Keep the booking, and the customer
Two euros a cover, fifteen per cent of a night, a slice of every appointment — and at the end of it the customer is still theirs.
A real Clay site — built from a Google listing
Nobody leaves a platform over one booking. The rate is small enough to shrug at, which is exactly how it is priced. So do the arithmetic on a year instead: fifteen per cent of €4,000 a month is €600 a month, and €7,200 by December. That is a part-time wage, or the van, or the room you never repainted.
A booking taken on your own page costs the same whether it is your first that month or your four-hundredth. Clay puts the diary on the site people already land on when they search your name — the one with your photographs, your hours, your reviews and your map on it.
The second cost is bigger
The commission is the part you can count. The part you cannot is that the booking is never really yours: the confirmation comes from them, the reminder comes from them, the review request comes from them, and the next time that customer is hungry they open the app. You rented a customer and gave them back.
Be exact about what changes. The name, the phone number, the email and whatever they wrote in the box land in your inbox, and pressing Reply reaches the guest. What does not change is the post: one confirmation to them, one alert to you, and nothing else. No reminder the day before, no waitlist.
What a platform is actually for
Discovery, and it is real. A villa with no reviews on a coast nobody searches by name, a salon three weeks old in a city where nobody knows it — those businesses are buying customers they could not otherwise reach, and fifteen per cent of a booking that would not have existed is a price, not a tax.
There is a test for which one you are. Open your last fifty bookings and count how many came from somebody who had never heard of you. If it is most of them, stay where you are. If it is a handful, you are paying a finder's fee on people who already knew your name.
What you get
Three shapes, one engine
A time in the diary, a table for a party, or something hired by the day — the same booking engine draws all three.
The details come to you
Every booking mails you the name, the phone number and the note, with the guest's own address as the reply-to.
Nothing per booking
One flat monthly price for the site. Nothing is taken per cover, per appointment or per night, however good the month was.
On a page worth landing on
The site is built from your Google listing, so the diary sits under your photographs, your hours, your reviews and your map.
What you get
Questions
What does it cost to take a booking?
Nothing per booking. The site is €49 a month ex-VAT on Pro, flat whether you take four bookings or four hundred. Booking is the one thing a free Clay site cannot do — the page draws, but the server refuses the booking until the site is on Pro.
Will I lose the bookings the platform sends me?
The ones who found you there, yes. Clay does not market you to anybody: it is your own site, and the traffic is whatever your name and your listing already bring. Run both for a season and watch which one the bookings actually come through. What your Google listing already does.
Can it take the deposit, or the payment?
No. A table can carry a deposit that starts from a party size upward, and it is worked out on the server, shown on the card and printed in both emails — but no card is charged anywhere in the booking. They pay you in person. How a table booking works.
I am on Booking.com too — will the two stay in step?
No, not by themselves. Clay publishes your bookings out as one calendar feed you subscribe to in Google, Apple or Outlook, so you see everything in one place. Nothing reads back the other way, so a channel manager this is not.
Will people trust booking on my own site?
They already do it for a dentist and a hairdresser. What makes it feel safe is the same three things a platform does: the time is confirmed on the screen, an email arrives immediately, and it carries a link to move or cancel it. All three come with the booking; it is not a form that goes into somebody's inbox.
Real sites, made with Clay
Open one. It is the live site in a frame, not a screenshot — so what you see is what it looks like right now.
Keep the booking, and the customer
Search your business and see your site in seconds — free, no signup.