To become a host on Outdoorsy, there’s no sign-up fee. You start making money as soon as your first guest finds your listing and books a trip. While you supe up your rig and manage the front end of the business, we’re behind the scenes working through paperwork and background information to make sure you and your guests have the safest and best possible experience.
For this, we receive a percentage of your payout—we call it the host fee—while the rest of your funds get deposited straight into your bank account up to 48 hours after your guest starts their trip (though the money usually takes 3-5 business days to appear in your bank account).
Below, we’ll explain more about the ins and outs of your host fee—from how much it is, what it covers, and why it helps you rest easy when you rent out your rig.
How much is Outdoorsy’s host fee?
Outdoorsy hosts share 25% of each booking fee with us. A 25% chunk might seem like a lot, but it’s small potatoes when you think about all the things the host fee gets you.
The host fee is there to help us help you with all the things you don’t want to worry about – things like marketing your rig (we literally bring customers to your door :), making sure your guests clear background checks and other important hurdles, customer service when your guests need help, and more.
In the next few sections, we’ll unpack the work on the backend that the host fee covers.
Customer service support to help optimize your listing
If a guest runs into trouble on the road, they can call us right away so we can help them out with things like roadside assistance, mobile mechanics, and more.
Without the host fee, we’d be unable to provide this service for you and you’d be stuck dealing with these challenges when you’d probably rather be spending time with your family.
Marketing your listing to drive bookings
The RV rental marketplace is a highly competitive space. Marketing on your own means you’d have to compete with large companies that have big budgets to spend on things like social media ads and search engine optimization.
When you list your rental with Outdoorsy, you get the benefit of our name recognition and collective marketing efforts. Our team works tirelessly to get our RVs out there so your rig gets in front of the right people, at the right time, and for the right price.
Verifying the identity of guests
No unqualified drivers here! We require all guests to become Verified Drivers by uploading photos of a valid driver’s license to confirm their identities. guests must pass a two-step verification process and meet the minimum age requirement of 25 in order to become verified.
Anyone who plans to drive must become verified. These steps are required to give you peace of mind that only qualified drivers are getting behind the wheel of your rental.
Covering your trip with industry-leading insurance
Verifying the identity of guests brings us to our next point: Only Verified Drivers are covered by insurance when driving or towing an RV. Guests can select from standard protection plans offered through Outdoorsy depending on their travel needs when they book a rental.
Additionally, at no cost to you as a host, you can add Outdoorsy Protection Plans to your rental as part of your listing to cover:
- Up to $1M in liability coverage
- Up to $300,000 in comprehensive and collision coverage based on the value of the RV
- Free 24/7 roadside assistance and free towing and tire service
We know that mishaps occasionally happen on the road, and we want to make sure you feel confident and covered. Our protection plans also account for: back-up accidents, vandalism, fires, theft, power surge, earthquakes, fallen trees, windstorms, hail storms, and animal impact.
For further details about protection packages, read more here.
Fraud protection and reservation screening
Unfortunately, fraudsters are attracted to big-ticket transactions like RV and trailer rentals, where they can prey on unsuspecting hosts and owners. We never want that to happen at Outdoorsy, so we have a fraud-prevention team dedicated to minimizing the potential for risk as much as possible. They look for any strange behaviors, such as people flooding owners with messages, sending strange links, asking to conduct business off the platform. Then our team puts an end to the fraudster before they can ever reach you. This is work you don’t want to do on your own.
Phew, that’s a lot of things going on in the background! These are all the benefits that come with listing your rental through Outdoorsy—a small price to pay for everything that’s included. Outdoorsy takes care of it all so you don’t have to worry about it.
