The short answer
Download the tracker, enter your stays from your Airbnb and VRBO payout statements, and it works out what each platform really costs you. Not the host service fee on its own, but the whole thing, including what your guest pays on top and the annual VRBO subscription. Across our own bookings the answer came out between 16.5% and 20% of the booking.
Get the tracker
Same file, two formats. Take whichever one you actually work in.
Open in Google Sheets (saves your own copy)
No signup and no email required. The Google version prompts you to save your own copy, so nothing you type into it is visible to us or to anyone else.
Why the host service fee is not your real cost
Most hosts can quote their host service fee. Very few can quote their real platform cost, because the larger share of it is charged to the guest and never appears anywhere in host reporting. You do not see it. Your guest does, and they are comparing that total against the place down the road.
The tracker pulls all of it into one number per stay:
- The fee deducted from your payout
- The service fee your guest pays on top, which never shows on your statement
- Your annual VRBO subscription, spread across the bookings it actually brought in
- GST, PST and MRDT kept separate, so taxes do not distort the percentage
- Your true cost as a percentage: your share, the guest's share, and the two combined
What we found running our own bookings through it
Total platform cost landed between 16.5% and 20% of the booking. The annual VRBO subscription was the surprise. It never appears on a payout statement, so it is easy to forget it exists, but spread across the bookings it brought in it nearly doubled what VRBO really costs us. 3.5% on paper, 5.9% in reality.
Airbnb was the less predictable one. Some of our bookings were 3.2% off us and 14% off the guest. Others were 16.5% off us and nothing off the guest. Same listing, same property, no explanation we could find.
The direct booking row is the one worth staring at. Zero on both sides.
How to fill it in
- Set your tax rates in row 1: GST, your provincial PST, and MRDT if your municipality levies it. British Columbia rates are already filled in.
- Set your VRBO annual fee in N1. If you pay per-booking commission instead of the annual plan, set it to zero.
- Enter one row per stay, taking the numbers straight off your Airbnb or VRBO payout statement. Use the Source drop-down rather than typing it, because the VRBO fee split keys off that cell.
- Leave the grey columns alone. Those calculate themselves and typing over one breaks the column.
- Read your answer in the last three columns: your cost as a percentage, your guest's, and the total.
If you use ChatGPT or Claude, you can hand it the spreadsheet along with your payout statements and have it fill the rows in for you.
What to do with the answer
The guest-side fee is the number that should change your pricing. If a guest is paying 14% on top of your nightly rate to book you through a platform, you have real room to price direct in a way that is better for them and better for you at the same time. Most hosts set their direct rate as though that gap does not exist, and leave the whole difference on the table.
Common mistakes
- Counting only the host service fee. That is a fraction of the real number, and it is the fraction your guest never sees.
- Forgetting the annual VRBO subscription. It is a real cost of that channel whether or not it shows on a statement.
- Blending taxes into the fee percentage. Taxes are not a platform cost, and mixing them in makes your channels look closer together than they are.
- Setting your direct rate at exactly your platform nightly rate. Your guest is comparing totals, not nightly rates.
- Running the numbers once and never again. Fee structures change, and so does your mix of bookings.
Where StayCanadian fits
We built StayCanadian so Canadian travellers can find Canadian stays and book them directly with the host. We are a discovery platform, not an OTA. We never take a commission on a booking and we never sit between you and your guest. If the numbers in your own tracker make the case, listing your property is the next step.