1. Who this is between

You are an independent business. Nothing here makes you our employee, our agent, or our partner in law. You decide how your tour runs, who you employ, what equipment you use and what you charge.

2. What each of us does

You run the tour, set its price, publish the dates it runs on, and deliver the experience you described in your listing.

Welist your tour, take the traveller’s payment as merchant of record, hold your booking calendar, send the traveller their confirmation and redemption code, and pay you.

Being merchant of record means the traveller’s card is charged by us, not by you. That is a payments arrangement, not a transfer of responsibility for the tour itself — section 6.

3. Money

You set the price of each bundle you offer. That price is what a traveller sees and what the payout in section 4 is calculated from.

Our commission is currently 0%. We do not take a percentage of your price. If that changes we will tell you before it applies to any booking — see section 11.

Separately, we add a 3% service fee that the traveller pays on top of your price. It is shown to them as its own line at checkout. It is not taken out of your share, and it does not change what you are owed.

All amounts are in US dollars. We do not currently calculate, collect or remit any sales tax, VAT or local tourist levy on your behalf. Any tax due on your earnings, and any tax you must charge on your tour, is yours to handle. If you are unsure, take your own advice — we cannot give it.

4. When you get paid

A payout is recorded the moment a booking is paid for, and becomes due to you when the traveller checks in — that is, when you enter their redemption code, or check them in without one because they arrived and the code was lost. Checking a guest in is what tells us you ran the tour.

Payouts are sent to the Payoneer account you connect in your guide portal. We cannot pay you until that account is active and Payoneer has completed its own identity checks, which are theirs to run, not ours.

If a guest never arrives and you never check them in, that seat is not paid out automatically. Tell us and we will settle it by hand.

5. Insurance and paperwork

You must hold and keep current public liability insurance and a business registration, and upload both to your guide portal. Where your activity needs a licence or permit in your jurisdiction, you must hold that too.

We check the expiry dates. Thirty days before your insurance lapses your listing is marked as expiring — you can still sell. Once it has lapsed, your tours stop accepting new bookings until you upload current cover. Bookings already made are unaffected and you must still honour them.

What we do with the files. They are held in private storage that is not reachable from the public site, and only a PalapaVibez administrator signed in to the admin panel can open one. We keep a document we have accepted for as long as it is the current evidence that we checked you. A document we rejectis deleted ninety days after we tell you why — long enough for you to query the decision, and no longer than that, because after it is settled we are holding your paperwork for no reason. Deletion means the file itself, not just the record of it.

A “verified” badge on your profile means we have checked who you are. It is not a statement about the quality or safety of your tour, and it cannot be bought.

6. Who is responsible for what

You are responsible for the tour. That includes the safety of the people on it, your equipment and vessels, your crew, your compliance with local law, and any injury, loss or damage arising from how the tour is run.

We are responsible for the platform: the listing, the booking, taking the payment correctly, and paying you what you are owed.

If a traveller brings a claim about something that happened on your tour, it is a claim against you, and your insurance is what answers it. You agree to indemnify us against claims arising from your tour, except to the extent they are caused by our own failure.

7. Cancellations and refunds

You set your own cancellation policy, in your own words, on each listing. We show it to the traveller verbatim — on the tour page, in the booking panel, in the checkout, and in their confirmation email. We do not rewrite it, summarise it into terms you did not choose, or apply a policy of our own on top.

If you cancel a departure, we email every traveller booked on it straight away and ask them to acknowledge. Any payout for that departure that has not yet been sent is voided.

We send refunds from the platform, against your policy.When a refund is owed we send it back to the card the traveller paid with — in full or in part, whatever your policy says — and email them to confirm it has left us. Their bank usually shows it within five to ten days, which is the card network’s timing and not ours.

A refund also cancels any payout for that booking that has not yet been sent. If we had already sent you the payout — because the traveller had checked in — we cannot take it back, so we will contact you to recover it.

8. Traveller information

You will see the name, party size and any note a traveller left for you — an allergy, mobility need, or similar — for the departures you are running. You get this so you can run the tour safely.

Use it for that and nothing else. You may not add travellers to a mailing list, market to them, or pass their details to anyone, without their separate consent. This information is held under our privacy policy, and mishandling it is grounds for us ending this agreement immediately.

9. Your listing

Everything you publish must be true and yours to publish — your own photographs, your own description, an itinerary you actually run. Edits go through a short review before they go live; we may decline anything inaccurate, unsafe or not yours, and we will tell you why.

You keep ownership of your photographs and words. You give us permission to show them on palapavibez.com and in the emails and search results that promote your tour, for as long as you are listed with us.

10. Ending this agreement

Either of us can end it at any time, in writing. If you leave, you must still run every tour already booked, and we will still pay you for them.

We may suspend your listings immediately if your insurance lapses, if a listing is materially untrue, or if there is a credible safety concern. We will tell you why.

11. Changes to these terms

If we change anything commercial here — the commission in section 3 above all — we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and it will not apply to bookings already made. Continuing to list after that date is how you accept the change.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Oregon, USA.

Questions about any of this: [email protected]. A real person answers.