Hostaway sends two channel fee line types, guestChannelFee and hostChannelFee. Getting them right takes two decisions, not one:
Is it a guest fee or a host fee?
If it's a host fee, does the channel net it from the payout, or bill it separately?
The second question is the one most setups miss, and it decides whether the line belongs in reservation financials or in a reference account.
Quick reference
Line type | Who pays | Reaches your account? | Treatment |
Guest channel fee | The guest, on top of the booking | No — goes to the channel | Exclude. Informational only |
Host fee, netted from payout (Airbnb) | You | Yes — payout arrives already net | Include in reservation financials, map to Channel Commissions - Airbnb |
Host fee, billed separately (VRBO, Booking.com, Direct) | You | No — payout arrives gross, fee invoiced later | Exclude from reservation financials, map to the reference account, deduct via a fee template |
Guest channel fees — always exclude
A guest channel fee is what the channel charges the traveller at checkout. The guest pays it to the channel. It never lands in your trust account and it is never the owner's money.
Let it into reservation financials and three things go wrong at once:
Revenue inflates by the fee amount.
The owner gets paid on it — at 30% commission, the owner receives 70% of money nobody received.
The reservation looks underpaid. Expected now exceeds what the guest actually paid, so a fully-paid booking shows a balance and lands in Guest Balances → Departed.
Host fees netted from the payout — include them (Airbnb)
Airbnb deducts its host service fee before it pays you. The deposit that arrives is already net, so the fee is part of the reservation's own economics.
Include the line and map it to Channel Commissions - Airbnb — a real posting account, not the reference account. No fee template is needed: the line itself is the deduction. Because that account sits in the management commission formula, the fee correctly reduces the commission base, and the owner statement shows gross rent with the Airbnb commission as a visible deduction.
Host fees billed separately — exclude and use the reference account (VRBO, Booking.com, Direct)
VRBO, Booking.com and Hostaway's direct booking engine typically pay out the gross booking and invoice their commission separately, often monthly.
Here the cash that actually arrived for that reservation was the gross amount. Putting the fee into reservation financials would misstate what was received and break payment matching. So:
Exclude the host fee line from reservation financials
Map it to Channel Commissions (Reference Account) — non-posting; its only job is to carry the value
Create a fee template that reads the reference account and posts the owner deduction, filtered to that booking channel, at 100%
One definition per channel, all reading the same reference account. The reference account holds whatever Hostaway reported, so the deduction is always the actual amount — no estimate to drift.
Why the reference account has to be separate from the posting account
This is the part that catches people out.
If a fee's formula reads the same account the fee posts to, you get a self-reference: the fee's own posting feeds back into its input. And if both sides of a rebill pair sit in a management commission formula, the debit and credit cancel to zero and the fee silently stops reducing the commission base. The statement still looks plausible and is wrong by exactly the commission rate times the fee.
Keep the roles apart:
Reference account — non-posting, carries the raw Hostaway value, read by formulas
Posting accounts — where the fee's debit and credit actually land
Don't estimate what the channel already told you
A percentage estimate (say 5% of rent plus cleaning) is a reasonable fallback when no fee data arrives, but it is fragile: it drifts silently when the base it is computed from changes, and it can't reflect a promotional or negotiated rate. If Hostaway is sending hostChannelFee, use it.
Worked examples
Management commission 30% in both.
Airbnb — fee netted from the payout
Hostaway reports: base rate $3,000.00, cleaning $300.00, host channel fee $99.00, guest service fee $420.00. Airbnb deposits $3,201.00.
Guest service fee excluded. Host fee included, mapped to Channel Commissions - Airbnb:
Commission base = 3,000.00 − 99.00 = 2,901.00
Management fee = 2,901.00 × 30% = 870.30
Owner net revenue = 2,901.00 − 870.30 = 2,030.70
VRBO — fee billed separately
Hostaway reports: base rate $5,000.00, cleaning $800.00, host channel fee $290.00, guest channel fee $850.00. VRBO deposits $5,800.00 — gross — and invoices the $290.00 separately.
Both channel fee lines excluded from reservation financials. Host fee mapped to the reference account; the Channel Fee - VRBO template posts the deduction:
Commission base = 5,000.00 − 290.00 = 4,710.00
Management fee = 4,710.00 × 30% = 1,413.00
Owner net revenue = 4,710.00 − 1,413.00 = 3,297.00
Payments still match the $5,800.00 that actually arrived.
What including a guest fee by mistake costs
Take the VRBO booking and let the $850.00 guest fee into financials:
Revenue = 5,000.00 + 850.00 = 5,850.00
Commission base = 5,850.00 − 290.00 = 5,560.00
Management fee = 1,668.00
Owner net revenue = 3,892.00 — $595.00 too high
$595.00 is exactly 70% of the $850.00 guest fee. The reservation also now expects $850.00 more than the guest paid, so it shows as underpaid.
How to tell you have this wrong
Owner payouts are higher than the PMS statement by exactly (1 − commission rate) × the guest channel fee
Reservations flip from paid to underpaid with no change in payments
Fully-paid stays appear under Guest Balances → Departed
Airbnb bookings tie but VRBO or Booking.com don't, or the reverse — a sign the same treatment has been applied to channels that collect differently
A quick test for which bucket a channel is in: look at payments received. If the deposit is an exact fraction of the gross booking, the fee is billed separately. If the deposit already equals the net, it is taken out of the payout.
Setup checklist
Guest channel fee line type → excluded, every channel
Airbnb host channel fee → included, mapped to Channel Commissions - Airbnb
VRBO / Booking.com / Direct host channel fee → excluded, mapped to Channel Commissions (Reference Account)
One Channel Fee definition per separately-billed channel, reading the reference account at 100%, filtered to that channel
Assign each definition to the listings it applies to — a definition on zero listings does nothing
Confirm the posting accounts appear in your management commission formula, and that only one side of any rebill pair is in it
Refresh journals and reconcile one booking per channel against the PMS statement before publishing
A note on refreshing
A team-wide journal refresh fails outright if any reservation is locked to a published owner statement — you'll see Journal refresh is blocked by accounting locks, and it can abort partway, leaving some reservations on the new configuration and some on the old. Refreshing per fee definition skips locked records and completes cleanly. Use that while prior months are published.