There are a few reasons why payout verification could take longer than usual. These are the most frequent that we see:

Once submitted, verification usually takes only a few minutes. However, it can take 1-2 business days. If you have waited longer than 3 business days, please get in touch with our support team.

Direct Basic is the “just the payment processing” option, primarily for hosts that already have experience in taking direct bookings. You can use our Direct websites and booking widget, but you need to connect your own Stripe account. This means you pay your own payment processing fees, you are liable for chargebacks, and you need to keep up with the various taxes for all of your properties. There are also no integrated solutions for guest vetting and damage protection.

Direct Premium is the fully featured package. Hospitable acts as the merchant of record for payment processing while also handling tax calculations on your behalf. Any payments received are paid out to an account of your choosing. Guest vetting and damage protection are also included.

As the merchant of record, Hospitable processes the payment, accepts liability for refunds and chargebacks, covers costs associated with cancellations, provides customer support during the booking process, and in general is responsible for the quality of the marketplace experience.

Chargeback liability can be especially important for smaller-scale hosts, where a single chargeback against a small volume of transactions could trigger consequences with a payment service provider. Instead, Hospitable can spread the risk and liability of chargebacks across a large client base, so occasional chargebacks don’t restrict your ability to keep processing payments.

Direct Premium is a hybrid between an Online Travel Agent like Airbnb and the do-it-yourself direct booking options out there that require a lot of setup and leave you bearing all the risk.

Similar to OTAs, Direct Premium helps hosts manage risk by investing in things like Merchant of Record liability, guest vetting, and damage protection on every reservation.

Unlike OTAs, we don’t pass on the costs of big-budget advertising campaigns to you and your guests.

So how do we stack up? Let’s compare direct booking versus OTAs.

In our price comparisons, Direct Premium can save you:

Just so you know, Direct Premium performs best on larger bookings. If you generally get < $100 bookings, you are likely a better candidate for Direct Basic.

Hospitable collects applicable taxes from the guest and passes them through to you with the payout. For Direct Basic, you need to enter your own taxes for each property. For Premium, we will calculate them for you and update them when there are changes.

In the future, we will start filing and remitting for Premium hosts in a limited number of jurisdictions where 1) we are legally able to do so and 2) where it makes business sense for us to do so. For now, filing and remitting taxes are your responsibility. Premium users may be required to sign regular affidavits that they are properly remitting the taxes that have been passed through to them.

You can learn more about how Hospitable handles taxes in this article.

For Direct Premium, we make an ACH transfer to your bank account 24 hours after check-in or when the payment settles, whichever comes later. If a guest books within four days of their check-in, the funds may not be available when the guest checks-in, in which case we will show you the settlement date, which is your payout date for that booking.

For Direct Basic, you are in charge of your payouts. We strongly advise you to keep funds in reserve to cover liability for cancellations, refunds, and chargebacks.

What’s not covered?

Damage protection is provided by Superhog and covers upto US$5M. You can find more details regarding the damage protection plan on their site.

We will create a Direct listing as soon as you receive your first reservation for that property.

This isn't currently supported but has been raised as a feature request. You can vote for it here!

Payment processing is now available for those on Direct Basic or Premium plans (currently only available in the US, UK Australia). We will continue to roll this out to other markets in the near future, with Canada at the top of our list. Check out our article here for all the info and updates.

No, this isn't currently supported but has been raised as a feature request. You can vote for it here!

Once you've completed your setup and hit Publish, we start working on issuing your site with an SSL certificate. This can take up to 24 hours but is usually completed within 30 minutes.
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If you have set up your Direct site with a custom domain, please make sure you set up your DNS records correctly with your provider. Take a look at this article for the information you need to do this.

If you've been waiting for longer than 24 hours, please get in touch with us.

Stripe is currently our only supported payment processor for Direct Basic. Basic is available in all countries where Stripe is supported.

If Stripe is not available in your country, you will be unable to use Direct Basic at present. We have a Lite version of Direct that does not include payment processing, so it is just your Direct website and booking requests, with payments taken off platform. Lite is only available for hosts with properties in regions not supported by Stripe.