Running Crew Accommodation for Several Owners: Rooms, Seasons and Accounts on Airflow

In the yachting hubs, a lot of crew accommodation isn’t run by the owner. It’s run by someone local who looks after a handful of apartments, a crew house and a few rooms for owners who live elsewhere. If that’s you, this guide covers how to set it up on Airflow so it all appears on Crew HQ.

Can I list several properties and rooms?

Yes. One Airflow account can hold as many listings as your plan allows, plus extra listings if you need them:

Free and Starter: 1 listing included, extra listings $10/month each.
Growth: 3 included. Pro: 10. Business: 25.

Each place, and each room you rent separately, is its own listing with its own photos, prices, calendar and Crew HQ card. Every published listing appears on Crew HQ by itself, near the boats, jobs and companies around it.

Airflow listings are shown on Crew HQ above every directory listing. Pair a paid Airflow plan with a Crew HQ Business Listing for your business and your places are Featured: shown above everything else, with a badge. For a portfolio that is usually the setup that pays back fastest.

Organisations: one per set of books

Airflow groups listings into organisations. An organisation is a group of bookable places that share one set of payments, one Stripe account and one accounting connection. A listing (or resource) is one bookable place: a house, an apartment, a room. One organisation holds many listings, and one login can hold several organisations and switch between them.

The rule of thumb for a manager: one organisation for each set of books. Places that are paid into the same account and reconciled in the same accounting file belong in one organisation. An owner who wants their own payouts and their own accounts gets their own organisation.

You could run several organisations on the Free plan, one free listing each, but every one needs its own card and runs its own payments and commission. For a portfolio that quickly gets complicated. A paid plan that holds each group of properties in one organisation is simpler, and its places can be Featured on Crew HQ. Featured is decided per organisation.

The house in summer, the rooms in winter

Plenty of crew houses work like this: let as a whole in the busy season, by the room the rest of the year, when crew are in town for refits and yard periods.

Airflow handles that with house and rooms by season:

Add the house, then add each room as a listing under it.
Set date ranges for when the place is let whole and when it is let by the room.
In a “whole” season, guests can only book the house. In a “rooms” season, each room books on its own.
A booking of the whole house blocks every room, and a booked room blocks the whole house for those dates. Nothing is double-booked.

Seasonal prices, minimum stays and long stays

Crew rarely stay one night. For each listing you can set:

Seasonal rates for summer, winter and refit season.
Minimum and maximum stays, for example a 7-night minimum in July.
Weekly and monthly rates for crew staying through a yard period.
Payment terms that suit long stays, such as a deposit now, then monthly payments or instalments.

Managing places for owners

There are two ways to set this up. Pick the one that matches who gets paid.

1. One account for your business (you take the payments). List every property in your own Airflow account. Guests pay into your Stripe account, and you settle with the owners. On Pro and above, Airflow produces owner statements for each owner’s properties, showing bookings, your deductions and what is due to them.

2. A separate account per owner (the owner takes the payments). Each owner has their own Airflow account, connected to their own Stripe account, and invites you as a manager. One login can belong to several accounts, and you switch between them in the portal. The owner is paid directly, and you run the calendar, bookings and guests.

Either way, you can invite your team with their own logins as owner, manager or staff. On every plan you only list properties you have the owner’s permission to rent.

Each organisation can connect its own Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or FreshBooks account, so every booking becomes a draft invoice in the right owner’s books. Each draft is one automation from your plan’s monthly allowance; on Free each one costs $2.

If you work with outside agents who take bookings and collect the money themselves, you can record those bookings as agent-collected, so they appear on the calendar without a payment running through Airflow.

What it costs

Listing costs nothing either way. A Crew HQ directory listing for your business is free and takes no commission, and crew contact you directly. Airflow listings carry commission only on bookings:

Through Crew HQ and Airflow Stay: 15% on Free, 12% on paid plans.
On your own Airflow booking page or website: 5% on Free, 2–3% on paid plans.
Taken elsewhere and recorded as already paid: none.

On Crew HQ, the first company listing on an account is free. Each further company you list there needs a paid place on your Business Listing membership, and each paid place makes one company a Business Listing.

For a portfolio, a paid plan usually pays for itself through the lower rates. Full details are in our plain-English guide to fees and on the pricing page.

A practical setup for a small portfolio

Here’s an example. A property manager in Palma looks after two apartments near the marina and a four-room crew house for three owners.

The crew house goes on as a house with four rooms: whole-house lets June–September, rooms October–May, with a monthly rate for refit crew.
The two apartments each get seasonal rates and a 5-night minimum in summer.
Airbnb and Booking.com calendars are pasted into each listing, so dates stay blocked everywhere.
That makes seven listings, so the Pro plan fits, with owner statements for each owner at month end.
All seven appear on Crew HQ: on Palma yacht jobs, on the profiles of Palma-based crew, near the yards and on the crew accommodation map. On Pro, crew bookings through Crew HQ carry 12% commission.
A Crew HQ Business Listing for the business makes all seven Featured at the top of Crew HQ in Palma.
Crew who would rather call or message can reach the business through the same Business Listing page.

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