Most hosts assume adding 15.5% to their nightly rate covers the new platform fee. It doesn’t. You need to bake your fixed costs in to survive. Use our free calculator to find your exact break-even price; and see if this sudden spike in artificial gross revenue will accidentally trigger local VAT/GST tax thresholds.
Because the platform deducts its fee from the final total, a linear 15.5% addition leaves you operating at a loss. To completely offset the fee, your effective markup must be exactly 18.34%. But this creates a dangerous secondary problem: Phantom Revenue.
🇬🇧 The £90k UK VAT Cliff:
Inflating your gross accelerates your trajectory to mandatory 20% VAT registration.
🇳🇿 The $60k NZ GST Threshold:
Breaching this limit strips your 8.5% flat-rate credit and drags your physical asset into the GST net.
🇦🇺 The $75k AU Threshold & Victoria Levy:
Inflated gross triggers the commercial residential threshold and compounds the 7.5% state levy.
🇺🇸 The 1099-K Reversion:
Spiking gross revenue above $20,000 triggers automatic IRS audits and artificially inflates local TOT (Transient Occupancy Taxes).
You cannot allow an OTA to dictate your gross revenue narrative. The survival strategy is simple: bake your cleaning costs into a lower OTA base rate, and migrate all secondary revenue to KoruStay’s autonomous Digital Guest Service Manager.
🤑 Strip the Fees:
Remove cleaning, pet, and extra guest fees from the OTA. Keep the advertised price as low as mathematically possible.
🧑💼Deploy the Service Manager:
KoruStay engages the guest autonomously via SMS/Email leading up to their stay, acting as a digital concierge.
📈 Capture Direct Revenue: Guests purchase late check-outs, pet fees, and mid-stay cleans directly from their phones. You bypass the 15.5% tax entirely.
KoruStay offers enterprise-grade commerce infrastructure tailored to your accounting workflows.
0% Commerce Engine (Self-Managed)
Ideal for sophisticated operators and Property Manager Companies.
Connect your own Stripe merchant account in seconds. Keep 100% of your upsell revenue. Pay only standard Stripe processing fees. Cleanly decouple funds for perfect tax threshold management.
KoruStay Managed Upsells (Full-Service)
Ideal for operators wanting zero administrative overhead.We act as the merchant of record. Includes full dispute management, chargeback protection, and refund administration.
Significantly lower rate (5% – 12%) than the AirBNB OTA fees.
Stop paying commission on your own physical cleaning fees. Protect your business logic, avoid the tax trap, and decouple your revenue.