A payment plan lets a customer pay for a trip over time — a deposit up front, then scheduled installments charged automatically to their card.

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.

On the Pro and Growth plans you can create custom templates. A template has:

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.

On the Free plan you can use the built-in templates but not create new ones — see Plans and what's included.

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.

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 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 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.