Revenue Optimization

Revenue is where TIDY starts. Before any turnovers get scheduled, TIDY works to grow your net operating income (NOI) — projecting what each property can earn, recommending the right rental strategy, distributing your listing to the channels that fit, keeping those listings optimized and tracking how they rank, and adjusting pricing continuously. This guide explains how that works, and the fee and channel math behind it.

How TIDY Grows Your Revenue

TIDY treats revenue as an active, ongoing job — not a one-time listing setup. Here is what TIDY’s AI and team do on your behalf:

1. Revenue projection. When a property comes online, TIDY estimates what it can realistically earn under each strategy — nightly short-term, monthly mid-term, or a long-term lease — so you can see the tradeoffs before you commit.
2. Strategy recommendation. Based on the projection, seasonality, and your goals, TIDY recommends the strategy — or blend of strategies — that maximizes NOI for each property. The same unit is often worth more as an STR in peak season and an MTR or LTR the rest of the year.
3. Channel distribution. TIDY identifies the right channels for your strategy and lists your property across them. See Listing Channels for the full map of where your property can appear.
4. Listing optimization & rank tracking. TIDY keeps each listing’s title, photos, description, and settings tuned for conversion, and tracks how your listing ranks in search on each channel so it stays visible to guests and renters.
5. Dynamic pricing. TIDY sets and continuously adjusts nightly and monthly rates and availability based on demand, comps, and your rules — with a per-day strategy for every night (short-term, longer-term, both, or blocked).

How aggressively TIDY optimizes depends on where each listing is in its lifecycle — a brand-new listing earning its first reviews runs a very different playbook than an established one raising rates. See Optimization Phases for the phase-by-phase approach.

Platform Fees

Part of maximizing NOI is understanding what each channel actually costs. We generally don’t recommend worrying about what is labeled a “guest fee” versus a “host fee.” What matters is the amount the guest pays and the amount you actually receive. The figures below are the effective total per-platform take:

VRBO and Booking.com charge different rates based on stay length, location, booking value, and visibility or marketing programs you opt into. But in practice, they are similar to Airbnb for most properties.

Direct Bookings

A direct booking is one made through a website TIDY hosts on your behalf — no marketplace commission. For direct bookings, you typically want to budget about 5% to cover:

• Credit card fees — standard payment processing costs.
• Chargebacks — you incur fees from credit card companies when customers dispute charges.
• Refunds — you do not get back payment processing fees when you refund a booking.

Most guests will discount these bookings by about 5%, meaning in general you can expect to make about 5% more on a direct booking than on a platform booking. The reason you typically offer a discount on direct bookings is that much of your direct traffic comes from people who found you on Airbnb and want to see if there is a reason to book off-site. See Reservations for how bookings flow through TIDY.

Typical Channel Mix

For a short-term rental, most hosts can expect roughly this split of revenue by channel:

Direct traffic tends to start near 0% and grow over time as TIDY builds and optimizes your direct booking presence. Mid- and long-term strategies use a different channel mix entirely — see Listing Channels for the STR, MTR, and LTR breakdowns.

Our Approach

TIDY is focused on boosting your net operating income transparently. That means recommending and running the highest-value strategy for each property, listing where your guests and renters actually are, and keeping pricing and listings continuously optimized. We prefer direct bookings for their better margins, but we won’t give up the traffic that comes from the major marketplaces — so a healthy mix, actively managed, is almost always the right answer.