The ownership map

Here is who owns the major booking platforms today, as of mid-2026.

The online-travel land grab (2018). In April 2018, two deals closed within 24 hours of each other. Booking Holdings (the parent of Booking.com) bought FareHarbor, the largest tour and activity booking platform in the US. The next day, TripAdvisor bought Bokun, a competitor. Both travel giants recognized the same thing at the same time: if you own the reservation system, you own the data, the customer relationship, and the ability to steer bookings toward your own marketplace.

The private equity rollup (2023). A private equity firm called Vertica Capital Partners invested roughly $150 million to merge three booking platforms into one holding company: Rezdy (strong in Australia), Checkfront (strong in North America), and Regiondo (strong in Europe). They installed the former CEO of FareHarbor to run all three. Two months later, a European digital conglomerate called team.blue acquired SimplyBook.me.

The Squarespace chain (2019, then 2024). Squarespace bought Acuity Scheduling in 2019. Then in October 2024, private equity firm Permira took Squarespace itself private for $7.2 billion. Acuity is now two corporate layers deep: a scheduling tool, inside a website builder, inside a private equity portfolio.

The open-source reversal (2026). Cal.com, the most prominent open-source scheduling alternative, went closed-source in April 2026. The community edition that remains (Cal.diy) had its team scheduling and workflow features stripped out. We use Cal.com ourselves for our own discovery calls, so we watched this one closely.

That leaves Calendly (backed by venture capital, valued around $3 billion, independent for now), Peek Pro (also venture-backed, recently raised $70 million and acquired two more companies), and Square Appointments (owned by Block, Inc., the company behind Cash App). None of these are small independents either. Every major booking platform is now owned by, or funded by, someone bigger than the name on the screen.

What happens after an acquisition

The pattern is consistent enough to call it a pattern.

Prices go up. FareHarbor introduced a $5,000-a-year charge for website hosting that used to be free. Checkfront had two consecutive unannounced price hikes (20%, then 25%) after the private equity merger. Rezdy’s pricing aligned upward across all three merged brands. This is not a coincidence. It is the business model: acquire, then optimize revenue.

Data flows to the parent. FareHarbor’s privacy policy states that personal information may be shared across the Booking Holdings corporate group. Under California law, some of that sharing qualifies as a “sale” of personal data. Bokun operators have reported that bookings dropped after joining the platform, because Viator (same parent as Bokun) appeared to be routing customers directly to its own marketplace. When your booking system is owned by the same company that runs the marketplace you compete on, the conflict of interest is structural.

Lock-in deepens. FareHarbor built “free” websites for operators, then informed them in 2024 that FareHarbor owns the website template. Leave, and you leave without your site. Rezdy users report difficulty closing accounts, with continued billing after cancellation requests. Peek Pro’s fee structure (6 to 8%, calculated using undisclosed variables) makes it hard to comparison-shop at all. These are not bugs. They are retention mechanisms.

The real cost

The “free” platforms are often the most expensive. FareHarbor charges no monthly fee, but takes approximately 6% of every direct booking, plus payment processing on top. For a tour operator doing $500,000 a year in bookings, that is $30,000 in booking fees alone, before processing. Peek Pro’s effective take is similar or higher.

One family-owned travel business we worked with was paying over $60,000 a year in fees to their booking platform. They had been trying to leave for years. They even hired a venture-backed firm that could not get them off it. We built them a system they own, on a website they control, for less than one year of those fees.

That is an extreme case, but the shape of it is common. The fee looks small per booking. Over years, it compounds. And the switching cost (the pain of actually leaving) is what keeps the fee where it is.

How to evaluate what you are on

If you already use a booking platform, or you are choosing one, four things are worth checking. (We have a whole guide on judging any tool by its conduct. These are the booking-specific version.)

1. Can you export your data? Your customer list, your booking history, your contact information. Not “can you see it on a screen,” but can you download it in a format you could take to another system? If the answer is unclear, that is the answer.

2. Who owns what you have built? If the platform built your booking website, ask who owns the template. If you have spent years building a catalog of tours, services, or listings, ask what happens to them if you cancel. The word “ownership” matters less than what you can actually take with you when you leave.

3. What is the real cost over three years? Monthly fees are only part of it. Per-booking fees compound. Payment processing fees stack on top. And the price is theirs to raise, not yours to hold. Do the math over three years, not one month. (Our buy-or-build guide walks through the full cost comparison between renting tools and owning them.)

4. Who is behind the name? Not because big is automatically bad, but because the parent company’s business model tells you where your data goes and where the pricing pressure comes from. A booking platform owned by an online travel marketplace has different incentives than one you host yourself.

What the alternatives look like

You do not have to run your bookings on a platform owned by a travel conglomerate or a private equity firm. The alternatives are more practical than they used to be.

Self-hosted scheduling. Easy!Appointments is a mature, open-source appointment scheduler you can run on your own server. WordPress has several booking plugins (Bookly, Amelia, and others) that keep your data in your own database. These are realistic options for service businesses, consultants, and small teams. We use a self-hosted scheduling system for our own client calls, and we have built custom booking systems for clients who needed something their SaaS could never give them: a system they own outright, on a website they control, with no per-booking fee and no lock-in.

A smaller, more honest SaaS. Not every SaaS is a lock-in trap. Some charge a fair monthly fee, let you export your data cleanly, and do not penalize you for leaving. The test is the same four questions above. If a platform passes them, using it is a reasonable choice, even if it is not self-hosted.

Hybrid. Use self-hosted tools for the parts that hold your data (your customer list, your calendar, your website) and a focused SaaS for the parts that are genuinely better as a service (often payment processing). This is the approach we took for the travel business in the story above, and it is the one we recommend most often.

The honest summary

Nearly every major booking platform has been acquired by an online travel conglomerate, a private equity firm, or a digital holding company. The names stayed the same. The ownership, the pricing incentives, and the data flows changed. The “free” platforms are often the most expensive at scale, and the lock-in is by design.

None of this means you have to leave today. It means you should know what you are standing on. Check what you can export. Check what you would lose if you left. Check who is behind the name. And if the answers make you uncomfortable, know that the alternatives are more accessible and less expensive than they have ever been. Owning your booking system used to be out of reach for a small business. It is not anymore.