What Airbnb and Booking.com fees really cost you in a year

Most hosts know the host service fee. Fewer have added up what the platforms take across a whole year, and almost nobody counts the part the guest pays — which is money that came out of the same booking and shaped the same decision. Here is how to work out your own number in about five minutes.

The two fees on every booking

There are normally two, and only one of them appears on your payout statement.

• The host fee — deducted from your payout. On Airbnb’s standard split-fee model this is a small single-digit percentage of the booking subtotal for most hosts.
• The guest fee — added at checkout, typically a good deal larger, often in the low-to-mid teens as a percentage. You never see it, but your guest paid it, and it is part of the price they compared you against.

Booking.com works differently — a single commission on the booking value, commonly around 15%, with higher rates where hosts opt into visibility programmes. Different mechanics, same outcome: a meaningful slice of the transaction goes to the intermediary.

Exact percentages vary by country, listing type, cancellation policy and which programmes you have joined. Do not take my numbers — take five minutes and read your own last payout statement against what the guest actually paid. That gap is the real figure.

Work out your number

Three lines on the back of an envelope:

1. Your annual booking revenue. Take last year’s total, before fees.
2. Your blended platform take. Add the host fee and the guest fee. For a lot of Airbnb listings the combined figure lands somewhere around 15%; on Booking.com the commission alone is often in that neighbourhood. Use your own statements where you can.
3. Multiply. That is the annual cost of the intermediary.

A property turning over €40,000 a year at a combined 15% is paying roughly €6,000 for distribution. That is not automatically bad — for nights you would never have sold, it is excellent value. The question is what share of it you are paying for guests who already knew you.

The part that stings: repeat guests

A first-time guest found through Airbnb’s search is a customer the platform genuinely introduced. Paying for that introduction is fair. But when the same guest returns next summer and books through the same listing, you pay the same commission for an introduction that already happened — and so do they.

This is why the highest-return direct-booking work is not a marketing campaign. It is simply making sure returning guests have somewhere else to go. Ten nights a year moved from platform to direct, on a €150 rate, is around €225 back in your pocket at a 15% blended rate — and the guest usually pays less than they would have.

What direct booking costs you instead

It is not free, and it is honest to count it:

• Card processing — roughly 1.5–3% depending on card and country. Real, but an order of magnitude below platform commission.
• A website — anywhere from nothing to a few hundred a year.
• Your time — mostly one-off setup, then a few minutes per booking.
• Risk you now own — chargebacks, cancellations and calendar discipline are yours to manage. That last one matters: selling in more places means more calendars to keep honest.

Net: a direct booking typically keeps 12–17 percentage points more of the same transaction than a platform booking. On one property that is a decent holiday. Across a portfolio it is a salary.

The sensible conclusion

Not “leave the platforms” — they sell nights you cannot reach and that is worth paying for. The conclusion is that the second booking from the same guest should not cost you the same as the first. Set up somewhere for those guests to land, keep your calendars honest, and let the platforms keep doing the job they are actually good at.

If you want the practical version, the direct-booking playbook walks through the whole setup.