Every booking costs you a full changeover, however short the stay. On a one or two-night booking, the changeover, laundry and platform fee can take most of what the guest pays, leaving you far less per night than a week does, or nothing at all. Put your own figures into the holiday let short stay calculator below to see what each stay length leaves you, the lowest rate worth accepting and the minimum stay to set.
How to use the short stay calculator
- Enter the length of the booking you're weighing up and your nightly rate for those dates. A weekend in August and a Tuesday in January give different answers.
- Check the platform fee. It starts at 15.5%, Airbnb's fee for most hosts; change it for another platform, or use your card payment fee for direct bookings. The fee is only one part of choosing a platform, and what to weigh up besides the commission is covered separately.
- Add what each stay costs you: the changeover, laundry and supplies, and any extra running costs per night.
- Add the least you'd accept per booking if you want a suggested minimum stay. Your results update as you type.
See what you keep from each booking after fees and costs
Enter your nightly rate to see your results.
A worked example
Say you charge £100 a night with no separate cleaning fee and pay a 15.5% platform fee. Each stay costs £45 for the changeover and £20 for laundry and supplies, plus £5 a night in extra running costs. These are example figures; yours will differ.
At those figures a one-night stay leaves you £15, a two-night stay leaves £94 (£47 a night) and a seven-night stay leaves £492, about £70 a night. A two-night stay covers its costs at £45 a night, but it needs £128 a night to earn as much per night as a week.
If you want at least £100 from any booking, the shortest stay that clears it at £100 a night is three nights. To accept two-night stays as well, you'd charge at least £104 a night for them.
What counts as a changeover cost?
Count everything a new booking sets off that a longer stay wouldn't repeat:
- paying whoever does the changeover, or a fair value for your own time and travel if you do it yourself
- laundry or linen hire for the beds and towels used
- toiletries, cleaning products and any welcome items you replace each time
- time spent on messages before arrival and after checkout, if you want to put a value on it
Leave out costs you pay whatever happens, such as insurance, broadband or your mortgage. They don't change with the number of bookings, so they don't affect whether a short stay is worth taking.
Laundry is often the figure hosts are least sure of. If you're still deciding whether to hire linen or buy your own, work that out first, because it changes the cost of every stay. If putting a value on your own time changes the picture, start with how to measure the hours self-managing takes.
How to set a minimum stay from your results
Start with the least you'd accept from one booking. The calculator finds the shortest stay that clears it at your current rate, which makes a sensible floor for your minimum stay.
You may want different minimums for busy and quiet periods: a longer one when a short booking could block a week, and a shorter one when the calendar has gaps to fill. Run the calculator once with your peak rate and once with your quiet-season rate to see both.
When a short booking makes sense anyway
A one or two-night booking that fills a gap between two existing stays is a different decision. Those nights would probably stay empty, so anything above the break-even rate is extra income and blocks nothing.
The match-the-week rate matters when a short booking would take dates that a longer stay might have filled. That's usually in busy periods, when it pays to hold out for the longer booking or charge more for the short one.
What the calculator leaves out
The results are before tax and don't include costs you pay all year. They also can't tell you whether a longer stay would have booked the same dates; that depends on demand in your area at that time of year. Everything you type stays in your browser and isn't sent to StayWorkbench or saved.
Next steps once you have your numbers
Change your minimum stay on each platform you use, and keep a note of the short-stay rates you settled on so you can recheck them when your costs change. If your changeover cost came out higher than you expected, building a changeover checklist from the property's own weak points shows what each changeover involves, so you can see where the time and money go. To check whether a same-day changeover fits between checkout and check-in at all, use the holiday let changeover planner.