What booking fees actually cost you a year

Booking fees cost you the fee on one ticket multiplied by every ticket you sell in a year, plus whatever the platform charges you just for being on it. That’s the whole sum. It takes about a minute on the back of an envelope, and it’s the first thing I do with anybody who gets in touch about a booking or ticketing system.

The fee on one ticket looks like nothing. 50p, a quid, a small percentage. That’s what it’s designed to look like. Nobody’s ever been put off by a pound.

How do you work out what booking fees cost you?

Start with how many tickets or bookings you sold last year. Your platform will know, it’s very good at counting the things it charges you for. Multiply that by the fee on each one. If you pay a percentage instead of a flat fee, multiply last year’s ticket revenue by the percentage.

Then add anything else the platform bills you for over the year, like a monthly subscription or a setup charge.

That total is your number. Write it down somewhere, because you’ll want it again in a minute.

A worked example (with made-up numbers)

These are round numbers I’ve picked so the maths is easy. They aren’t a client’s figures and they aren’t any particular platform’s fees.

Say you sell 50,000 tickets a year at a £1 fee.

That’s £50,000 a year. Over three years it’s £150,000, and that’s before any subscription, and before you’ve grown at all.

Our booking and ticketing systems start from £12,000, with a fixed price agreed before we start (it’s on the pricing page under the complicated stuff). A system that has to handle memberships, timed entry, group bookings and several venues costs more than the “from” price, obviously. Even so, one year of fees in this example is more than four times that starting price. You’d be paying for a system of your own over and over and ending up owning none of it.

Owning it doesn’t make the costs disappear, mind. You still pay card processing whichever route you take, because the money goes through the same payment providers the big platforms use. You’ll pay for hosting as well.

And you’ll want things changing as the business moves on, which is development time. Cannon Hall Farm’s system has been built and developed continuously since 2021 and it never stands still. Put all of that in the sum, or you’re kidding yourself.

What if the fee is a percentage?

A percentage is the one to watch, because it grows when you do.

Say you take £1 million a year in bookings and the platform takes 5% (another number I’ve made up for the sum). That’s £50,000. Have a good year and push revenue up 20%, and the fee goes up 20% with it, to £60,000. The platform hasn’t done a single extra thing to earn that extra £10,000.

Hotels know this one well, because it’s how booking sites work. Crest Hotels Group run nine hotels on one website platform we built, and every one of those sites leads with Book Direct. Every guest who books through a booking site comes with a chunk of commission off the bottom line, so the whole platform is built to stop guests drifting off to one. Same sum, different industry.

Does it matter if the customer pays the fee?

Some venues pass the booking fee straight on to the customer and reckon that makes it free. It doesn’t. The customer still pays it, on top of your price, at the exact moment they’re deciding whether a day out is worth it.

If the system’s yours, that money is yours to play with. Build it into the ticket price or knock it off altogether. Your call.

What the fee doesn’t show you

The sum only covers money. There’s a second cost that never turns up on an invoice.

Off-the-shelf ticketing is built for the average venue. If yours does anything slightly odd, you end up running the business around what the software allows. Cannon Hall Farm were on a solid, well-known platform used right across the industry. There was nothing wrong with it. But they run weather guarantees, sessions with two start times on the same day, livestreamed events you pay to watch from your sofa, bundled tickets with a sheep-shearing demo thrown in. Every new idea hit the same wall.

The customer data sat in someone else’s system too. That one bothers me more than the fees. They’re your customers and your repeat bookings, and you’re renting access to them.

What Cannon Hall did about it

We built them their own. Since 2021 it’s taken over 219,000 bookings and sold more than £10 million in tickets. That’s a lot of tickets to be paying somebody a fee on. (What they paid before is their business, so you’re getting my made-up numbers instead.)

Over 200,000 people now have a Passport account, up from under 40,000 three years ago, and the farm owns every one of those relationships.

Then there’s the stuff the old platform couldn’t sell at all. The Rainy Day Pass checks how much it’s rained on the day of your visit and issues a free return pass automatically. On one wet day in May it issued 416 of them. Paid livestreams sold over 2,100 tickets in a single month to people who were never going to fit through the gate. Around 70% of bookings now add paid parking at checkout. Ticket revenue is up 12.9% year on year, on 4.6% more visitors.

None of that goes in the fee sum. I’d still rather have it than not.

When the sum says stay where you are

Same made-up £1 fee, but say you sell 2,000 tickets a year. That’s £2,000 a year in fees. It’d take six years of fees just to reach our starting price, and that’s before any of the running costs I mentioned. If the platform does what you need, stay where you are. I’d tell you the same thing on the phone.

The platform did this sum years ago, by the way. It’s how they set the fee.