November 10, 2026
Online Booking for Hunting Outfitters: When to Take Deposits Online and When to Talk First
Most hunters who find your outfit do it after work, on a phone, a long way from anyone who can answer a question. If the only way forward is a contact form and a callback, a fair number of them drift off to the next website before you ever talk. Online booking fixes that gap, but it doesn’t follow that every hunt you sell should be bookable with a credit card at 10 p.m. A $900 bird hunt and a $9,000 backcountry elk hunt are different sales, and the useful question is which of your hunts belong in which lane.
What online booking does
On the Solo plan and up, Hunt Outfitter gives you a public page at your-outfit.huntoutfitter.app/book where a hunter picks a hunt and dates, enters their party size and contact details, and either pays a deposit or sends you a request. The dates on offer come from your seasons and guide availability, and the page disables days you can’t actually staff, so nobody books a week your guides are already full. Pricing and the deposit are calculated from your hunt setup on our side, so a hunter can’t change them.
It’s a hosted page rather than something you paste into your website, which means there’s no code to maintain. You grab the link from your Branded URLs page and put it on your website’s Book Now button, your social bios and your email signature.
Instant book or request to book
Each hunt type has its own Online Booking setting, so you decide hunt by hunt.
Request to book is the default, and it’s what we recommend for big game and any hunt where you want a conversation first. The hunter submits their dates and details, nothing is charged, and you’re notified so you can call, check they’re a fit and confirm. You keep the conversation about fitness, expectations and gear, which on a hard mountain hunt is part of the service, and you still skip the first round of phone tag because you already have their dates and party size.
Instant book & pay deposit suits hunts that are simple to sell and hard to get wrong, such as bird hunts, ranch hunts and other high-volume, short-duration trips. The hunter pays the deposit through Stripe Checkout, the booking is confirmed once the deposit clears, and a held booking from an abandoned checkout gets released on its own so it doesn’t clutter your dashboard.
A reasonable test is to ask what would happen if a stranger booked this hunt tonight without talking to you. If the answer is that you’d be delighted, make it instant. If you’d want to ask them a few questions first, leave it on request.
Setting it up
- Turn it on. Under Settings, open Online Booking and switch on “Accept public online bookings.” The same panel shows whether your card payments are live and how many of your bookable hunts take a deposit.
- Connect Stripe. Card deposits need a connected Stripe account with setup finished. Until then, the page still works and collects no-charge booking requests.
- Add a season. Only hunts with an active season can be booked, so the page shows as closed until at least one active hunt has one.
- Choose a mode for each hunt type. Set Online Booking on the hunt type’s edit page, and check the deposit while you’re there. A hunt set to instant with no real deposit falls back to a request.
- Share the link. Put it wherever hunters already find you.
What happens with groups
Party size is part of the booking, and the deposit scales with it, so a group of four pays four hunters’ deposits. The page also weighs that party against the guides you have free on those dates, using the hunt’s default guiding ratio. If a group is too big to staff, the hunter is asked to contact you directly rather than being booked into a problem. You can still book that party by hand from your dashboard, and if you often run larger groups, it’s worth checking the default ratio on that hunt type.
At the sports show
Each event in Hunt Outfitter can have its own QR code that opens your booking page and attributes the booking to that show, including any deposit taken at the booth. Before you print it, make sure the page is live, because a code pointing at a closed page isn’t much use on a banner. For people who aren’t ready to book, a separate QR code can open your lead form instead, which is on every plan.
If you’re on Starter or Basic
Self-service booking is a Solo-and-up feature, so on Starter and Basic the booking page stays closed. You still get a public lead-capture page, and you can drop its form onto your own website with an embed snippet, then enter bookings yourself and collect the deposit by card, which works on every plan. Clients pay a capped booking fee at checkout, and it comes down as your plan goes up.
Start free on the Starter plan — or try a paid plan free for 14 days.