Swellbase vs Viking

Why surf schools are switching from Viking to Swellbase

Viking came out of a Dutch kitesurf school, and it does that job well: multi-lesson packages, customer self-rescheduling, instructor availability driving the plan.

Swellbase was built for busy surf schools, inside a busy Scottish surf school, and is now in use in surf schools across the UK. The multi-session bookings, camps and board hire that make up your season—handled properly, in a system simple enough to hand to a seasonal instructor on their first morning.

In a nutshell

Multi-session booking, in one go

If you're on Viking you'll be selling blocks of lessons, and you won't want to give that up. You don't have to—Swellbase does it in fewer steps.

Rather than buying a package and then scheduling the sessions afterwards, your customer picks the dates and times they want and books them all at once. Six clicks from browsing to booked. Discounts for multi-session packages and group sizes are applied automatically as they build the booking, so the price on screen matches the price on your board outside.

Powerful, without being hard work

Most booking platforms make you choose. Either it's simple and you outgrow it, or it's capable and only the owner can drive it.

Swellbase is built to be both. Day, week and month views that load fast and read clearly. Availability set in a few clicks. Board and wetsuit hire tracked alongside lessons. Your team get a portal showing exactly what they need—their schedule, participants, medical info—without the rest of the system in the way.

Everything else you need to run the season

Qualifications with expiry reminders, so nobody's teaching on a lapsed lifeguard ticket. Equipment records with scheduled safety checks. Risk assessments and SOPs with version control and read receipts. Session checklists logged every time, and an AALA-ready collection shared in two clicks.

Then the growth side: digital waivers, gift vouchers, session photos, customer history, and automated messages that fill quiet sessions without adding to your admin.

A fee on your online bookings, not on the ones you take yourself

Not every booking comes through your website. Walk-ins pay on the card machine, regulars pay cash, schools and groups pay by bank transfer, and someone in your team types them into the dashboard.

Viking now takes a percentage of those too, whatever way the money actually reached you. Swellbase only charges a booking fee on bookings made through your online widget. A booking you took yourself, and were paid for yourself, costs you nothing extra to record properly. Which means there's never a reason to keep part of your season out of the system.

Switching is free, and you are never tied in

Viking charges €380 to €480 to set you up. We charge nothing and take care of the switch for you, hassle-free.

Tell us what you're running and we'll move your products, pricing, staff and upcoming bookings across ourselves. You keep taking bookings while we do it. No setup fee, no lost bookings, no evenings spent copying data between systems.

And there's no contract holding you in place at the other end either. We'd rather earn your renewal every season than lock you into one. If Swellbase ever stops being the right fit, your data is yours and we'll help you export it.

Improving all the time, around what operators ask for

Swellbase ships improvements every month, and most of them start as a school request. When you get in touch you're talking to people who've spent the morning on the water and the afternoon in the centre office—phone, email or WhatsApp, and an answer the same day.