Money
Where a booking dollar actually goes
A plain split of guest payment, OTA fees, taxes, cleaning, and a co-host fee for Orlando-area short-term rentals.
Owners get surprised when a $2,400 guest total becomes a much smaller deposit. The missing money is usually not a hidden co-host trick. It is a stack of pass-throughs nobody drew on one page.
The stack
- Accommodation: the nightly rate times the nights. This is the number a co-host percentage should be discussed against.
- Cleaning: collected from the guest and owed to the cleaner. It is not profit.
- OTA commission: Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and Hopper each take a host-side or guest-side cut, and the labels change. Read the payout, not the slogan.
- Lodging taxes: state sales tax, county tourist development tax, and any local surtax. Some platforms remit part of this. Some do not, depending on the county and the channel. Osceola owners in particular should confirm what is still theirs to file.
- Co-host fee: a percentage of accommodation, quoted per home. Not a slice of the tax, and not a slice of the cleaner’s pay.
The calculator on this site lets you move those pieces so the shape is obvious. It is a teaching tool. It is not a quote and it is not a projection of annual income.
Guest total, illustrated$1,762
What this sketch leaves with the owner, after the example OTA and co-host shares, and before mortgage, utilities, insurance, supplies, and repairs:$910
Teaching tool only. Platform fees and tax remittance differ by channel and county. Palm Hosts quotes a co-host percentage after seeing the home. This is not an income projection.