Revenue management, answered

Should I charge extra-guest and pet fees, and how do they interact with my nightly rate?

Yes, use both fees, but calibrate them against your base rate. Extra-guest and pet fees capture real incremental cost and demand without inflating your headline price, which protects conversion while recovering revenue from higher-impact bookings.

By Jack Murphy, Head of Revenue Management at UpRev. Running pricing for US vacation rental managers since 2017. Last updated September 1, 2026.

How These Fees Interact With Your Nightly Rate

Your base nightly rate should reflect the property at standard occupancy with no pets. Fees for additional guests or pets then layer on top as separate line items, keeping your listed price competitive in search results while still capturing the full value of those stays. If you bake pet or large-group demand into your base rate instead, you price out smaller, cleaner bookings that would have converted at a lower number. Keep the base rate clean and let the fees do the incremental work.

Setting Fee Levels That Hold Up

Extra-guest fees should reflect real costs: additional laundry, wear, utilities, and any HOA or permit thresholds tied to occupancy. Pet fees need to cover deep-clean cycles and any damage reserve your clients carry, not just gesture at them. Fees that are obviously too low get ignored as a booking barrier but also fail to offset actual cost, and fees set too high push pet owners to lie on booking forms, which creates a worse outcome for your property managers than the pet itself would have.

Consistency Across a Portfolio

When you manage multiple properties for multiple owners, standardize fee structures by property tier or market segment rather than setting them property by property from scratch. Inconsistent structures create confusion in owner reporting and make it harder to identify whether fee revenue is actually tracking with occupancy patterns over time. Document the rationale for each fee level so you can defend it in owner reviews with logic grounded in cost recovery and market positioning, not guesswork.