Change Your Plan
How to move to a higher plan from the portal, what changes the moment a plan change goes through, and what a lower plan does to your displays, slides and airport add-ons.
Change Your Plan
This article explains how to move to a higher or a lower plan, what a plan change does to your account the moment it goes through, and what a lower plan switches off. Plan changes in LobbyFlight take effect immediately — there is no scheduled change that waits for the end of the billing period.
Upgrading from the portal
The fastest way to upgrade is the billing page itself: go to Portal → Billing. Below your current plan you will find the Upgrade Your Plan section with a card for each plan above yours and an Upgrade Now button on it. On Basic you see both the Pro and the Premium card, so you can go straight from Basic to Premium without passing through Pro. On Pro you see the Premium card. On Premium the section is not shown at all, because there is nothing above it.
Pressing Upgrade Now changes the subscription right there — you are not sent to Stripe and you do not have to re-enter payment details. The new limits are written to your account, the prorated difference is added to your next invoice, and the billing page reloads with the new figures. If your account has no active subscription yet, the same button sends you to Stripe Checkout instead, because there is no subscription to change.
Only the account owner can change the plan, upwards or downwards — it takes the billing permission (billing.write). Other users see neither the upgrade cards nor the Change plan section; the billing page tells them "Only the account owner can change the plan." instead.
The Manage Subscription button next to your current plan is a different thing. It opens the Stripe billing portal in the same browser tab, where you look after the payment method and invoices. Plan changes are made on the billing page in LobbyFlight, not there. Use the browser's back button to return to LobbyFlight.
What a plan change costs
A plan change is prorated in both directions. Stripe sets the part of the current period you have already paid for on the old plan against the rest of the period at the new rate and puts the difference on your next invoice. After an upgrade in the middle of a month that is an extra charge for the days that are left, not a full month; after a downgrade it is a credit for the unused part of the higher plan, deducted from that invoice. Before a downgrade, the preview shows the credit and your next invoice whenever Stripe can calculate them. From the next billing date onwards you pay the full price of the new plan. The exact lines appear on the invoice, which you can review under Portal → Billing in the payment history and in the Stripe billing portal.
Because the difference is settled with the next invoice, the plan change itself does not wait for a payment. If that invoice cannot be charged later — an expired card, insufficient funds — follow Payment Failures.
What each plan gives you
Every plan includes one hotel and one airport. What the tier actually scales is the number of displays, not the number of airports.
| Basic (€69/month) | Pro (€149/month) | Premium (€199/month) | |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Hotels | 1 | Up to 6 (each beyond the first €49/month) | Unlimited (each beyond the first €49/month) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Displays | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Airports included | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Additional airports | Not available | €99/month each | €99/month each |
| Own info slides | 0 | 5 | Unlimited |
| Languages per display | 1 | 2 | All 42 |
| Branding | Logo only | Colours and logo | White-label, custom domain option |
| Weather widget | No | Yes | Yes |
| Analytics dashboard | No | No | Yes |
| Push notifications | No | No | Yes |
| Flight data refresh | Every 60 minutes | Every 30 minutes | Every 5 minutes |
| Support | Priority | Priority and phone |
Pro is marked Most Popular in the portal. One smaller difference is worth knowing before you move down: airline logos on the board are on by default on Pro and Premium and off by default on Basic.
What happens the moment a change goes through
The new entitlements are written to your account immediately, so the portal reflects them as soon as the billing page reloads. Your displays follow on their own schedule: they poll for their configuration and pick up the change at the next refresh, which is why nothing needs to be reinstalled. The display URL does not change, and no device has to be touched.
Two consequences are easy to miss:
Moving to a lower plan
Moving down happens on the same billing page. Below the upgrade cards, the Change plan section shows every plan below yours with a Downgrade to … button: on Premium you see Pro and Basic, on Pro you see Basic. On Basic the section is not shown, and it only appears once there is a subscription to change.
The button changes nothing yet. It opens a preview of what the lower plan means for your organisation, worked out from your actual displays and slides:
Flight Concierge is not affected. You confirm with a checkbox and the Downgrade to … button, and the change takes effect immediately.
Switched off, never deleted
The displays you did not keep show a "switched off" screen instead of the board, and the info slides beyond the limit stop playing but stay in your library. Nothing is deleted — not the displays, not the slides, not your branding, languages or design settings. Settings the lower plan does not include stay stored; the board simply does not apply them. After an upgrade you switch displays and slides back on under Portal → Displays and Portal → Content, up to the limit of the new plan.
Changes made in the Stripe billing portal
Plan changes belong on the billing page in LobbyFlight. If a plan is ever changed on Stripe's side, LobbyFlight applies the new plan automatically, but without a preview and without a choice of displays. If the new plan covers fewer hotels than you run, the newest additional hotels are paused automatically — never your main property, and never the hotel that carries the subscription. The account owner receives one email about it, and the hotels switch back on by themselves as soon as the plan covers them again.
Checking the result
Portal → Billing is the place to verify a change. The page states your account rather than the price list: the price and status at the top, the renewal date, and then the entitlements that are actually stored for you — displays, own slides, languages, branding level, weather and analytics. If those match the plan you bought, the change went through.
The rest of the portal follows the same numbers. Airports live under Portal → Airports, info slides under Portal → Content, and languages are set per display under Portal → Displays → open the display → Language Settings, where the header shows how many of your allowance you have used.
If a plan change fails
If the change cannot be completed you get "Failed to change plan. Please try again or contact support." on the billing page. In practice this is almost always the payment method or a subscription that Stripe could not update. Check the card under Manage Subscription first, then retry the upgrade. If it still fails, write to us with your hotel name and the plan you were trying to move to.
Complimentary accounts are a separate case. They cannot change plans at all — the billing page shows the complimentary view instead of the plan cards, and both the plan-change and the Stripe portal endpoints refuse the request. That is expected, not a fault.
Annual billing
Each plan can also be billed yearly instead of monthly. The yearly price is ten times the monthly one — two months free, about 17 percent — and the interval is chosen at checkout. Annual pricing is a property of the subscription, so switching between monthly and yearly is not the same operation as changing tier; contact us if you are already subscribed and want to move to yearly billing.
Under the hood
Upgrades and downgrades both post to POST /api/stripe/change-plan with a body of { targetPlan: 'basic' | 'pro' | 'premium', keepDisplayIds? }. The endpoint requires the billing permission (billing.write) and answers 403 without it. Before a downgrade the billing page loads the preview from GET /api/stripe/change-plan/preview?target=…. A downgrade without a valid display selection for every hotel over the new limit is refused with 409 display_selection_required, together with the preview; a plan whose hotel limit the organisation exceeds, paused hotels included, with 409 too_many_properties_for_plan.
The endpoint updates the organisation's Stripe subscription with proration_behavior: 'create_prorations' and writes the new entitlements — subscription_tier, max_displays, max_info_slides, branding_level, languages_enabled, weather_enabled, analytics_enabled and can_add_airports — to every property that follows the organisation's subscription. On a downgrade it then sets is_active = false on the displays that were not kept and on the info slides beyond the new limit; on a move to Basic it cancels the airport add-ons.
Changes made on Stripe's side arrive as a customer.subscription.updated webhook, which applies the same tier update and sends a confirmation email when the tier has actually changed. If the new plan covers fewer hotels than the organisation runs, the webhook pauses the newest additional hotels with the reason plan_limit, lifts that pause again once the plan fits, and then resyncs the additional-hotel quantity on the subscription.
Next steps
Support
Questions about a plan change: info@lobbyflight.com.