Your prices in euros are costing you American bookings
On an island with two currencies, a price that does not say what will be charged makes visitors hesitate. Here is how to show euros and dollars properly.
Ten in the morning in Simpson Bay. A couple who flew in from Miami last night is comparing two excursions on one phone. The first site says "€95". The second says "$110, taxes included". Neither of them opened a calculator: they booked the second one. The first operator was cheaper.
Should I show my prices in euros or in dollars?
Show one main currency, the one you actually get paid in, and give the second as a clearly labelled indication. On the French side the euro remains the billing currency; on the Dutch side the dollar is what everyone uses in practice. What makes a visitor hesitate is never the currency you picked, it is not knowing what their card is about to be charged.
One island, two currencies, one visitor
St Martin and St Barts are on the euro. On the Dutch side the official currency is the Caribbean guilder, pegged to the dollar at a fixed 1.80 to one, and dollars circulate everywhere in tourism. Your visitor does not know that border exists. They arrive thinking in dollars, compare four operators in the same half hour, and the price they remember is the one they understood without effort.
That is obvious on the Dutch side, where we work with businesses in Sint Maarten whose customers are almost entirely North American. It is just as true in Grand Case or in Gustavia: a good share of tonight's dining room paid for their hotel in dollars.
The trap of a rate frozen into the page
The temptation is to type "€95 (≈ $110)" straight into the text. The problem is that the euro to dollar rate moves constantly: six months later your page is quoting a figure that is wrong, and your customer is the one who discovers it at the payment screen.
There are two honest ways around it. Either you date the indication, in one quiet line along the lines of "approximate equivalent at this month's rate". Or the conversion is calculated when the page loads, from a rate that is kept up to date. Either way the rule is the same: the converted figure helps someone decide, it is never the amount of the contract.
The number your customer wants before they book
Three pieces of information are enough, and they are almost always missing. The currency you charge in. Whether taxes are included. What the price actually covers, per person or per group. One sentence settles all three: "€95 per person, taxes included. Charged in euros; your bank applies its own rate."
That sentence spares you the most tedious conversation in this business, the guest who comes back with a bank statement and an amount they do not recognise. The full case for showing prices at all, and what hiding them costs, is in showing your prices on your website.
At the payment step
Your payment account settles in one given currency. If you sell online, that currency is what will appear on the checkout page, whatever the product page displayed. A site that advertises a dollar rate and ends on a euro checkout form, with no word of explanation, loses a share of its carts in the final seconds.
The reverse holds in St Barts: a price in euros, a payment in euros, and one line in English that says so, beat a dollar display your bank cannot actually collect.
What it changes for search
People do not search in your currency, they search in theirs. "Jet ski rental St Maarten price", "villa St Barts per week", "taxi Marigot to airport cost": those queries are written in English and thought in dollars. A page that puts its price in writing, with the currency, can answer that question. A page that says "contact us for rates" cannot, and an answer engine like ChatGPT or Perplexity has nothing to quote.
We never promise a first page on Google. We simply note that a page without a price appears in no comparison at all, because there is nothing to compare.
What you can measure
Three signals tell you whether your pricing display is working: the share of visitors who move from the pricing page to the booking step, the number of drop-offs on the payment page, and the messages that start with "is this in euros or dollars". When the third one disappears, the first two improve on their own.
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