Xola vs Peek Pro for Fishing Guides

Neither of these companies will tell you what it charges. That is the obvious thing about the pair and it is not the interesting one, because they do publish the machinery they use to sort prospects, and the two machines disagree. One asks how many guests you handle. The other sorts by turnover. Run the same set of businesses through both and they come out in a different order.

For a fishing guide that matters more than it sounds. A kayak rental taking forty thousand dollars a year lands in a higher bracket on the guest ladder than a guide taking seventy two thousand, because the rental moves two thousand people and the guide moves three hundred and sixty. Whichever yardstick a vendor picks decides how small you look before anybody has quoted anything. Every vendor costed here sits on the booking software topic page.

What does each one actually ask you?

One wants a headcount and the other wants a turnover figure, and both put the answer where a price should be.

On the first of these pages, the space a price would occupy holds a form that will not submit without your annual guest number. Its options climb in familiar steps: below a thousand, then five, twenty five, a hundred, and higher.

Around that gap the page is reasonably forthcoming. There is no monthly plan to buy, the company's own charge is levied on whoever purchases the trip, and cards are processed at a published US figure of 2.39 percent with thirty cents on top.

The second asks nothing publicly at all, because its pricing page returns a not-found. Reading its sitemap turns up three pages cut by business size, at zero to three hundred thousand dollars, three hundred to six hundred and fifty, and beyond.

Load any of them and the body reports that nothing was found. The frame for revenue-tiered pricing exists and was never filled.

So one vendor asks a question and the other built somewhere to put the answer and left it empty. Both, though, have told you which measurement they think in.

Kodiak Wilderness, AK

Farmington River Trading Company, CT

Why does guest banding suit guiding so badly?

Because it measures the one thing guiding deliberately keeps small.

The whole commercial logic of a guided day is few people paying a lot each. You sell a boat rather than a seat, cap the party at what fishes well, and price accordingly.

Every improvement a guide makes tends to reduce guest count relative to revenue. Raising a day rate, moving upmarket, specialising in a fishery that suits two rods rather than six: all of these make the business better and smaller on that particular measure.

A ladder built on headcount therefore reads a maturing guide business as shrinking. It is the wrong instrument pointed at the wrong quantity, and no rate quoted from it will reflect what the platform actually does for you.

Revenue banding is imperfect too, since turnover is a poor proxy for system load, but at least it moves in the same direction as your success.

The vendors that meter reservations rather than either one produce a third answer again, and that structure is set out in the Bookeo review.

What does each one settle, if not the rate?

Different halves of the arrangement, and both halves are worth having.

The guest-banded vendor settles who pays. Its charge falls on your customers rather than on your settlement, which means your margin is untouched and your quoted price is not what appears at checkout.

It also settles the payments question, publishing a card rate that stands up against the competition and resolves to about seventeen hundred and fifty seven dollars across a guiding season.

The revenue-banded vendor settles the base and the scope instead. Its agreement permits charges to be worked from everything processed rather than what you net, and enumerates gratuities, add-ons and convenience charges among the chargeable components.

It also brings reservations that started life on another platform inside the net, and reserves latitude to list you on its own consumer sites with a consequent uplift accepted ahead of time.

So one tells you whose money it takes and the other tells you what it can reach. Neither tells you how much, and the two disclosures are not interchangeable. Each card is worked through in the Xola review and the Peek Pro review.

Which quote would you rather receive?

The one whose scope you already understand, which is not the same as the one with better disclosure.

A rate is only meaningful once you know what it multiplies. Being quoted four percent means nothing until you establish whether that four percent applies to trip revenue, to gross including tips, to bookings from every channel, or only to those the platform itself produced.

On that test the revenue-banded vendor has done more work for you, because its contract answers the scope question in detail even while withholding the number.

The guest-banded vendor answers a different question thoroughly. You know the money comes from your clients, so whatever rate arrives, the effect on your own accounts is nil and the effect on your quoted price is everything.

Which you prefer depends on what you are protecting. If it is margin, a customer-paid structure is already the safer shape regardless of rate. If it is the relationship with people who fish with you every year, an unknown surcharge on their bill is the thing to worry about.

That trade-off is examined from the other direction in the comparison with TripWorks.

Is either quote likely to be competitive?

Not from the position a guide occupies, on either ladder.

Negotiated pricing responds to leverage, and leverage in this market comes from volume, from credible alternatives, and from willingness to walk away.

A guide brings very little of the first, which is exactly why the bracket question matters. Land on the bottom rung of the shortest ladder and you get shown the unfriendly end of whatever range exists.

The second is available and mostly unused. Walking in with a published competitor's annual figure changes the conversation from a pitch into a comparison, and it costs nothing to prepare.

The third is entirely yours. A guide with a working calendar and a full season has no urgent need to change anything, which is the strongest position anybody can occupy in a sales conversation.

Use all three. Ask what band you fall into, ask what the range is for that band, and ask what would move you within it. A vendor willing to answer the second question is one worth continuing with.

What would either have to be worth?

More than the cheapest published alternative, and it is worth calculating that threshold before anybody quotes you.

An unstated price is not an impossible one to reason about. You can bound it from below by asking what you would otherwise spend, and that number is small.

A published plan billed at $14.95 monthly takes no proportion of anything from operator or guest. Frozen through an off-season it runs near a hundred and twenty seven dollars for the year.

Set that against seventy two thousand dollars of processed revenue and the equivalent percentage is under two tenths of one percent. No customer-paid or commission platform in this market charges anything close.

So the comparison is settled before it starts on cost alone, which means the question is never whether these two are cheaper. It is whether the distribution they carry is worth the difference.

That reframing is useful going into a call. You are no longer waiting to hear a number and judge it; you are testing a specific claim about what a network delivers, and you can ask for evidence rather than a rate.

Ask what proportion of a comparable operator's bookings the platform originates. A vendor that can answer with a figure is selling distribution. One that changes the subject is selling software at a distribution price.

Does either one know what a charter is?

The vocabulary on both suggests not, and that shows up in configuration rather than in marketing.

Read either site as a guide and the language belongs to somebody else. Guests instead of clients, purchases instead of trips, seats and queues and channel partners.

That describes an operator moving volume through several distribution routes, where a small charge disappears inside a modest ticket price and managing channels is most of the product.

A guided day inverts every assumption in that sentence. One hull, one captain, a handful of large transactions, sold mostly to people who came looking for you by name.

The mismatch declares itself in the difficult configurations. Can a rate that climbs once a third rod joins be held as one reservation. Does an early departure take the same hull off the board for later that day. Will a settled trip survive being pushed back two weeks without the deposit unravelling.

A price list addresses none of that, and here you cannot fall back on a trial because neither company offers one. Software shaped for a different trade, with the usual method of checking removed, is about as strong a case as exists for exhausting the published vendors first.

If you do take a call, ask for a sandbox rather than a walkthrough and build those three cases yourself. A refusal is informative and the request costs nothing.

What should you establish before either call?

Four things, and two of them are about arithmetic rather than the vendor.

Work out your own guest count and your own revenue first, because both vendors will ask for one of them and the answer determines your bracket. Most guides have never counted heads across a season.

Then set a ceiling in writing, expressed as dollars per trip rather than as a percentage, since a percentage will be quoted to you and dollars per trip is what you actually feel.

From the vendors, get the rate and the base together. A rate without a base is not a quote, and on the revenue-banded card the base explicitly may include money that clients handed over as gratuities.

Then ask what happens on a refunded booking and what data leaves with you if you go. Those two questions are the least glamorous in any evaluation and the most likely to matter in four years.

Nothing on that list requires technical knowledge and all of it can be settled by email, which is the point. The full argument for pricing against a knowable alternative runs through the direct-booking piece.

What happens if you grow into a lodge?

The two ladders diverge further, not less, which is the opposite of what you would expect.

Most pricing structures converge as a customer grows, because scale eventually puts everybody into a percentage band where the same logic applies.

These two do not, because they are measuring different quantities and guiding grows along only one of them. A guide adding a second boat, sub-guides and multi-day packages adds revenue quickly and guests slowly.

Take the fly shop lodge in the table above. Two hundred and seventy thousand dollars of turnover against nine hundred guests a year, which is nearly four times a single guide's revenue on two and a half times the headcount.

On the revenue ladder that business has climbed most of the way through the bottom bracket and is approaching the next. On the guest ladder it has not moved at all, still sitting under the thousand-guest line alongside a part-timer running forty days.

So the vendor sorting by turnover will notice you growing and the vendor sorting by headcount will not. Whether that is good or bad depends entirely on which direction their rates move with size, and neither publishes that either.

What it does mean practically is that a lodge-scale operation should approach these two in a different order than a single guide would, and should expect the guest-banded vendor to keep reading it as a very small account.

Which suits a fishing guide better?

Neither cleanly, and the guest-banded one is the safer accident.

That is an unsatisfying answer and it is the honest one. A guide cannot compare two rates that neither company will state, so the decision has to be made on structure alone.

On structure, a customer-paid charge with a published processing rate at least protects your margin and gives you one figure that survives checking. The cost lands on your clients, which is a positioning problem rather than a financial one.

The alternative offers more detail about what it can charge on and less protection about who bears it, with a contract that permits both a broad base and a discretionary uplift.

Both, though, are built around distribution networks that a referral-driven guide does not use, and both put a guide at the floor of their smallest bracket.

Cost a vendor that prints its prices before you approach either. Should a no-commission subscription handle your calendar properly, there is nothing left for these two to sell. Comparable products appear in one alternatives roundup and the other, with the budget end covered by the cheap tools survey.

What is on solid ground?

The machinery on both sides, and the amounts on neither.

Solid on the guest-banded card: nothing is billed monthly; the vendor's own charge sits with the purchaser rather than the operator; extra costs arriving through travel agents are ruled out; American card processing is printed, with a footnote conceding other territories vary; and a rate reaches you only after a form extracts your yearly headcount, sorted into the brackets described above.

Solid on the revenue-banded card: what it levies is either a percentage or a flat amount; the sum it applies that to can be the whole of what moves through rather than your net; tips and convenience charges appear by name on the list of chargeable items; reservations that began elsewhere still count; and the vendor may put a merchant onto its own shopfront, with whatever rate rise follows agreed to beforehand.

Missing from each: the number itself. The second card additionally omits every subscription figure, setup charge, trial period and card rate. Requesting its prices produces an error page, and the three pages named for company sizes come back with no content in them.

The four businesses in the table are illustrations built to show how the two ladders sort, not descriptions of particular companies. Substitute your own guest count and turnover; the sorting behaviour is the finding rather than the examples.

Neither platform has carried a season of my bookings, so read this as an examination of two intake forms and one contract. The documents were checked on 25 July 2026. Revisions to terms in this bracket arrive silently, so look again before committing.