HOSTING
Your empty hours already cost you money
A flat between bookings, a hotel room vacant until the 3pm check-in, a consulting room dark on Fridays. The overheads run whether or not anyone is inside. Shortyme sells the hours you are not using, to people who only ever wanted a few.
What you actually earn
Shortyme takes 10% commission from the space subtotal. Guests pay a 10% service fee on top, capped, so the fee stops growing on longer bookings rather than punishing them.
Payouts are per booking, and every figure shown in your dashboard is what lands in your account — never gross booking value. The headline metric is revenue per available hour, not revenue, because revenue flatters whoever opened the most hours and occupancy flatters whoever underpriced. Only the two together tell you anything.
Three things before a listing goes live
The platform tells you exactly what is missing rather than refusing vaguely. You can save and come back at any point.
At least five, each reviewed by a person before it goes live. We strip location metadata from every image automatically, so a photo of your living room cannot publish your address.
An access method and arrival instructions. Remote access — a code, a smart lock — is the least work for you and what most guests prefer. Meeting every guest at the door is the most hands-on.
The hours you are willing to let. Not a calendar of whole days — the point of the product is the Tuesday between 10 and 2 that would otherwise earn nothing.
You cannot be double-booked
Not “we try hard not to”. Two overlapping bookings on the same space are impossible at the database level — the second one is refused by a constraint, not by application code that might have a race in it. This is the failure that costs a host a relationship with a guest, and it is designed out rather than monitored for.
Your address is not published
Listings show an approximate location, fuzzed by about 150 metres. The exact address is released to one person, once they have a confirmed booking. Your address is also encrypted at rest, so it is not sitting in plain text in a database.
Guests are identity-checked before they can book anything. You will always know someone was verified; you will not be shown who they are before you accept, which is deliberate.
Tax, honestly
Shortyme works out VAT per jurisdiction and shows guests a total that already includes it. Whether your supply is taxed depends on whether you are registered where the space is — below a registration threshold many hosts are not, and the platform records your status rather than assuming it.
Two things that are yours, not ours. Letting a residential property short-term can engage local planning or licensing rules, and if you rent or hold a lease, your agreement may simply prohibit it. Neither is something a marketplace can waive for you, and any platform that implies otherwise is handing you its risk.
What we ask of you
Describe the space accurately, including its flaws. A guest who arrives to something quieter — or louder — than promised leaves a review that costs more than the booking was worth.