If you run a venue in Kuwait — a play area, a party room, a court, a studio, a table — here is exactly what it takes to list your venue on Spotly, what the platform charges, and how the money reaches your bank account.
What it costs to list your venue on Spotly
Pricing first, because it is the first question every venue asks. Spotly takes 12% commission from the host on each completed booking, with a minimum of KWD 0.500 per booking. Your first three bookings are free — zero commission — so the platform earns nothing until it has already sent you three paying customers.
- 12% host-side commission, deducted per completed booking
- KWD 0.500 minimum per booking, so a KWD 2.000 ticket costs KWD 0.500 rather than KWD 0.240
- First 3 bookings free — commission starts on the fourth
- No setup fee, no monthly subscription, no exclusivity clause
Host-side matters. The customer pays the price you publish, with nothing added at checkout. In Kuwait, parents and group organisers compare your Spotly price against your Instagram DMs and your walk-in rate inside the same minute, and a platform markup would make you look more expensive than you actually are. The short reason a two-sided marketplace charges the supply side instead of the demand side: the side holding the inventory is the side that can price it.
What a venue actually lists
A Spotly listing is a bookable unit, not a brochure. You are not uploading a company profile — you are defining something a customer can pay for on a specific date at a specific time. For most venues that means one listing per session type or per space.
- The bookable unit — an open play session, a two-hour party room, a court, a studio slot, a table
- Capacity and duration — how many people, how long, private or shared
- Price in KWD — per person or per slot, plus any add-on such as an extra hour, catering or host staff
- Availability — your weekly opening pattern plus blackout dates for Ramadan, holidays and private events
- Arabic and English — name, description and rules in both; roughly half your customers read Arabic first
- Photos of the real space — three to six, shot in the lighting the customer will walk into
- Rules — age range, socks, outside food, deposit, cancellation window
- A location pin and a phone number somebody answers
The rules field does more work than anyone expects: most refund arguments come from something that was true but unwritten. If you run a kids venue specifically, the fuller version is in our guide to Spotly listings for Kuwait kids venues.
How payout works
Money moves in one direction and you never chase it.
- The customer pays your full listed price by card, in the app, at the moment of booking
- Funds are held until the booking date passes and the slot is marked complete
- Spotly deducts 12%, or the KWD 0.500 minimum if that is higher, and transfers the remainder to your bank account
- Payouts are batched, so a week of bookings arrives as one transfer with a statement listing every booking, fee and net amount
- Cancellations follow the window you set on the listing; no-shows count as completed unless your own rule says otherwise
Two practical consequences. The cash is collected before the visit, which removes the unpaid no-show that quietly eats walk-in venues. And your accountant can take the statement as-is, reconciling one bank line per payout instead of hundreds of card settlements. If rostering staff against the bookings is your real bottleneck, that is a different problem — we covered it in AI workforce scheduling.
Which listings get booked, and which sit
The pattern repeats across venues:
- Honest availability. A calendar that shows slots you cannot actually host costs you the customer permanently, not just once.
- Real photos. Renders and wide-angle tricks raise bookings and raise complaints by the same amount.
- Bilingual copy. An English-only listing loses the half of the market that searches in Arabic.
- Fast replies. Booking intent in this category has a lifespan measured in hours.
- One clear price. Surprises discovered at the door become refund requests.
We have built booking products in Kuwait before — iWash, an on-demand car wash app with live routing and scheduling — and the operators who kept their calendar honest were the ones who got repeat bookings. The ones who treated availability as marketing lost the customer on the first failed slot.
Spotly and your own page do different jobs
Spotly is discovery: people who do not know your venue yet, searching for a session this weekend. Your own page is where returning customers and ad traffic land, and it carries no commission at all. The answer is both, not one — a landing page in seven days gives you the direct channel, and if you want the booking questions, WhatsApp replies and follow-ups handled without hiring a person, that is what our AI work covers.
To list a venue, email hello@khatibdesigns.com with your venue name, area, the session or space you want bookable, your price in KWD and your weekly opening hours. Your first three bookings carry no commission, so the platform is proving itself on your terms before it costs you a fils.