Managing a Co-Host: Permissions, Payouts and What Stays Yours

A co-host who can change the calendar can also change your rate. The permission list is the contract.

Last updated: September 23, 2026

Most co-host arrangements are agreed in a conversation and documented in a chat thread. So the thing that governs them — who can do what — never gets written down. It works until somebody discounts a week to fill it, or a payout arrives smaller than both sides predicted.

This guide covers the four groups a co-host's access falls into, and the one hosts grant weeks too early. It shows how a split is calculated and the fee line that surprises both sides. It sets out the three things that stay with the owner. And it lays out the sequence for ending the arrangement with the calendar history intact.

Key Takeaways

• Access splits into four groups. Orders, finance, availability and rates are four separate decisions.
• Rates go too early. It arrives bundled with routine operations and it decides revenue, not admin.
• The split has a base. Agree whether the percentage runs on gross, or after commission and cleaning.
• Three things stay with the owner. Payout details, licence records and master access.
• Wind down in sequence. Remove access, export the history, then settle — never the other order round.

The four permission groups, and the one hosts hand over too early

Access isn't one switch. It falls into four groups, and granting them is four separate decisions that most hosts collapse into one.

Orders. Seeing and handling reservations: who is arriving, what they asked for, what the booking is worth. This is the group a co-host needs on day one, and it's the least dangerous of the four, because reading an order doesn't change anything.

Availability. Opening and closing nights, blocking maintenance, holding dates. This is the group that looks purely operational and isn't. Whoever controls the grid controls whether a night is sellable at all, and a wrong block is invisible until the week it costs you.

Finance. Payout views, statements, settlement figures. Granting this doesn't let anybody move money, but it does let them see everything you earn, across every unit, which is more than a per-property co-host needs.

Rates. Setting what a night costs, and the rules underneath it — minimum stays, discounts, length-of-stay tiers. This is the group most hosts hand over too early, and the reason is structural. It arrives bundled with the ordinary work of running a unit. It gets granted in the first week, when trust is highest and no disagreement has been tested yet. Rate authority isn't an operational convenience. It's the revenue decision, and a co-host holding it can fill a calendar by discounting it, which reads as performance until you look at what the nights earned.

A workable schedule: orders and availability at the start; finance on a review basis rather than standing; rates only after a full season, and then with a written floor the co-host may not go below without asking.

One mechanical note on how this is expressed in a tool. Access granted by area — orders, finance, availability and rates as separate scopes — is what makes that schedule possible, because a single "manager" role can't be staged. Where the work touches a reservation itself, changes such as checking a guest in, checking them out, extending a stay or moving them to another unit run as write operations. They execute only after you confirm them, and only for properties outside mainland China. Properties in China stay read-only. Any arrangement that depends on an unconfirmed write is an arrangement nobody can audit.

How a payout split is calculated, and the line that surprises both parties

The split everyone agrees is a percentage. The argument is never about the percentage; it's about what the percentage is applied to, and that was never stated.

Take one booking as a worked example, with figures chosen only to show the order of operations:

• Nightly revenue. Four nights at $180 = $720.
• Cleaning fee. $90, charged to the guest.
• Total charged to the guest. $810.
• Platform deduction. Applied by the channel on its own terms, on its own base.
• Cleaning cost actually paid out. $70 to the cleaner, which isn't the same number as the $90 charged.

Now the two candidate bases:

• Split on gross. The percentage runs on $810, and the platform deduction and the cleaning cost come out of the owner's side afterwards.
• Split on net. The percentage runs on what remains after the deduction and after cleaning is paid.

Those two produce materially different numbers for the same booking and the same percentage, which is why agreeing the percentage isn't the same as agreeing the split.

The line that surprises both parties is the cleaning fee. It's charged to the guest, and it's commonly inside the commission base, so the platform's deduction is computed on an amount that includes money which never reaches either party as profit — it goes straight to the cleaner. Both sides then feel shortchanged by a payout neither of them can explain, and each suspects the other of taking more. Write the treatment of the cleaning fee into the agreement explicitly: whether it's inside or outside the split base, and who carries the gap when the cleaning cost exceeds the cleaning fee.

A second line worth naming before it arrives: currency. Where the guest pays in one currency and the co-host is settled in another, the conversion happens somewhere in the chain and somebody absorbs the difference. Say which side that is, in writing, before the first payout rather than after the third.

What must stay with the owner

Three things, and the test for each is simple: if this relationship ended badly tomorrow, could the other party use it against you.

• Payout details. The account the money lands in is the owner's, and it never needs to be shared to run a property. A co-host who needs to see earnings can be granted a finance view; nobody needs the destination account to do the work.
• Licence records. Registration numbers, permits and the correspondence with the authority are held by whoever the authority holds responsible, which is the owner. Copies may be shared; the record and its renewal clock don't move.
• Master access. The ability to grant and revoke everyone else's access, including the co-host's. Handing this over converts a revocable arrangement into one you have to ask to leave.

The corollary matters as much as the list: everything you do hand over should be handed over in a form you can take back the same day. Access granted by area rather than by sharing your own login is what makes that true. It's also why the arrangement should live inside the tool rather than in a shared password. At localsbnb.com a co-host's scope is a set of areas you can narrow or close, rather than a key you have to ask for back.

Winding a co-host arrangement down without losing the calendar history

Endings go wrong in a predictable order: access is removed first, in a bad mood, and the records are discovered to have been in the other party's account. Reverse it.

1. Export before you revoke. Take the full calendar and reservation history out while both sides still have access. Bookings, blocked nights, rate history and the notes attached to them. This is the asset the arrangement created and the one nobody thinks to save.

2. Settle the open bookings in writing. List every stay that hasn't yet happened, what each is worth, and who owes what. Future bookings are the only part of a split that stays arguable after the work has stopped.

3. Then revoke, group by group. Rates first, then availability, then finance, then orders. Staggering it by a day or two makes the cause and effect legible if something breaks.

4. Confirm what the guest sees. Arrival details, the contact name, the entry arrangement. A handover that's clean on your side and confusing on the guest's isn't clean.

5. Keep the licence and the calendar under the owner's name throughout. If any of it was ever registered to the co-host's details, that's the first thing to move, and it's the item most often discovered late.

FAQ

Should a co-host be able to change my rates?

Not in the first season. Rate authority is the revenue decision, and it usually arrives bundled with routine operational work. Grant it later, with a written floor underneath it.

Do we split on what the guest paid or on what we received?

Whichever you wrote down, and write it down. The same percentage on gross and on net produces different money, and the cleaning fee sitting inside the commission base is what usually makes both sides feel short.

What is the one thing I should never hand over?

Master access — the ability to grant and revoke everyone else's. Everything else can be clawed back; that one determines whether you can.

Four groups, staged rather than granted; a split with its base named; three things that never leave your hands. That's the whole contract, and it fits on one page. Put it somewhere the calendar survives it — Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda and Trip.com hold their availability and rates on one grid at localsbnb.com, so the history stays yours whichever way the arrangement goes.

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Figures in this article are a worked example showing the order of operations, not benchmarks. Commission bases, cleaning-fee treatment and settlement currency are set by each channel's own terms and by your agreement; check both before relying on any of it.