Answering Fee Questions With One Table

Guests and hosts ask the same three fee questions. One table answers all of them without a paragraph.

Last updated: October 31, 2026

The questions arrive in the same order every time. What does the whole stay cost? What's in that number? And who is charging me for each part? Answering them one message at a time takes an hour a week and produces three slightly different answers, which is how a guest ends up quoting your own words back at you. A table does the same job in one screen.

Key Takeaways

• It's always three questions. Total, contents, and who charges what. Nothing else comes up often enough to plan for.
• Build the columns from the questions. If a column doesn't answer one of the three, it belongs in your bookkeeping, not in front of a guest.
• One page, one link, one date. A table lives at a URL you can point at, not in the fifth message of a thread.
• A fee change is a one-row edit. That's the whole reason to keep a table instead of prose.
• Say the unit, not just the number. Per night, per stay, per person or a share of the subtotal — a figure without a unit is the beginning of an argument.

The three questions

The first is the total. Not the nightly rate — the number that actually leaves the guest's account, for the nights they asked about. It's the only number most guests care about, and it's the one a listing rarely states.

The second is what's inside it. Cleaning, local charges, a channel's own fee, a damage deposit that comes back. Guests don't object to paying these. They object to meeting them at the last screen, after they've decided to book.

The third is who charges each part. This one matters more than hosts expect, because it decides who a guest complains to and who can fix it. A charge you set can be waived by you. A charge the channel sets can't, and saying so plainly saves a conversation that would otherwise run for three days.

There's a quieter fourth question that belongs inside the second: when is it collected, and does it come back? A deposit isn't a fee, and treating the two as the same line is the fastest way to look like you're hiding something.

Columns that answer them

Five columns, one row per fee. That's the shape.

The line. What it is, in the words a guest would use. Cleaning, not "housekeeping recovery".

The amount. With its unit attached — per night, per stay, per person, or a share of the subtotal. If the amount varies by season or by length of stay, say so in the cell rather than leaving a number that's only true in July.

Who charges it. You, the channel, or the local authority. Three words, and they settle most of the follow-up.

Whether it's in the quoted rate. A plain yes or no. This is the column that prevents the bad surprise, and it's the one most tables leave out.

When it's collected. At booking, at check-in, or on departure. One word each.

What you leave out matters as much. Don't put your own cost base in there, and don't put a performance metric in there. Average daily rate is a useful number and it isn't a fee — it's the average nightly rate you actually booked, which is a different thing from what a particular guest pays for a particular stay. Mixing the two produces a table that's technically accurate and practically misleading.

One more thing about the first row. If you sell on several channels, the nightly rate can differ by channel, because each connected channel carries its own source price. A single "nightly rate" cell is therefore a promise you may not be able to keep for every guest. Either add a channel column, or state plainly which channel the quoted rate belongs to.

localsbnb.com shows each connected channel's source price next to the others, so the rate you put in the top row can be read from one screen rather than assembled from four back offices. That's the difference between a table you update and a table you abandon.

Where the table lives

One page, one address, one link. Put it on your own site if you have one, or in a page you control, and point at it from three places: the listing description, the first reply to any enquiry, and the booking confirmation.

Don't attach it as a PDF. A downloaded file goes stale in someone else's inbox, and you'll never know which version a guest is holding. A page you can edit is a page that's true this morning.

Design it for a phone. Five columns is already the limit of what reads well at a narrow width, which is the real argument for stopping there. If a row needs a second line of explanation, the explanation belongs under the table as a note, not in a cell.

Then put a checked date on the page itself, somewhere visible, not in a footer. "Checked 31 October 2026" tells a guest the page is maintained. It also tells you, three months later, how stale the thing has become.

The last piece is a single sentence above the table that answers the first question before anyone reads a row. Something like: the total for your dates is the nightly rate times the nights, plus the lines marked as not included. That sentence is what most guests actually wanted.

One habit ties it together. When a guest asks about fees in a message, reply with that sentence and the link, not the table pasted into the thread. A pasted table becomes a separate version the moment you edit the page, and a guest holding an old paste is a guest you can't correct without looking like you moved the terms.

Updating it when a fee moves

This is where a table earns its keep. When a fee moves, you change one row, change the checked date, and add a line to a change log that says what moved and when. Ten minutes, one place, no rewriting of listing copy in four languages.

Write the change log as one line per change: the date, the row, what moved, and who decided. It reads like a maintenance record, which is what it is. Keep the old versions. Not for guests — for you. When someone asks in November what they were quoted in March, a dated archive answers it in a way that memory can't, and it costs nothing to keep.

Set the review rhythm by what actually moves. A local charge changes when the authority changes it. A channel's fee structure changes when the channel changes it, usually with a notice you'll skim and forget. Your own cleaning policy changes when you decide it does. Those are three different rhythms, and the quarterly check is the one that catches the ones you didn't notice.

Two habits make the table survive contact with reality. First, when a guest asks a question the table can't answer, that's a missing row or a missing column, not a one-off — add it. Second, when you find yourself typing the same paragraph for the third time, that paragraph is a row waiting to happen.

FAQ

Should the table show a total for specific dates?

No — a table shows structure, and a quote shows a number. If you put a dated total in the table it goes stale the moment your rate changes, and guests will screenshot it. Keep the table structural and send the total as part of the quote, using the same rows so the two match.

What if a fee only applies in some seasons?

Show the unit and the period in the same cell, or split it into two rows. What you can't do is leave a single number that's only true in high season, because the guest who books in February will read it as a promise and they won't be wrong to.

Do I need a separate table for each unit?

Only if the fees genuinely differ. If they do, one table with a unit column beats four tables that drift apart. If they don't, one table for the whole portfolio is easier to keep true and easier to link to.

A fee table is unglamorous. It's five columns, a handful of rows and a date, and it replaces a hundred copied-and-pasted paragraphs. localsbnb.com won't write the rows for you, but it puts the channel prices and the booked nights in one place, which is where the numbers in those rows come from.

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This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal, tax or insurance advice. What must be disclosed, and how, differs by jurisdiction and by channel, and fee rules change; nothing here states a rate, a fee value or a disclosure requirement for any place. Confirm the current requirements with the competent authority and the current terms of each platform you sell on.