Straight answers. If yours is not here, call or write and you will get a real person, not a form letter.
You do, directly. Deposits go into a Stripe account in your name and your bank, the same day Stripe pays out. CharterPilot never holds your money and never takes a cut of a trip. You pay us once to set it up and a flat monthly fee to run it, and that is the whole relationship.
A one time set up fee, then a flat monthly rate starting at $299 for a single boat operation. Fleets are priced per boat with a volume discount, quoted before anything is built. The set up fee starts at $199 and covers putting the whole thing together: your site built, your trips and rates loaded in, your photos, moving you off your old site and setting up the receptionist. What it lands at depends on how much there is to build, so one boat sits at the low end and a fleet with several boats, captains and calendars takes more work. We quote it once we have talked, before you owe anything. After that there is no per booking fee and 0% commission no matter how much you book. The only other cost is Stripe's card processing on deposits, which you pay Stripe directly, the same as any card reader.
No. Month to month, cancel any time, no notice period and no cancellation fee. Months are not prorated, so whenever you cancel, everything keeps running to the end of the period you have already paid for. The set up fee is non refundable.
Your own domain stays yours. It is registered in your name, we never hold it, and it points wherever you tell it to next. Your photos are yours, and you can export every booking and customer, name, phone and email, as a spreadsheet any time you like, including on your way out. The one thing that cannot travel is an address on our own charterpilot.boats domain, because that one is ours. That is exactly why we push you to own a real domain from the start, and we will help you buy one.
Nothing, until you say so. We build yours alongside the old one and you look at the whole thing before anything changes. When you approve it we point your domain at the new site and redirect your old pages, so the rankings you have already earned carry over instead of starting from zero.
No, and that's the part that can cause confusion. If your email runs through the same company as your old website, we plan the move around your mail, use the route that leaves your email records untouched where we can, and send a test message before and after. Nobody flips anything until your inbox is proven working.
No. Keep the number on your truck and your business cards. The receptionist gets its own line, and you forward your number to it whenever you want it answering. Forwarding takes seconds to turn off again if you change your mind.
Usually the trip. A customer who gets your voicemail gives you one to three minutes to call back, then dials the next captain on the list. The receptionist picks up on the first ring instead. It quotes your real prices when asked, holds the date and sends the deposit link, so the call that used to go to the next boat books with yours. If somebody hangs up before it answers, the dashboard gives you a one tap text back.
By default it answers around the clock, because nights and weekends are exactly when a marketplace takes the booking you never heard about. But you set the hours per day, and you can switch it off for a stretch, a haul out or a week away, and it turns itself back on. Off the clock, callers either hear a short message or your own phone rings. Your choice.
Block the number from your dashboard and it never gets worked again, it hears one line and gets hung up on. The dashboard also points out numbers that call over and over and never book, so you can block them in one tap. Your list is yours alone, since one captain's nuisance caller is another captain's regular.
No. It only sells the trips, dates and times that are open in your calendar, it obeys your booking cutoff and party size limits, and it reads your rules aloud and takes a yes before it takes a deposit. Weather day? Block the date once and the calendar closes everywhere at the same instant, the website, the phone and your own screen.
Yes. Deposit online, balance however you like, cash, card or a gift certificate, marked paid in one tap on your phone. Cash is a first class citizen here, not an afterthought, and the trip day screen tells you who still owes what before they step on the boat.
Both. A trip can be private, priced for the boat, or shared, priced per seat, where separate groups fill the boat together. You decide how many paid seats lock the date, and until that number is reached a full private charter can still take the day. If that happens, the early seats are refunded to the card automatically and every customer is told what happened and invited to rebook. Party-size pricing works too: a base price that covers so many guests, plus a set amount for each extra guest, quoted the same everywhere, on the site and on the phone.
No. Export your existing calendar, which Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook all do in a couple of taps, and we import it. Entries with a name and phone number become bookings; everything else blocks the date so nothing double-books. You review every line before anything is written, and no customer gets a surprise email about a trip they took last year.
At setup we wire your pages so every message gets an instant reply pointing at your live booking calendar and your phone line, day or night. Your inbox stays yours and you still reply personally whenever you want; the difference is that a message at 9pm gets a path to book instead of silence until morning.
One conversation and usually live within the week. You send trips, rates, rules and photos. We build the site, load all of it, set up the receptionist and hand it over, and you approve everything before it goes live. If you would rather not touch a dashboard again after that, send us changes and we will make them.