What actually happens when someone books your room for the first time
· 3 min read
Step by step, including the parts people worry about: the money, the address, and what happens if it goes wrong.
Listing a room for the first time raises a set of practical questions that most marketplaces answer vaguely. Here's the whole sequence, plainly.
Before anyone books
You create the listing: what the room is, what's in it, your rate, your hours, your cancellation policy. It's free and stays free — there's no listing fee and no monthly cost for the basic product.
Two things worth setting up properly at this point:
Payouts. You connect a Stripe account so money can reach you. This is required before anyone can book a paid session — the system won't let a guest pay for a room that has nowhere to send the money.
Your address privacy. If the room is at your home, turn on approximate location. The public listing then shows your city and a deliberately offset map pin rather than your street address. The exact address is only revealed to a guest once you've accepted their booking.
The request arrives
A guest picks a date and time and requests to book.
They are charged at this point — not when you accept. That's deliberate: it means a request is from someone who has actually committed, not someone browsing. You're not fielding enquiries from people who'd vanish when asked for money.
The money does not come to you yet. It's held. You'll see the booking as a pending request on your dashboard with the guest's name, the times, and what you'd earn.
You accept or decline. If you decline, the guest is refunded in full, including the service fee — declining costs them nothing and costs you nothing.
If you simply don't respond, the request expires after 48 hours and they're refunded automatically. Nobody's money sits in limbo because you were busy.
The session happens
Once you accept, the booking is confirmed and both of you get an email. The guest can see the exact address.
Then the ordinary part: they turn up, they use the room, they leave.
You get paid
Your payout is released automatically, 24 hours after the session's scheduled end time. You don't request it, invoice anyone, or chase anything.
The 24-hour delay is the one thing worth understanding rather than resenting. It exists so that if something went genuinely wrong — the room wasn't as described, the session couldn't happen — there's a window to sort it out before the money has moved. It's short enough not to affect your cash flow and long enough to be useful.
After release, the money lands in your Stripe balance and Stripe pays it to your bank on its normal schedule, usually a couple of business days.
The numbers
On a £100 booking:
- The guest pays £112 — your rate plus a 12% service fee
- You receive £95 — your rate minus a 5% commission
- SESH keeps £17
Those rates are the same for every host on every plan. There's no tier that changes them.
Set your rate as the number you want to receive plus roughly 5%, not the number you want the guest to see.
If something goes wrong
They cancel. Your policy decides it, automatically, with no conversation. Flexible, moderate or strict means a full refund up to 24 hours, 5 days or 14 days before. Outside that window, the booking is non-refundable and your payout releases as normal.
You need to cancel. You can, and the guest is refunded in full. Do it rarely — it's the thing most likely to lose you a repeat customer.
They damage something. Raise it before the payout releases. Message them, and contact support. There's no insurance product here — that's your own cover's job — but a payout can be frozen while something is looked into.
They don't turn up. The booking is paid. A no-show is their loss, not yours.
Reviews
After a completed session, both of you can review each other. A review can only be written by someone who actually completed a booking, which is why they mean something.
Your first few reviews matter disproportionately. They're the thing that converts the next ten bookings.
The realistic first month
You probably won't be busy immediately. Directory density takes time, and a new listing has no reviews.
What tends to help: a full gear list, honest photographs, being explicit about what the room is not good for, and answering requests quickly. Those are the four things that separate listings that get booked from listings that sit there.
Create a listing — it takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.