Free to run

The platform: free

Creating programs and trips, the rooming and chaperone board, permission-form tracking, the bus coordination, the itinerary, and the oversight view for your AD or principal. All of it is free, for any number of trips and travelers.

Online payments: the school gets 100%

When families pay online, the school is the merchant of record: the payment settles to the school's own Stripe account, and the school receives 100% of the trip cost. Nothing is taken out of the school's amount. What a family pays is the trip share plus one clearly labeled service fee, shown before they commit.

On a card, that service fee is two things added together and both deserve a number. The first is payment processing: Stripe charges 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. That is Stripe's standard published rate, it goes to Stripe, and it is not a Jettova markup. The second is Jettova's platform fee, 1.5% of the trip share, rounded up to the cent. Neither part has an upper limit on a card, so a card payment on a large trip share costs proportionally what a card payment on a small one costs.

A bank transfer is where there is a limit, and this is the part worth reading twice. A bank payment costs the family whichever is lower: the card price, or the trip share plus $15. That $15 is a ceiling on the whole service fee rather than a charge of its own: Stripe's cost of moving the money comes out of it, not on top of it, so on a large bank payment Jettova receives whatever is left of it once Stripe is paid.

The two rules meet at $324.00. At or below that share the card price is the lower of the two, so a bank payment costs a family exactly what a card payment costs and the only reason to prefer one is timing. Above it the ceiling takes over, the family pays the trip share plus $15 and not a cent more, and the larger the payment the more a bank transfer saves: on the $1,200.00 share below, a bank payment costs $39.69 less than a card one.

Because of that, the service fee is not one flat percentage. Card processing has no ceiling and carries a fixed $0.30 per payment, so the card fee is a bigger slice of a small payment and a smaller slice of a large one. On a $50.00 share the card service fee is $2.58 (5.16%); on a $1,200.00 share it is $54.69 (4.56%), against $15.00 (1.25%) by bank. Here is the middle of that range, in full:

So on the $450.00 example above a family pays $470.71 by card or $465.00 by bank, a difference of $5.71, and the school receives the same $450.00 either way. The gap widens with the payment: on a $1,200.00 share it is $39.69. Both methods are offered on every trip-share payment, and the service fee always reaches checkout as its own labeled line beside the trip share. Every pay button in the product names the exact total it will charge and says whether the bank option saves anything on that amount, so a family never has to work it out. Bank payments clear in a few business days; card is instant.

Prefer no service fee at all? You can collect by cash or check and mark those payments as received. The service fee applies only to money moved online.

Travel bookings: standard prices

Your staff book the group's travel at standard prices, with no markup. Jettova may earn a small commission from travel partners on bookings made through its links, the same way any travel site does. It costs your families nothing extra.

Refunds

If a family drops out and the program's own refund policy allows it, the organizer can refund them from the product. The refund is issued on the school's own account, the family gets their whole payment back including Jettova's platform fee, and a partial refund returns that fee in proportion. No surprise charges to the family. The school sets that policy, and families see it before they pay.

One thing worth knowing before you start rather than in month three: Stripe does not return its processing cost on a refund. That is Stripe's standard policy, not a Jettova choice, so on a refunded payment the school absorbs that part. On the $450.00 example above it is about $13.95 on a card payment and about $3.72 on a bank payment. It is one more reason to point families at bank transfer.