Frequently Asked Questions

Your Profile Quality score is set by Kumutu Operator Managers and is either low, medium, or high based on the quality of information in both your Operating Base Details and information provided in your Activities. The higher your quality score, the higher your activities will be in search results and the more Affiliate Networks your activities will be distributed to.

Your score will be higher if you include full itineraries, longer descriptions, and additional information in inclusions, exclusions, and please note.

Kumutu Managers regularly review updates made to activities and operating base details, but for faster service please notify us if you have updated your information and would like a manager to review and increase your Profile Quality score.

If you are having trouble signing up, uploading your details and getting your website live on kumutu.com you may want to manually fill in your information. This can be done by downloading the Word document attached below (available in both English and German), filling it in with as much detail as possible and emailing to support@kumutu.com. We can then take this document and upload it ourselves. 

Please make sure to include your logo and at least 3-4 photos (some for your main page and at least one per activity).

Please also indicate if you started the sign up process on Kumutu.

If you are using the German document, please try to fill it in English as our translation service is not yet fully functional.

To find your Facebook username, click on "Account" in the top toolbar, then "Account Settings", then on the primary Settings tab you should see the second item down labeled Username. Your username should be right there. 

If you would like to use your company Facebook Page as a link from your Kumutu profile, go to your company page in Facebook, then click on "Edit Info" under your Company name. You company username or id should be the second item down. 

For more information see this eHow document:
http://www.ehow.com/how_5090053_facebook-username.html

No worries, just go to the forgot password page and follow the instructions on how to reset your password and wait for us to send further instructions to your e-mail.

There could be several reasons this happens. Check the following:

• your password is case sensitive, so make sure you do not have CAPS lock on
• enable cookies (Learn more)

If these still doesn't help, please contact us and include your e-mail account, browser name and version, and briefly describe the problem.

Date Ranges are how we specify a time and price for an activity.

We understand that many operators have specific prices for certain times of the year or certain times of the day. For instance, let's say you are a sailing course company in the UK. Around mid August you are packed with bookings and in January, not as much. So to cope with demand you have higher prices in peak season. For another example, you run courses every Monday and Thursday year round, except not on certain holidays. Date Ranges let you do just that.  They are a flexible way for you to designate which days you operate, how many spaces (or seats) you have available on those days, and what your price is for this activity for those days. 

Start dates

As most operators we work with have weekly reoccurring activities, date ranges let you select a time period and then what days of the week your operate in during that time period. If you have non-weekly activity start times, then select a single day for the date range and the day of the week that occurs on. Date Ranges can be as long or short as you want - a single day or several months. 

Overlapping dates

Something to note, Date Ranges can not overlap, but you can have a shorter date range within another date range. For instance, If you have Date Range from 01 Jan - July 31 you can not have another Date Range from 01 June - August 31. But you can have another Date Range from 01 June - 31 June. We think this is a great way to set your yearly prices and then set peak times or holidays within your yearly prices. 

Holiday or non-operating dates

If you want to set a single day as a holiday or non-operating day, then select a single day in the Date Range, then set your Spaces available to zero (0). We will make sure not to show these days with zero spaces when a customer is looking for an activity.

Start times and duration

You can have multiple start times throughout a day with a start time and duration. Make sure your duration includes the total time the customer is required to be with you. For instance, lt's say your customer needs to be ready at your location 8:00am, they start their white water rafting at 10:00am after checkin and safety briefing, they finish rafting at 3:00pm, you have a debrief and photos at 4:00pm, then they are free to go at 5:00pm. Set your start time 8:00am and the duration to 9 hours. Because they first need to know how long they are busy for, not just how long the rafting is. Mention the rafting time in your description.

Price

Your prices should include all taxes, surcharges, park entry fees, VAT, etc. It should be the complete total price a customer needs to pay to complete that activity. The largest complaint we get from operators are from ones that tack on charges throughout the activity that were not stated up front. Don't hide your price for the customer. Show the full total price and convince customers what an amazing experience they are getting for that price.

Spaces

Spaces are the amount of seats, spaces, or allotment that you want to be bookable through Kumutu. Some operators want us to be able to fill all 20 of their daily Spaces, while others only want to allow Kumutu to fill 2 per day. We are happy to try to fill any or all your spaces, so use this area to fill in what suits your business best. Make sure you do have this space available though. When a booking is made, we will alert you immediately and you are obligated to fullfil that booking. Use the Lead Time down below if you need a long notice period.

Some activities are only bookable for groups. We consider a group as a single Space. For instance, you are a hot air ballooning company that has a special 3 person basket for a couple (and 1 guide). You only take groups of 2 people and you have a separate activity for people on their own. This is a circumstance where you would describe the activity as the price is inclusive for the total of 2 people, but you would set only 1 space per couple.

Minimum Spaces

Some companies only run their activities when they have a minimum amount of customer on a given day / start time. For instance, you are a trekking company that only takes people through the mountains when you have 5 customers all paid and ready to go. You would loose a lot of money if only 1 customer went with a guide. This is where Minimum Spaces come in. At the times of writing we have not yet quite figured out how to handle minimum spaces including how we handle credit card payments, notifications to customers, notifications to suppliers, how long to hold spaces, when to tell customers their previously booked activity didn't get enough support so it is canceled, etc, etc. If you have any suggestions on how this should work, please let us know. Realistically, we expect to launch minimum spaces in mid 2011. 

* If you need more flexibility or have a better suggestion for us on how to implement times and prices, please let us know by clicking on the feedback sidebar or our contact form.

Of course you can. Please contact us with the type of advertising you are looking for and we will promptly get back to you with a quote.

Currently we do not display the phone number or street address on your profile, but do send it via email to the customer when they purchase an activity. 

To have your phone number and street address displayed on your profile, you can sign up for one of our premium packages. While these packages are not yet available on the website, please feel free to contact us and we can get it set up for you.

You URL is set when you supply your shortname in the Company Details section. Your URL is kumutu.com/ followed by your shortname. For instance, if your shortname is superscuba, then your URL would be http://kumutu.com/superscuba. Your URL is nice, short and a great way to promote your operations and activities; feel free use it your marketing materials. 

Please note, you are able to change your URL when needed, but be careful not to change it too frequently as search engines like Google prefer web addresses that don't change often and they will take some time before they update their links.

All prices for activities being sold through Kumutu should be quoted as the final price of the activity including taxes/VAT.

Although a supplier can choose the price they charge for the customer, we always encourage them to use their best price. In doing so they can be marked as a "Best Price Guaranteed Supplier" on their profile. For more information on Kumutu's best price guarentees please visit the "What is Kumutu's "Best Price Guarantee" FAQ?

If there are additional added costs unrelated to the activity price, such as a required "National Park Entrance Fee," then this fee should be quoted in the "Exclusions" section under the activities "Additional Information (optional)" area. These additional fees can be paid onsite by the customers and are excluded from any commission rates.

The reason your profile is unavailable on World Adrenaline is because we haven't officially released our system*.

As you can imagine, building such a large backend and frontend web application takes a lot of time and effort. During this time we also have to focus on bringing in suppliers so our site has content when it is released. Additionally, we felt that it would be best to aggregate suppliers early in the process so that they could provide us with continuous feedback as to how our system was working.

*Suppliers - Once this system is complete, we will notify you directly so that you can ensure your content and activities are up to date.

Payments Advance is for activity providers who require customers to pay the entire activity cost upfront. Once a booking is made with this option, Kumutu collects the full amount from the customer in advance and then transfers the activity fee, less Kumutu's commission, to the activity supplier.*

• Customer pays full activity cost at the time of booking
• Kumutu takes the full payment in advance and pays the operator the full amount minus our commission once the customer has completed the activity

Payments Reserve is when the customer pays a small deposit and the remainder to the operator directly. This option is for operators who prefer not to deal with money transfers. How this works is that when a customer books an experience they pay an upfront deposit (equal to an operators agreed commission) directly to Kumutu and the remaining cost of the activity is paid to the operator on the customers arrival.

• Customer pays the operator directly
• Only a deposit is required at booking (equal to Kumutu’s commission rate)
• Customer pays the remaining balance directly to the operator on arrival

Payments Collect is when the customer pays the provider directly upon arrival. Kumutu will then invoice the provider at the end of the month for our commission. 

• Customer pays the provider directly upon arrival or within the providers terms and conditions
• No deposit is required at booking, only a CC number used in case of noshows
• Kumutu will invoice the provider at the end of month

For those operators who don't want to worry about money transfers. Get your payments directly from the customer with our post-pay booking option.

For operators who choose to use post-pay, Kumutu collects a deposit at the time of booking from the  customer which is equal to the Kumutu/Operator agreed upon commission rate. 

When the customer arrives onsite for the activity, the consumer pays the rest of the money owed directly to the operator. This amount is equal to the full cost of the activity, less the deposit already paid to Kumutu.

Commission rates for the post-pay option are 10% on all bookings.

Example of a post-pay booking:

Ryan's Bungy sells a "Wicked Bungy Jump" on Kumutu for $100USD. Ryan prefer's to use the post-pay option and is about to make his first sale on Kumutu. Ryan and Kumutu have agreed to a 10% commission rate so when Barney (the customer) purchases his "Wicked Bungy Jump" he only pays a $10USD (10%) deposit. Two weeks later when Barney arrives at Ryan's Bungy he shows up with his Kumutu booking voucher and hands it to Ryan. Ryan than politely reminds Barney that he can now accept the payment for remainder of the activity cost, $90USD (90%). After paying Ryan the remaining $90USD Barney goes on to enjoy the most "wicked" bungy jump ever! 

Once your profile and activities have been added, you currently need to request Online Bookings to be enabled for your account. Once online bookings are enabled for your account, all your activities will now be bookable online.

For each bookable activity, please make sure the activities availability in the future is correct including the number of spaces available for each date. 

As you'll notice our commission rates are really low. This is because we work on a high volume of bookings and thus are able to costs per booking low.

When a customer makes a booking online, they are required to enter their credit card information and pay a 10%* deposit / reservation fee for the activity reservation.

If you have selected that verification is required for this activity an authorization will be placed on the credit card and an email will be sent to you and the customer stating verification is pending. You will need to either confirm (the card will then be charged) or deny the booking (the authorization will be voided). If no action is taken in 24 hours, the authorization will be voided and booking will be canceled. Once confirmed, the customer will receive a confirmation email on Kumutu letterhead for the booking. 

If verification is not required, the credit card will be charged and the customer notified of the booking confirmation immediately. 

You will then be able to view all upcoming bookings in your admin area and Kumutu will email you your daily bookings. 

Once a booking has been confirmed, you will receive all contact details for the customer, should you need to get in touch with them before they arrive. The customer is obligated to pay the remaining 90%* directly to you on arrival or earlier based on your terms and conditions. 

Cancelations

If there is a no-show or cancelation outside of your cancelation window, you can request Kumutu to provide you with the customer's credit card to charge them for either the full activity price or as your terms and conditions state.

If the customer cancels within the cancelation window (which you set when you created your activity) the customer will be fully refunded their deposit. 

If weather or reasons requires you to reschedule the customer's booking and no agreeable date/time is available, you can cancel the booking and the customer will be fully refunded.  

Additional payment models

The current payment model described above is called Payments Reserve. In the near future, Kumutu will roll out two other payment models: Payments Collect and Payments Advance. Payments Collect will only require the customer to enter their credit card and no deposit will be charged. The customer will pay the full amount to you on arrival and Kumutu will invoice you monthly for our commission. Payments Advance will require the customer to pay the full amount of the activity immediately when booking and Kumutu will transfer the activity cost, minus our commission, immediately after the customer has taken place in the activity. If either of these models interests you, please email support@kumutu.com for more information on when they will be available.

* The deposit percentage will change and is equal to the agreed commission rate with Kumutu.com.

Kumutu connects your operations to thousands of travel sellers worldwide. We have agreements with large travel websites, sellers and agents who have the ability to resell our adventure activities in our system. This network has a huge reach directly to thousands of consumers. By loading your information in to Kumutu's distribution system, you then have one place to manage your activities and availability and this information gets broadcasted to thousands of sellers and consumers globally. More consumers seeing your activities will generate you more sales.

You can edit your account by logging in, and click on the My Account button at the top right corner of the page. There are numerous details you can update in there

Operators should only update their profile at Kumutu.com. Once at Kumutu.com, click on the "Log In" link on the upper right hand side of the page and login. You'll be automatically directed to your account page where your will be able to edit your account information and profile.

We consider an activity operator as an end supplier who manages their own activities, owns their own equipment and employs their own guides. They are also typically a registered company with the local government and have a storefront, although this is not a requirement.