Swellbase vs FareHarbor

Why outdoor centres are switching from FareHarbor to Swellbase

FareHarbor is a powerful, flexible booking platform, but that flexibility comes at a cost. Built to serve everything from city tours to farms, it's become a complicated legacy system that often requires contacting support for basic tasks.

Swellbase takes a different approach: purpose-built for outdoor centres, with intuitive design you can use from day one, tools that solve your specific problems, and fair 4% pricing from an independent team invested in your success—not a Booking.com subsidiary with corporate targets.

In a nutshell

Easy to use

FareHarbor aims to serve thousands of business types—from city tours to farms to ticketed attractions—prioritising flexibility above all else. The result is a complicated, legacy system that doesn't make your life easier. You can't be everything for everyone and still be the best for everyone.

You might find yourself having to contact support (which is increasingly dealt with by AI) to complete basic dashboard tasks, or having to wait for your ever-changing account manager to respond so you can make a time-sensitive offer to your customers, or find yourself surprised that a feature isn't available to you as it needs to be manually 'unlocked' on your dashboard.

At Swellbase, we do things differently. From the beginning, Swellbase was built to be intuitive and easy to use, while still offering the power and flexibility that you expect from an advanced booking platform.

We don't hide behind a complicated onboarding process to avoid overwhelming you with complexity, because we believe in the usability and design of our product. You can sign up for free and decide for yourself, and you can contact our team directly to receive personal support from people who understand how you work.

Swellbase is purpose-built for outdoor centres

FareHarbor is trying to be everything for everyone, which means it has to focus on flexibility above other priorities, is overly complex, and as a result can't focus on solving specific problems for niches within its overall customer base.

Swellbase has been designed from the ground up in a working outdoor centre, with input from a variety of outdoor centres of different sizes and activity types. We bring together the tools that every outdoor centre needs, so that you don't have to rely on multiple services and spreadsheets unnecessarily.

We solve specific problems like:

• Staff management and qualification tracking
• Resource allocation that makes sense for outdoor centre use
• Equipment safety checks
• Operational documents

Swellbase can legitimately claim to increase your revenue by automatically maximising your capacity around available staff, and offering a flexible ticket system that works for what outdoor centres sell. Gone are the days when booking systems were a replacement for pen-and-paper and by simply switching to an online system you could dramatically increase your bookings. A modern online system is the baseline now, and you need one that works for your business.

If you're running an outdoor centre, Swellbase solves your specific problems while still offering the power and flexibility of a generic tool like FareHarbor. If you are running a ticketed attraction, a train, a farm, or a city tour (or any of the other range of niches FareHarbor lists) then FareHarbor can work for you in the same way it works for outdoor centres (very generally, and often frustratingly).

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Pick the right tool for the job.

Focused on your success

FareHarbor is a corporate giant now owned by Booking.com. There have been a number of recent changes to their website pricing, pricing for small operators, and additional fees for integration bookings, on top of their standard 6% booking fee.

Swellbase is a small independent company based in Scotland, without corporate priorities. We are a partner invested in your success, that succeeds when you succeed, not a corporate entity with corporate targets.

This allows us to offer fair, sustainable pricing, with a transparent 4% booking fee which you are in complete control of—absorb it, pass it to the customer, or split it as you like. All features are included and we donate 10% of all booking fees to verified reforestation projects via our Ecologi partnership.