Airbnb Says 15%. Your Books Say 18.4%.
Part of the guide: Payouts that don’t match
The number you agreed to is not the number you pay
Ask a host what Airbnb charges and you will get the headline: 15%, or 3% if they are on the split-fee model. Ask what actually landed in their bank against what the guest paid, and the answer is usually a pause.
The gap is not a conspiracy. It is arithmetic. Between the guest’s card and your payout sit a host service fee, a guest service fee that inflates the gross the guest thinks they paid, occupancy taxes collected and remitted on your behalf, currency conversion if the guest paid in something else, and the occasional resolution or refund. Every one is disclosed. None of them appears on the line that says “15%”.
So the useful question is not what is the rate. It is what proportion of the money a guest handed over ended up as yours — and that is a division you can only do if something is holding both numbers.
What it looks like when you can see it
This is the channel panel from an Airflow demo account: one small portfolio, one year.
Two things are worth pulling out.
Airbnb’s effective rate is 18.4%, not 15%. Three and a half points, on 41,200 of gross, is about 1,480 — roughly a week of peak-season income, quietly gone, on the channel the host would have described as “the 15% one”.
Direct is the cheapest channel and the smallest. On this demo account its only cost in the chart is Airflow’s booking-page commission (your plan’s rate is on the pricing page), and it produces 12,400. If a tenth of the Airbnb volume moved across, the 18.4% on it is about 750 a year, and you would keep that less your booking-page rate, at no extra occupancy. That is the actual argument for direct bookings, and it is worth making in numbers rather than in principle.
| Channel | Guest paid | You kept | Headline rate | Actual rate | Share of income |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airbnb | 41,200 | 33,619 | 15% | 18.4% | 53% |
| Booking.com | 18,900 | 15,782 | 15% | 16.5% | 24% |
| Direct | 12,400 | 12,400 less Airflow’s commission | your plan’s rate | same as the headline | 16% |
| Airflow STAY | 4,800 | 4,800 less Airflow’s commission | marketplace rate | same as the headline | 6% |
| Total | 77,300 | 65,653 | — | 15.1% | 100% |
Example figures from a demo account, not a real customer. Airflow Stay is in pre-launch; the Stay row illustrates a marketplace rate, and Airflow’s current rates are on the pricing page.
Why the page shows share and cost together
It would be easier to show one of these. We show both on purpose, because either alone tells you something false.
Share alone flatters whichever channel is biggest. A pie chart that is mostly Airbnb reads as “Airbnb is working”. It is equally a picture of dependency — one policy change, one delisting, one algorithm adjustment away from a bad year.
Cost alone hides how much rides on it. Knowing Airbnb takes 18.4% is not actionable if you do not also know it is 53% of your income. A 3% saving on a channel worth 6% of revenue is a rounding error; the same saving on a channel worth half your business is a holiday.
Put together they answer the only question that matters: what is my dependency, and what is it costing me?
The one that surprises people
Direct bookings are not free. They cost you a website, a payment processor, the time to answer enquiries, and whatever Airflow charges. The honest comparison is your plan’s booking-page rate (on the pricing page) against 18.4%, not 0% against 18.4%, and we would rather put ourselves in the same table as everyone else than quietly leave ourselves out of the chart.
What these reports need. Every chart here is built from bookings Airflow can see. A channel it cannot read is a channel missing from the picture, and a report with a hole in it is worse than no report — so the pages say what they are missing rather than quietly averaging it away. The profit and reconciliation views need a connected ledger; without one you get income, not profit.
See it on your own numbers
Everything above is one demo account. The version that matters is the one built from your bookings, and it takes about twenty minutes to get there:
- Create an account — start free; a card is needed at sign-up.
- Import your history. Paste your Airbnb or Booking.com iCal link, or upload a CSV export. Past bookings come in too, which is what makes the first chart worth looking at on day one rather than in six months.
- Connect your accounting, if you keep books in Xero. That is what turns the income charts into profit charts, and it is what makes the reconciliation view work at all.
- Open Stats. Property tab for one place, Overview for the portfolio.
Related: Every Booking You Already Have, When the Channel Doesn’t Collect, and Quote in Their Currency, Bank in Yours.