For river cruises, expedition ships and charter vessels

A Floating Hotel NeedsHotel Software

A small ship is a hotel with restaurants, a bar, a spa, excursions and a store room — except it also moves, and you cannot reorder mid-voyage. Almost no software covers all of that together, so operators run cabins on one system, the bar on another and provisioning on a spreadsheet. FullGuest runs the whole vessel: cabins, every outlet, excursions, stores and crew, with one folio per guest.

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Why Small Ships Get Badly Served

Cruise software is built for the giants — ten thousand berths, casinos, a dozen decks. A 40-cabin river boat or a 90-guest expedition ship gets quoted a system priced for a fleet, or ends up stitching hotel tools together and hoping.

  • Cabins in one system, restaurant and bar in another, excursions in a third — and no single guest bill at the end.
  • Onboard spend is written on a chit and re-keyed at disembarkation, which is where the arguments happen.
  • Provisioning is a spreadsheet. You load stores in port and cannot reorder for a week, so a miscount is a shortage nobody can fix at sea.
  • Nobody knows the true cost of a dish once you factor in what it cost to get it aboard.
  • Crew rotas, certificates and drills are tracked on paper by whoever has the clipboard.
  • Guests want to book the spa or an excursion from their cabin and have to walk to reception to do it.

One Vessel, One System

Everything a small ship sells and consumes runs in one place, which is what makes a single guest folio possible and what makes provisioning something you can actually plan.

  • Cabins run as rooms: reservations, guest register with ID capture, housekeeping and one folio per guest.
  • Every outlet — dining room, bar, café, sun deck — orders and bills onto that same folio, so disembarkation is one settlement.
  • Excursions, spa and treatments as bookable services, with real capacity caps per slot and per day.
  • Provisioning as a central store: recipes, batch and expiry tracking, first-expiry-first-out consumption, and costed transfers between galley and outlets.
  • Crew rosters, SOPs in the crew's own language, and certificate records with expiry reminders.
  • Guests order and book from their cabin by QR — no app, and in their own language.

What It Covers Aboard

Cabins and the guest register

Cabins behave as rooms: assignment, occupancy, housekeeping status, and a guest record with identity documents captured before boarding rather than in a queue at the gangway.

  • Web check-in with ID photo and signature before the guest arrives
  • Guest register for the paperwork every operator has to keep
  • Housekeeping status per cabin, tied to turnaround days
  • Group bookings for charters and block-booked departures

One folio, settled once

The single most useful thing on a ship: everything a guest spends anywhere aboard lands on one bill, so nobody reconciles chits at disembarkation.

  • Dining, bar, spa, excursions and shop all post to the cabin
  • Guests can see what they have spent so far, rather than being surprised
  • One invoice at the end, in the currency you operate in
  • Deposits taken at booking and settled against the final bill

Provisioning you can actually plan

The constraint that makes a ship different from a hotel: you load in port and live with it. So the store room has to be honest, and consumption has to be tracked against recipes rather than guessed.

  • Recipes drive what a voyage will consume, so you load against a number
  • Batch and expiry tracked with oldest-first consumption
  • Costed transfers between the main store, the galley and each outlet
  • Wastage recorded by item, so the next voyage loads better than the last
  • Recipe cost recalculates from what you actually paid at the last port

Crew, standards and records

A small crew covers many roles, and turnover is constant. The venue should hold the knowledge rather than the person who is leaving at the end of the season.

  • Rosters, time off and shift swaps for a rotating crew
  • SOPs read or listened to in the crew member's own language, with acknowledgement tracked
  • Certificate and licence records with expiry reminders
  • Daily checklists that are noticed when they are missed

The Shape of It

1
Folio per guest, whole voyage
1
System for cabins, outlets and stores
95+
Languages guests can order in
0
Chits to reconcile at disembarkation

Stitched Tools vs One System

How most small ships run today
  • Cabins, bar and excursions on separate systems that do not meet
  • Onboard spend on paper chits, re-keyed at the end of the voyage
  • Provisioning in a spreadsheet, loaded on instinct
  • No idea what a dish costs once it is aboard
  • Crew certificates and drills tracked on a clipboard
  • Guests walk to reception to book anything
FULLGUEST
FullGuest
  • Cabins, every outlet and every excursion in one system
  • One folio per guest, settled once at disembarkation
  • Provisioning from recipes with batch, expiry and real consumption
  • True plate cost, recalculated from what you paid at the last port
  • Crew rosters, multilingual SOPs and certificate expiry reminders
  • Guests order and book from the cabin by QR, in their own language

Before You Ask Us to a Demo

What size of vessel is this actually for?+

River cruises, expedition and small ocean ships, day-charter and dinner-cruise operators — broadly, vessels that run like a boutique hotel with outlets rather than like a floating resort city. If you are operating a 3,000-berth liner with casino and duty-free bonded stock across jurisdictions, this is not built for you and we would rather say so.

Does it work without internet at sea?+

Not fully, and this is the honest limit. FullGuest is a connected system: it needs a working link to take an order or post to a folio, so it suits vessels with reliable onboard connectivity — river routes, coastal itineraries and ships with dependable satellite. If your vessel routinely loses connection for hours, that is a real constraint and you should weigh it before anything else on this page.

Can it handle voyage-based pricing?+

Rates are priced by date and cabin type, which fits itineraries sold as dated departures. It is not a voyage-package engine with per-berth occupancy tiers of the kind large lines use, so if your pricing is built around triple and quad occupancy across cabin grades, ask us how it maps to your fares before committing.

What about muster lists, port itineraries and immigration manifests?+

Those are maritime systems and they are not ours. FullGuest covers the hospitality side of the vessel — cabins, food and beverage, excursions, stores and crew records. It captures guest identity documents at check-in, which is usually the input your manifest process needs, but it does not file them for you.

How does provisioning actually help?+

Recipes turn a passenger manifest and a menu into a quantity — how much flour, protein and wine a voyage will consume — so you load against a figure rather than an instinct. Then batch and expiry tracking with oldest-first consumption keeps fresh stock rotating, and wastage recorded by item means each voyage loads better than the last.

Can guests book excursions from their cabin?+

Yes. Excursions, spa treatments and tastings run as bookable services with genuine capacity limits — a set number of seats per departure, enforced when two guests book at the same moment — and the charge lands on their cabin folio.

We run several vessels. Does that work?+

Yes, the same way a group runs several outlets: each vessel is its own operation with its own stock and staff, reported on one definition of revenue and cost, with a shared store ashore able to supply them via costed transfers.

See whether it fits your vessel

Bring your itinerary, your outlet list and how you provision. We will tell you plainly what fits, what does not, and whether the connectivity on your route is good enough — before anyone talks about price.