Sell the Airport Pickup at Checkout: Guest Extras in Action

The same booking can be worth more — you just have to offer the extra

A guest books four nights at your place. They’re arriving on a late flight, they don’t know the area, and they’d happily pay for a pickup if someone offered one. Most of the time, nobody does. The booking goes through at the nightly rate, the guest sorts out their own transfer, and a clean piece of revenue walks straight past you.

That’s the quiet gap in most hosting setups. The guest is already paying, already in a buying mood, already on your checkout page — and that’s the single best moment to offer them something more. A transfer. A late checkout. A welcome basket. A private chef for one evening. None of it changes the nightly rate; all of it lifts what each booking is worth.

Airflow lets you sell those extras directly. You set up your add-ons once, and guests can buy them while they book or any time before they check out. The money lands in your account, the commission is handled automatically, and every extra is tracked against the booking. No invoices to write, no follow-up to chase. Here’s how it works.

In your portal, each property has an Extras panel where you create the things you want to sell. Each one takes a name, a short description, an icon, a price, and a pricing unit — per stay, per night, or one-time. Flip it active and it’s live.

Typical extras hosts add:

Airport pickup — a flat transfer fee, charged once.
Late checkout — a one-time fee to hold the room past the usual hour.
Activities and excursions — a boat trip, a guided hike, paddleboards for the week.
A private chef — a per-stay or per-night add-on for an in-villa dinner.
A welcome pack — groceries, wine, a fruit basket waiting on arrival.

That’s the whole setup. Once an extra is active on a property, it appears automatically wherever guests can book or manage that stay — you don’t touch it again per booking.

Alongside optional extras, the same panel handles mandatory fees and taxes — a cleaning fee, a tourism levy, a service charge. Those are applied automatically and shown to the guest separately from the optional stuff, so the things they can skip and the things they can’t are never confused. This post is about the optional extras, which is where the extra revenue lives.

Guests can buy at checkout — while their wallet is already out

This is the highest-converting moment, and it’s built in. When a guest books one of your properties — on your own booking site, on your marketplace listing, or through the portal — your active extras show up as selectable cards in the checkout flow, each with its icon, name, and price.

The guest ticks the airport pickup, adds a welcome pack, and the total updates to include them. When they pay, they pay for the stay and the extras in one go, through your own payment processor. There’s a clear “skip extras” path too, so nobody’s forced past them — but the offer is right there at the exact moment they’re most likely to say yes.

Behind the scenes, each chosen extra is recorded against the booking the instant it’s paid. You don’t reconcile anything. The booking already knows it included a transfer and a welcome pack, and for how much.

Guests can also buy during the stay — not just at booking

The checkout isn’t the only chance. Once a booking exists, the guest can open their trip in the guest portal and browse the same extras there — before arrival or mid-stay.

This is where the late-decision revenue lives. The guest who didn’t think about a chef at booking but wants one for their last night. The family who decides on day two that they’d like a boat trip. They open their trip, pick the extra, and pay for it through the portal — again, straight to your account.

Some extras you’ll want to gate behind a quick yes from you. If an extra needs your sign-off — a chef on a specific date, an excursion with limited capacity — the guest requests it, you approve it, and then they can pay. Extras that don’t need approval can be bought outright. Either way, the request and the payment are tracked against the booking automatically.

The money goes to you, and the commission is handled

This is the part that makes extras real revenue rather than a nice idea. Extras are paid through your own connected payment processor — the same Stripe or Paystack account that handles your booking payments. The money for that airport pickup lands where your booking money lands. There’s no separate payout to wait for and no third party sitting between you and your guest.

Airflow’s commission is handled in the background, the same way it is on the booking itself. When an extra is paid at checkout as part of the booking, it’s simply part of that booking’s value, and commission is taken proportionally — you can read exactly how that proportional model works in Commission on What You Collect, Not What You Hope to Collect. When an extra is bought later through the portal, it’s charged through your processor and the matching commission is accounted for on that payment. You never get a separate bill to puzzle over, and you’re never charged on money you didn’t collect.

A quick look at the upside

Say you run a place at $200 a night and a guest books four nights — an $800 stay.

Airport pickup: +$40
Late checkout: +$30
Welcome pack: +$25
One chef dinner: +$120

That’s $215 of extras on an $800 booking — a little over 25% more revenue from the same guest, the same dates, the same property. Not every guest takes every extra, and plenty take none. But the offer costs you nothing to make, it’s sitting in front of every guest automatically, and across a season the ones who say yes add up fast.

(Figures are illustrative — your prices and your guests’ choices are entirely your own.)

There’s a private side to this too

Not every charge is something you advertise. Airflow also supports host-only items — private charges like a damage claim, a lost-key fee, or a late-checkout penalty — that you assign to a booking yourself. These never appear in your public extras menu and guests can’t add them, but once you assign one, it shows up in the guest’s portal as an amount due that they can pay online. Same payment rails, same tracking, kept cleanly separate from the things you’re actively selling.

Where this is today — and where it’s headed

We want to be straight about the edges. What’s live now:

Building your extras menu per property in the portal.
Optional extras (plus mandatory fees and taxes) shown at checkout across your booking pages, with the total updating and a skip path.
Guests buying extras during their stay through the guest portal, with host approval where you want it.
Payment through your own Stripe or Paystack account, with commission handled automatically.
Every extra tracked against its booking, and host-only charges for private items.

Still in development: a richer fulfilment dashboard — a single view to move every requested extra through confirmed, fulfilled, and delivered — and per-property reporting that totals your extras revenue over a period. Further out, a cross-property network where adjacent local providers can offer their services into your guests’ extras menu. Those are coming; the revenue-earning core above is here today.

The principle

A booking shouldn’t be a single take-it-or-leave-it number. Your guests want more than four walls and a bed, and the moment to offer it is while they’re already saying yes — and again while they’re already enjoying the place. Airflow turns that into a few cards on a screen and a payment to your own account, with nothing extra on your plate.

You set up the extras once. Guests buy them at checkout or during the stay. The money’s yours, the commission’s handled, and it’s all tracked. That’s a bigger booking for the same work.

Want to see how the rest of the guest payment flow fits together? Read Deposit Now, Balance Later and Commission on What You Collect, or take a closer look at how Airflow handles direct bookings. If you’re not set up yet, get started here.