. Ten years later, I still think that was the right call.
