From empty account to first cruise on sale

There is no password to invent. You give an email address, we send a sign-in link, you click it. The same door works for signing up and for coming back later.

Where: kitedeck.fr/inscription — or “Create my account” in the header of this site.

1. Type your email address, then submit.
2. Open your mailbox. The message arrives within a minute; if it does not, look in the spam folder before trying again.
3. Click the link. It signs you in and takes you straight to the next step.

Because the mailbox is the key to the account, step 3 is not optional.

The organisation is the space that holds your boats, cruises and clients. Everything you create from now on belongs to it, and colleagues you invite later join it.

Where: Shown automatically after your first sign-in — screen “Welcome”.

Fill in “Organisation name” — your trading name, the one your clients know — and click “Create and continue”. You land on your home page, empty for now: the next section shows what is on it.

Signing in is passwordless, which means whoever opens your mailbox opens your account. A second factor is the only thing standing in the way. KiteDeck therefore requires it: until it is on, every screen sends you back here.

Where: kitedeck.fr/securite — screen “Two-factor authentication”.

1. Open your authenticator app and scan the QR code shown on screen.
2. Type the six-digit code it gives you, and confirm.
3. From then on, signing in asks for that code after the email link.

Do it twice. The screen offers “Add a second enrolment”: a second device, or a password manager that syncs the code across your machines. If you lose a single enrolment, only an administrator can reopen the account — that is a support email and a wait, on a day you will not have chosen.

The back-office speaks 8 languages. The setting is yours alone: a colleague in the same organisation keeps theirs, and neither choice touches what your clients see.

Where: “Settings” → section “Language” → “Interface language”.

Leave it on “Match my browser” if you would rather it follow your machine. Pick a language explicitly if your browser is in one language and your working day in another.

Your home page opens on a banner with a greeting, your organisation’s name and a search bar. Below it, “Getting started” lists what is left to set up and ticks each item off as you do it: Stripe, your sending domain, a destination, a boat, a cruise, the storefront, a first booking and the reminders. Then “Your season”: what is booked, collected and still due, and the year month by month.

The bar at the top of every other page holds the rest:

• “Back”, top left, returns to the page you came from.
• The “Home” menu, next to your logo, lists every section; “Setup” groups the settings.
• The search finds a section by name, and in your data: a client by name, email or phone number (typed with or without spaces or country code), a boat by name or model, a destination, a cruise by title — or by its boat or destination — and a client’s bookings.
• “Help”, top right, opens the help panel. Under “Ask a question”, an assistant answers questions about KiteDeck and offers a button to the right page; it does not see your data. Under “Write to the team”, a ticket — a subject, a message — reaches us with the page you were on, and the answer comes to your email address. Closing the panel by mistake keeps what you typed.

Optional, and it takes two minutes: your logo replaces KiteDeck’s in the top bar, next to your organisation’s name, and your photo fills the home page banner — for the whole team.

Where: “Settings” → section “Branding”.

• “Logo” — PNG, JPEG or WebP, square, ideally 512 × 512 px on a transparent background.
• “Banner photo” — JPEG, PNG or WebP, landscape, ideally 2400 × 800 px. It spans the full width of the screen, so the top and bottom may be cropped.

Larger photos are resized in your browser before they are sent; you do not need to prepare them. iPhone HEIC photos are not accepted: export them as JPEG first. Tick “Remove image” and save to go back to the default.

Deposits are collected through Stripe and land on your Stripe account. KiteDeck never holds your money — it opens the payment and records it. Stripe’s own fees stay yours.

Where: “Settings” → section “Online payment”.

Selling outside the euro zone? Check “Organisation currency” first, a little lower on the same page (EUR, USD, GBP, CHF). Every price and deposit is in that currency, and it can no longer change once a booking exists.

1. Click “Connect Stripe”. You are handed over to Stripe, which asks for your company details, an identity document and a bank account.
2. Come back to KiteDeck. The screen reads “Connected — collecting payments”, or “Verification under way” while Stripe checks your file. That check is on Stripe’s side and can take a day; you can keep setting up meanwhile.
3. Set “Deposit percentage” — the share of the total a client pays to confirm. Save it.
4. Optionally, tick “Charge the balance automatically to the deposit card” and choose how many days before departure. The card used for the deposit is then kept by Stripe, the client is told so under the payment button, and the balance is charged on that day. One attempt only: if the card is declined, the client gets an email with a link to pay, and you get a notification.

Leaving the deposit at 0 means no online payment at all: a booking is then held as an option, and the money is settled between you and the client by other means.

Confirmations, reminders and campaigns leave better from your own address than from a shared one: fewer spam folders, and a sender your clients recognise. Without this step, sending falls back to the default address and still works — it just travels worse.

Where: “Settings” → section “Sending domain”.

1. Enter a subdomain you reserve for sending — something like mg.example.com, not your main domain. Add a sender name if you want one, pick the region, then “Add domain”.
2. KiteDeck shows a table of DNS records. Copy them into your DNS host exactly as shown, one line per record.
3. Come back and click “Refresh status”. Propagation can take up to 72 hours, so a first attempt that reports nothing is normal.

Your storefront is a page with no account and no login, listing the cruises you have opened. It is the link you drop in an Instagram bio, a newsletter or a direct message — clients book on it by themselves.

Where: “Settings” → section “Public storefront”.

1. Choose your “Storefront address”: letters, digits and hyphens only. It becomes kitedeck.fr/o/your-address and your clients will see it, so keep it short and readable.
2. Tick “Public storefront active” and save. The page is live straight away — empty until step 10 opens a cruise.

The storefront and the booking tunnel follow the traveller’s own language, not yours: a German visitor reads German, and the booking confirmation leaves in the language they used.

On a cruise page, the client picks a cabin on the boat plan — or several at once with “Book several cabins”, choosing how many guests sleep in each. One deposit covers them all, and each cabin shows up in your bookings under the same client, one line per guest. From the link in their email, a client can release a cabin on their own while it is still an option.

Each guest fills in a short kiter profile while booking — sex, level, height, weight and own gear or rental. It is optional unless you tick “Kiter profile required” in this same section. Shared cabins are never mixed between strangers: a traveller cannot join a cabin already taken by someone of the other sex who booked separately, and you are notified with their contact to suggest another cabin. Bookings you enter yourself are never blocked; the cruise page simply warns you about a mixed cabin.

To match your own website, open “Storefront” in the menu: colours, a photo of the boat and one per cabin.

A destination is where you sail, and it carries what is owed there. A cruise cannot exist without one.

Where: “Destinations” → “New destination”.

Name it the way a client would say it — Egypt — Red Sea — then open it to fill in two things that will save you typing later:

• “Automatic fees”: port taxes, tips, island fees. Each one has a unit — per person, per person and per day, per cruise, per day — and is applied to every cruise on this destination.
• “Practical info (visa, eSIM, taxi…)” — these are injected later into the reminders your clients receive before departure, so they are written once and never again.

The boat is the piece that makes the rest possible: its cabins are the stock you sell, and the plan drawn here is the plan your clients click on when they book. A berth taken is a berth gone — it cannot be sold twice.

Where: “Boats” → “New boat”.

Start from one of the three options:

• “38 m motor yacht (Red Sea type — 11 cabins)” — three decks, the usual Red Sea safari layout.
• “Catamaran (4 cabins + convertible saloon)”.
• “Blank boat (manual setup)” — for anything that resembles neither.

A template is a starting point, not a cage: open the boat and rename, add or delete decks and cabins until the screen matches the boat you actually sail. For each cabin, set its type — double bed, twin beds, suite, sofa bed, single — its number of berths, and a per-person supplement if that cabin is worth more.

The plan draws cabins from the bow down, two side by side, in the order of the list. Use the ▲ / ▼ arrows next to a cabin to move it towards the bow or the stern, and its “Position on plan” menu to pin it to “Port” or “Starboard”, or give it a row of its own with “Centre” — the owner’s cabin at the bow, for instance. “Auto” keeps the default placement.

A cruise is a departure: one destination, a boat, dates, a price. Creating it is where the previous two steps pay off — the form needs at least one destination and one active boat.

Where: “Cruises” → “+ New cruise”.

• “Title” — what a client reads first: North safari — April.
• “Departure” and “Return”.
• “Price / person (€)”, and a “Solo suppl. (€)” if travelling alone in a cabin costs more.
• The boats: tick one or several — several boats means they sail together, and their cabins are sold as one pool.

Each boat’s configuration is frozen on the cruise the moment you create it. Refitting the boat next winter will not rewrite a departure already on sale.

The cruise exists; now it has to be reachable. There are four ways in, and they all sell from the same stock — a berth booked through an agency disappears from your own page at the same instant.

• Your storefront. kitedeck.fr/o/your-address, from step 7. Nothing more to do: an open cruise appears on it.
• A widget on your own website. Go to “Setup” → “API keys”, click “Generate”, and copy the key the moment it appears — it is shown once and never again. The same screen then displays an iframe snippet to paste as is into your site, and the address of the read-only JSON API for whoever builds it. Neither exposes client data or your margin.
• Aggregators and OTAs. “Setup” → “Distribution” → “Enable” (an active API key is required). Bookings pushed by a partner arrive marked as to confirm: you keep the final say.
• Commissioned resellers. An agency or a partner that sells berths for you: “Setup” → “Resellers”, add it with its commission rate, which you can change at any time. It gets a tracking link to your storefront, and you can also hand it an API key of its own. Every booking that comes through either one is credited to it, with the commission worked out automatically from the booking total. A seat quota per cruise caps how much it can sell. The rate is locked on each booking when it is made, and a cancelled booking owes nothing. What you owe each reseller is shown in “Finances”.
• Promo codes. “Promo codes” → “New code”. A discount, a scope — one cruise or the whole organisation — and a validity window. The discount applies to the participant’s total at the time of booking.

Between a booking and a departure there are balances to collect, passports to ask for and a boarding time to confirm. That is the part that eats an organiser’s evenings, and the part KiteDeck was built to take over.

Where: “Reminders” and “Campaigns”.

• Reminders are sequences that run on their own from D-30 to departure day. If you have no templates yet, click “Create the default templates” and edit them to sound like you. Emails leave by themselves; WhatsApp messages wait for one click, under “Today’s reminders”.
• Campaigns are marketing emails to clients who consented. Write a subject and a message; the “Variables” list next to it inserts {{prenom}}, {{organisateur}} or {{lien_vitrine}} where your cursor is, and each one is replaced for every recipient. The unsubscribe link is added for you, and it works: a client who unsubscribes stops receiving campaigns without you having to remember it.
• How it looks. With “Text in the template”, KiteDeck wraps your text in an email with your logo, your name and a button to your storefront. Set the colours and a logo of their own under “Email template”, at the top of the screen; an empty field reuses your storefront’s. Prefer your own design? Pick “Custom HTML” and paste it, or start from “Start from the HTML template”. Scripts are stripped, and the storefront button and unsubscribe link are still added at the bottom. The “Email preview” shows the real email.
• Segments narrow the audience: by level, by client or prospect, by destination visited, by past or upcoming cruise, or by client folder. Each list takes several values — “Select all” ticks them all — and a client matches if they fit any of them. Several rules still combine: all of them must match.

Send yourself a test first. It renders the real template with example values, so you read what your client will read.