Your Villa Sleeps Eight. Who Actually Books It?

The listing says eight

You bought, built or furnished for a number. Four bedrooms, sleeps eight. The rate card was set with that number in mind, and so was the cleaning schedule, the linen order and the welcome pack.

Then the bookings came in, and you stopped thinking about who was in them. A booking is a booking. The calendar shows dates, the payout shows money, and nothing you look at every week shows how many people actually came.

When hosts do try to answer that question, they reach for an average: “we get about four”. That average is almost always true and almost never useful. A year of couples and eights averages out at four. So does a year of fours. Those are two different businesses, and they want two different rate cards.

The shape, not the average

This is the Group sizes panel for one property on an Airflow demo account, this year against last.

Example data from an Airflow demo account, not a real customer. Bookings at Villa 1 by party size, this year against last, on one shared scale.

The average rose from 3.7 guests to 4.5. Said like that, it sounds like a small drift. The bars say something bigger.

Couples fell away. Parties of two went from 14 bookings to 9. That was the largest single group last year, and it lost more than a third of its bookings.

Big groups doubled. Parties of six or more went from 7 bookings to 14, from under a fifth of the year to over a third. Parties of eight, the size the villa was built for, went from 2 to 6.

The middle held. Fours barely moved, 12 to 11. The change happened at both ends at once, which is exactly what an average is built to hide.

Party size	This year	Last year
1 guest	1	0
2 guests	9	14
3 guests	2	3
4 guests	11	12
5 guests	3	2
6 guests	7	4
7 guests	1	1
8 guests	6	2
Bookings counted	40	38
Average party	4.5	3.7

Example figures from a demo account, not a real customer. Seven bookings this year carried no guest count and are left out rather than counted as zero.

Why the panel is drawn this way

A few deliberate choices, each one there because the obvious alternative misleads.

Exact sizes, not bands. “1–2”, “3–5”, “6+” looks tidier, and at a few dozen bookings a year it hides more than it groups. Six bookings of eight is a fact about your business. It should not be folded into “6+” beside a single party of seven.

Both years on one scale. Two charts scaled separately cannot be compared at all, however similar they look.

Every size either year, including the ones that stopped. If a group size came last year and not this year, it still gets a row, drawn empty. A panel that listed only this year’s sizes would quietly drop the group that stopped coming, which is the one change you most need to see.

Missing is not zero. A booking with no guest count is left out and counted in the note underneath, never recorded as a party of nobody. A party is adults plus children, the usual occupancy count; infants are reported separately.

What it means for the rate card

Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. If your nightly rate covers the whole villa, a couple and a party of eight pay the same. For this demo property, 14 bookings this year were six or more people, twice as many as last year, and every one of them paid what a couple would have. More people mean more linen, more laundry, more water and power, and a longer clean. The rate did not move.

There are two sensible responses, and the panel tells you which one fits.

If big groups are growing, charge for them. In Airflow, open Settings → Mandatory fees and add a fee with the rate type Per extra guest/night. Set After X guests to the number your base rate is meant to cover. With the threshold at 4 and a fee of 20 per extra guest per night:

Party	Nights	Extra guests	Fee added
2 guests	4	0	0
4 guests	4	0	0
6 guests	4	2	160
8 guests	4	4	320

Worked example, not a recommendation of a particular fee.

Couples and fours pay what they paid before. The groups that cost more to host pay for it, because the fee is worked out from the party size the guest books with. It applies to bookings made through your Airflow booking page; prices on Airbnb or Booking.com are set on those channels.

If couples are drifting away, look at why. A whole-villa rate can look steep to two people. That is a question about your seasonal and promotional rates, not about an extra-guest fee, and adding a fee will not bring them back. Pricing by the number of bedrooms a group actually uses is not something Airflow does today.

Whichever it is, check it against the season. On the same Bookings tab, the Rate & value over time chart can switch to Party size or Guests by month, which tells you whether the big groups are a summer thing or all year. If you want the nightly rate beside it, we covered that chart here.

What this report needs. Guest counts. Direct bookings record them at checkout, channel bookings bring them in the confirmation email, and you can set them on a booking yourself. An iCal feed carries dates, not people, so bookings that only ever arrived by calendar sync have no party size and are left out, with the number stated under the chart. And as with every report here, a channel Airflow cannot see is a channel missing from the picture.

See it on your own numbers

Everything above is one demo account. The version that matters is yours, and it takes about twenty minutes to get there:

Start your trial: seven days free. Your card is taken at signup and not charged until day 7; cancel before then and you pay nothing.
Import your history. Paste your Airbnb or Booking.com iCal link, or upload a CSV export. Forward a few booking confirmation emails too; that is where the guest counts come from.
Connect your accounting, if you keep books in Xero. It does not change this panel, but it turns the income charts on the other tabs into profit.
Open Stats → Bookings. Group sizes is further down the same tab as the rate chart, with last year beside this one when Compare with previous year is on.

Start your free trial →