What Your $100 Campsite Actually Costs

A man in east Tennessee owns a few quiet acres in the foothills of the Smokies. At the edge of his land sits a single RV site he and his son built last summer: a level concrete pad, full hookups, fast wifi, a clear view of the ridge from the picnic table, and a hundred yards of private stocked trout stream down the path. He charges guests $100 a night, mostly to couples on a slow loop through the region. He thinks of it as a small side thing: a way to share the land, meet a few good wo/men passing through, and put something aside.

This year he sat down and did something most hosts never quite do. He added up what each platform had actually cost him, line by line, over the past twelve months. Then he did the same exercise from the guest's side: what did the wo/man on the other end of the booking actually pay to stay on his land?

The numbers were not what he expected. The platform he liked least turned out to be the one taking the most. The platform he thought was generous was, on his small volume, the worst deal of all. And the gap between what he charged and what his guests paid (the part of the bill he never saw) was wider than he'd ever quite registered.

This piece walks through the same exercise. The numbers are simple. The conclusions are not.

The setup: $100 a night, thirty nights a year

For the worked example, hold the host's situation steady. His rate is $100 a night. His average stay is two nights. He completes fifteen bookings in a year. That's thirty paid nights total, or $3,000 in gross compensation before anyone takes a cut.

This is a small operation by design. If the math is unflattering at this volume, it's worth knowing, because the host's marginal night is more sensitive to fixed costs when the volume is low. We'll come back to that.

Here is what each major platform takes from his $3,000, using the published 2026 rate structures.

Platform	Host commission	Annual subscription	Host nets
Airbnb	~15.5% per booking	—	$2,535
VRBO	~3% per booking	~$699/yr	$2,211
Booking.com	~15% per booking	—	$2,550
Hipcamp	~10% per booking	—	$2,700
Fyreside Club	$0 booking commission	$297 (Charter rate)	$2,703

A few things stand out before we even get to the guest side.

Hipcamp comes out ahead of Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking on this profile, but it's not because Hipcamp is generous. It's because Hipcamp's commission is comparatively lower. The platform model is the same; the rate happens to bite less.

VRBO is the worst deal here, and it's not particularly close. The 3% commission looks like a bargain until you see the $699 annual subscription that comes with it. On thirty nights of $100 stays, that subscription works out to about 23% of gross compensation, on top of the per-booking commission. VRBO's pricing structure assumes the host is doing real volume; for a small host it's punishing. A wo/man doing five hundred nights a year on VRBO is paying a fractional rate. A wo/man doing thirty is being charged like a hotel.

And the headline of the table: Fyreside Club, at the Charter Host rate, comes out within $3 of Hipcamp on the host side, before we look at anything else. That's the part of the comparison that's already familiar.

What the table doesn't show is everything that happens after.

What the guest is actually paying

Here is the part of the bill the host doesn't see, and most prospective hosts don't think about.

Every major platform charges the guest a separate service fee on top of the host's nightly rate. The host posts $100. The platform displays the rate, takes the guest through checkout, and tacks on its own fee, usually somewhere between 10% and 14% of the booking subtotal, sometimes more. On top of that, the platform collects state and local lodging tax, which varies by jurisdiction but tends to land around 10% in most U.S. markets. By the time the guest's card is charged, the total has wandered well above the host's posted rate.

On a $100 nightly rate, a two-night stay, here is roughly what the guest ends up paying on each platform. (Guest service fees vary by market and listing type; these are middle-of-the-range estimates for 2026.)

Platform	Host rate	Guest fee	Lodging tax	Guest pays
Airbnb	$200	~$28	~$23	~$251
VRBO	$200	~$20	~$22	~$242
Booking.com	$200	~$14	~$21	~$235
Hipcamp	$200	~$22	~$22	~$244
Fyreside Club	$200	$0	$0	$200

Read that last column carefully. The host posted $100 a night and gets paid as if it were $100 a night. But the guest, on every public platform, paid somewhere between $235 and $251 for those two nights. That's a 17% to 25% spread between what the host charged and what the guest actually paid. The host never sees that money. The platform took the guest fee. The state took the lodging tax. The host's $200 to the guest's $250 is the gap that the platform sits in.

Why the guest-side fee matters more than hosts realize

Most hosts think of platform fees as a host problem. The platform takes some of your money. You factor it in or you don't.

But the guest-side fee is a different kind of cost, and it's the one that quietly shapes whether bookings happen at all.

Put yourself in the guest's shoes. They see a $100 nightly rate in search. They click. They go through the booking flow. At checkout, the total has jumped by 20% or more because of fees and taxes they didn't see at the listing stage. There is a measurable, documented effect in e-commerce literature for this: fee surprise at checkout is one of the most reliable predictors of cart abandonment in the entire industry. People who would have booked at $250 walk away when they thought it was going to be $200 and it's not.

The host doesn't see this happen. The host sees an inquiry that didn't convert, a booking that fell through, a slow week. The platform sees an abandoned cart and offers the guest a discount on a different listing. The host's price is suppressing their own bookings, and they don't know it, because the host never sees the price the guest sees.

The second savings: price flexibility

This is where the math turns from "fees are annoying" to "the model itself is the problem."

On a platform, the host is locked in a difficult position. The platform fee is fixed (well, it's not really fixed, since the platform changes it whenever it wants, but let's say it's effectively fixed in any given month). The guest-side fee is also fixed. The lodging tax is fixed. The only thing the host can move is the nightly rate. If the host wants the all-in price the guest sees at checkout to come down, the only lever is to lower the host rate, which means taking less home.

On Fyreside, the host is not in that position. There is no platform commission. There is no guest-side service fee. The host's posted rate is what the guest sees, more or less. (State or local tax obligations on private property arrangements are a separate question, governed by the host's own situation, not added on by an intermediary at checkout.)

What that means in practice is that a Fyreside host can charge less and take home more than they would on a platform charging the same total. Drop the rate from $100 to $90, the guest sees $90 instead of $251, and the host still nets more than they would have at $100 with Airbnb skimming 15.5% and tacking on a guest fee. Lower friction. Lower total cost. More booking requests. More nights filled.

This is the part of the comparison that almost no host actually models, because the platform-side math focuses on what the host gets per booking rather than on what makes bookings happen in the first place.

What the worked example looks like for an active host

Now imagine the man in Tennessee scales up. Same land, same rate, but he gets serious: thirty bookings a year instead of fifteen, sixty paid nights at $100 each, $6,000 gross.

Platform	Annual cost to host	Annual take-home
Airbnb	~$930 (commission only)	$5,070
VRBO	~$180 commission + $699 sub = ~$879	$5,121
Booking.com	~$900 (commission only)	$5,100
Hipcamp	~$600 (commission only)	$5,400
Fyreside Club	$297 (Charter rate)	$5,703

At sixty nights, the Fyreside member is keeping $303 to $633 more per year than they would on any of the four big platforms, before we factor in the guest-side pricing effect, the platforms' tendency to raise fees without warning, or the biggest variable of all: income tax.

Platforms send a 1099-K to the IRS for every dollar that flows through them, so the $6,000 in this example lands as ordinary income subject to federal and state tax. At a 22% federal plus 5% state bracket, that is another $1,620 gone, larger than any of the per-platform fees in the table above. Private member arrangements sit differently in tax terms, and that line is often where the math stops being close.

What none of these numbers capture

The math, even when it favors Fyreside by an order of magnitude, is not the most important part of the comparison.

The platform fee is a price you pay for a relationship in which the platform sets the rules. They define what a "good host" looks like. They penalize you for being selective. They take guest reviews and use them to rank your listing. They change the economics on thirty days' notice. They build an algorithm that rewards behavior that may or may not be aligned with how you want to host on your own land.

If you read the longer essay on why the platform model works against the landowner, the structural argument there is the deeper version of this. The fees are just where the structural problem becomes visible on a balance sheet. The deeper cost is that you're a vendor in someone else's marketplace, operating on someone else's terms, on your own land.

Fyreside doesn't take a percentage of your stays because Fyreside is not a marketplace. It is a private membership club. Members pay annual dues to belong. The club's job is not to insert itself between you and your guests. It is to make a directory of like-minded wo/men available to each other and stay out of the way after that. The economics of every stay belong to the two wo/men making the arrangement.

Run your own numbers

The example used here was a small host doing thirty nights a year at $100. The arithmetic shifts substantially with rate, volume, and how aggressive the platform is in your specific market. A high-volume host in a high-occupancy-tax jurisdiction will see a much larger gap than the example suggests. A low-volume host on VRBO will see an even more punishing one.

If you are currently hosting on a public platform, the most useful thing you can do is plug your own numbers into the savings calculator and look at the breakdown side-by-side. The math is not theoretical. It applies to your specific listing, your specific nightly rate, your specific booking volume, and the specific platform you use.

It is also worth, while you're there, asking yourself the harder question: why is a third party sitting between you and the wo/man staying on your land at all?