A payment plan lets a customer pay for a trip over time — a deposit up front, then scheduled installments charged automatically to their card.
Using a plan
Every workspace comes with ready-made plan templates — like 50/50 and Deposit + balance. Attach one to an experience, and customers booking that trip can choose to pay on the plan instead of all at once.
Payment plans are for multi-day tours only — day tours are always paid in full.
Building your own template
You can also create your own templates. A template has:
a deposit percentage taken at booking, and
a series of installments, each a percentage of the total due a set number of days before departure.
Your deposit plus all installments must add up to 100%. You can have up to 24 installments, and each must fall closer to departure than the one before.
If you retire a template, any experience using it falls back to full payment at booking. Bookings already placed on it keep their existing plan and aren't affected.
How installments are charged
Once a plan is running, Samba charges each installment to the customer's saved card on its due date — you don't have to do anything. The customer gets a receipt each time, and a "you're all paid" note when the final installment clears.
You can also turn auto-billing off on a template, in which case customers get a reminder on each due date and pay themselves.
If a payment fails
If a charge doesn't go through, Samba automatically retries it a few times over the following days and lets the customer know. The customer can also pay a due or overdue installment themselves — or update their card — from their booking portal.
If all the retries fail, the installment and the plan are marked Failed and the booking's status changes to Overdue — you'll get notified too, so you know to follow up with the customer.
Late bookings
If someone books so close to departure that a payment date has already passed, Samba automatically folds the missed amount into the remaining payments. If every payment date has passed, the full amount is simply collected up front.
Each template has an "auto-adjust for late bookings" setting for this, turned on by default. If you turn it off for a template, a customer booking after one of its payment dates has passed won't be able to choose that plan at all.