Commission on What You Collect, Not What You Hope to Collect
A deposit isn’t a full payment — so why was your commission charged like one?
Here’s a situation every host knows. A guest books a stay, pays a 30% deposit to hold the dates, and the balance falls due closer to arrival. The booking is real, but most of the money isn’t in your hands yet.
Until today, Airflow billed your booking commission on the full booking value the moment that deposit landed — including the portion the guest hadn’t paid. If the guest later paid the balance, fine. But if they didn’t, you’d already been charged commission on money that never arrived.
We looked hard at that and decided it was wrong. As of today, your commission tracks the money you’ve actually received — nothing more, nothing earlier.
What changed
The principle is simple: you pay commission proportionally, on each payment, as it comes in.
- Guest pays in full → commission on the full amount, charged once. (Exactly as before — nothing changes here.)
- Guest pays a deposit → commission on just that deposit now. The rest is charged later, when the balance is paid.
- Guest pays the balance → commission on the balance, charged at that moment.
So a booking paid in two parts has its commission charged in two parts, each one matched to the cash that actually moved. No more paying upfront for a balance that may never arrive.
Your commission rate hasn’t changed. This isn’t a discount, and we’re not pretending it is. The rate is exactly what it was. What’s changed is when it’s charged and how much at a time — so the total only ever reflects money you’ve genuinely collected.
A quick example
Say your commission is 6% and a guest books a $700 stay, paying a 30% deposit of $210 up front.
- Today: you’re charged commission on the $210 deposit — roughly $12.60 — at the moment the deposit is paid.
- Later, when the $490 balance is paid: you’re charged commission on that — roughly $29.40.
Same total commission across the whole booking. But it arrives in step with your cash, not ahead of it. And if that guest never pays the balance, the second charge simply never happens.
(Figures are illustrative — your actual rate is whatever’s set on your account.)
Why this matters: deposits, cancellations, and no-shows
This is the part that turns a billing tweak into real money in your pocket.
Deposits are non-refundable. That’s the whole point of taking one — it protects you if a guest backs out. So when a guest pays a deposit and then cancels, you keep that deposit. Good.
But under the old model, you’d already paid commission on the entire booking — including the balance the guest never paid and never will. You kept a $210 deposit, but you’d been charged commission as if the full $700 had come in. You were paying commission on revenue that vanished.
Now that can’t happen. You only ever pay commission on money you actually kept.
- A guest cancels after paying a deposit? You keep the deposit; you paid commission only on the deposit. The unpaid balance was never charged.
- A no-show who never pays the balance? No commission on the balance — because no balance arrived.
- A booking that’s paid in full and goes ahead? Identical to before. One payment, one commission charge.
There’s an important honesty point here, and we want to be straight about it: there’s no refund involved, because there’s nothing to refund. We didn’t build a system that overcharges you and pays it back later. We built one that never overcharges in the first place. Commission is non-refundable — but it’s also only ever charged on real, collected money, so you’re never out of pocket for revenue that didn’t show up.
It works the same way across every payment method
This isn’t a card-only feature. Proportional commission applies no matter how your guests pay:
| Payment method | How commission is handled |
|---|---|
| Card (Stripe) | Deducted automatically at the moment of each payment — deposit now, balance later. You never get a separate bill. |
| Paystack | Billed to your Airflow billing account per payment, matched to each amount as it’s collected. |
| Manual / bank transfer | Billed to your Airflow billing account when you confirm each payment received. |
For card payments, you don’t have to think about any of this — the commission comes out of each payment as it settles, automatically. For Paystack and manual payments, where you’re confirming the money yourself, the matching commission is applied to your billing account for that specific payment.
No surprises on manual payments — you see the number first
Manual payments are where hosts most want certainty, because you’re the one marking the money as received. So before you confirm any manual payment, Airflow now shows you a clear confirmation popup with the exact commission amount about to be charged.
You see the payment amount, you see the commission, and you confirm — or you don’t. There’s no guessing and no charge that lands without you having seen it coming first. What you confirm is what you pay.
The principle we’re standing on
We could have left the old model in place. It was simpler for us to bill everything once, up front. But it asked hosts to pay commission on money they hadn’t received and might never receive — and that’s not a relationship we want with the people who run their businesses on Airflow.
So here’s the rule we’re committing to, in plain words:
Your Airflow commission always tracks real money received. Simple, fair, predictable.
You collect a deposit, you pay commission on the deposit. You collect the balance, you pay commission on the balance. The guest disappears after the deposit? You keep the deposit, and the commission you paid matches exactly what you kept. Your cash flow and your commission move together, in the same direction, at the same time.
Nothing for you to do
This is live now and applies automatically to new payments — there’s no setting to switch on and nothing to configure. If you take deposits, you’ll simply notice that your commission now arrives in step with your guests’ payments instead of all at once.
Want to see how guest payments and deposits flow end to end? Read Guest Payments & Deposits, or take a look at how Airflow handles commission on direct bookings. If you’re not set up yet, get started here.