25 years of booking systems. One new one.

Why I built BookingPOS

I built my first booking system in 2001 and took its first online payment in April 2001. Since then my systems have taken millions of bookings, for dive shops, boats, courses and tours.

In 2026 it was time to replace what we had. Before building anything, I sat through FareHarbor’s and Rezdy’s offerings. Both are good at one thing: taking a booking online. Neither could run the rest of the day.

• No real till. Walk-ins, retail and hire went through a separate card reader, so the counter and the bookings were two sets of numbers.

• Nothing offline. At the ramp or out on the water, the manifest is a web page that won’t load.

• Fees on every booking, paid by us or added to our guests’ price.

• The crew left out: no roster, and waivers and head counts in other apps.

So we built BookingPOS: one system where every booking, every sale at the counter and every voucher is the same kind of record, that keeps working without a signal, and that the crew can run from a phone.

Ben de Groot, founder, Vertical Apps