The quiet case for
direct.

There are two kinds of hosts in India. The kind who treat Airbnb as a permanent shopfront, and the kind who treat it as a placement agency. Both are correct, but only one of them keeps the money.

Airbnb’s take rate sits somewhere between fourteen and twenty percent depending on the host service fee, the guest service fee, and a handful of opaque adjustments that nobody on either side fully understands. On a fifty-thousand-rupee booking, that is seven thousand rupees walking quietly out of your account, never to return.

Seven thousand rupees, on a single booking, every time, for as long as you list with them.

The arithmetic, set down plainly.

Consider a host with three properties — a modest portfolio, the kind a successful side-business looks like. Each property averages a lakh of gross bookings a month. So:

• Three properties · ₹1,00,000/month gross each = ₹3,00,000/month
• Airbnb’s share, conservatively 14% = ₹42,000/month
• Direct’s share, at Pro pricing = ₹1,200/month
• Razorpay’s share, on the direct bookings = ~2% of converted volume

If you convert just half of your second-time guests to direct — a low bar, since they already trust you — you save twenty-thousand rupees a month. After our fee. After Razorpay. After everything.

We are charging you ₹1,200/month to save you ₹20,000.

But you should not leave Airbnb.

Airbnb is, despite the take rate, a marvellous machine for finding first-time guests. It does discovery extraordinarily well. We are not asking you to delete the listing. We are asking you to make sure the second visit doesn’t go through it.

The trick — and it is the only meaningful trick — is the welcome book. A QR code, taped inside the front cover, that points to your direct site with a small note: “Book directly next time and save 15%.” Half your repeat guests will scan it. A quarter will actually use it. Within twelve months a third of your stays are commission-free, which is the kind of compound advantage that makes small hosts wealthy and large ones bored.

On the unusual idea of not being a marketplace.

We considered, briefly, charging a percentage. It is the modern instinct. Take a slice, you can call yourself a marketplace, you can put it on a deck. But charging a percentage means we are in the business of taking your money, and we’d rather be in the business of helping you keep it.

So our pricing is plain: a flat fee per live listing per month. We charge you for the software. The bookings are yours.

We are software. You are hospitality. Our jobs are different.

One last thing.

If this still seems improbable — that a SaaS would deliberately charge you less the more you sell — write to me at hello@makestays.com. I will explain it again, more slowly, with worked examples. Or I will tell you about the Goa villa host who tried it for a month and never went back. Either way you’ll save more than the cost of the chai.