bookingfish Review, Pricing & Features

BookingFish is an online booking platform for fishing guides and boat rentals, with a real-time calendar, gift certificates, Stripe payments, and a free…

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Category
Scheduling
Pricing
Pay-as-you-go with an unlimited free trial: no fees until a confirmed booking. Standard plan is a flat $25 CAD per confirmed booking (auto-refunded on cancellation) plus Stripe fees (2.9% + $0.30). Unlimited annual packages per boat run from $149 (1 year) to $499 (5 years), paying only Stripe fees.
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Last updated
August 15, 2026
SaaSFree TrialAPIStripe Integration

BookingFish is a niche online reservation platform purpose-built for professional fishing guides and boat rental operators, primarily in Canada. Instead of managing bookings by phone and risking double-bookings, guides configure their boats, available months, and time slots (full 8-hour day, 4-hour morning, or 4-hour evening) inside a web dashboard and publish a live availability calendar that clients can book directly. Each boat gets its own independent calendar, time slots, and deposit pricing, so operators running multiple vessels manage everything from one place.

The platform bundles the pieces a small guiding business typically has to stitch together: a customizable booking form (with your own photos, deposit prices, and presentation), automated confirmation emails with a full HTML editor, a color-coded web calendar, PDF export and printing of reservation lists, manual booking entry, and online gift certificates you can sell and embed. Payments run through Stripe Express, so client deposits go straight to the operator's bank account and BookingFish never touches the funds directly. A free, open-source (GPL v2) WordPress plugin lets guides embed their booking calendar and gift certificates on an existing WordPress site with a shortcode, and a Sync-Cell ICS feed pushes reservations to Google, Outlook, or Apple calendars on mobile, even offline, with read-only access tokens for additional guides. The admin interface and calendars are fully bilingual (French and English), and data is hosted in Canada.

Key Features

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Purpose-built for fishing guides and boat rentals, with vessel-specific calendars and half-day / full-day time slots that generic booking tools do not model out of the box.
  • Pay-as-you-go pricing with an unlimited free trial: no fees until you have a confirmed booking, and the $25 per-booking fee is auto-refunded if you refund a cancelled client.
  • Stripe Express payments go directly to the operator's bank account, so BookingFish never holds the funds.
  • Free, open-source (GPL v2) WordPress plugin embeds the booking calendar and gift certificates with a shortcode.
  • Fully bilingual (French/English) with data hosted in Canada, and a Sync-Cell ICS feed for mobile/offline calendars shared with guides.

Cons

  • Highly niche: designed around fishing guides and boat rentals, so it is not a fit for general appointment-based businesses.
  • Deepest integration story is with WordPress; operators on other website platforms rely mainly on shared booking links and embed codes.
  • On the standard plan a flat $25 fee applies per confirmed booking on top of Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30, which adds up for high-volume operators unless they buy an annual package.
  • Primarily oriented toward the Canadian market (built in Canada, CAD pricing), which may not suit operators elsewhere.

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