Why host with Villario

Villario charges a simple, tiered commission instead of a flat percentage on every booking — so short bookings on higher‑value properties aren't penalised, and longer stays cost you less than they would elsewhere.

Beyond price, everything you need to run a serious short‑term‑rental business is built in: custom pricing rules, Instant Book or Request‑to‑Book (your choice, per property), encrypted guest ID verification, iCal sync with Airbnb/Booking.com/Vrbo, PMS connections, delegated co‑host access, structured dispute resolution, and automatically generated earnings statements — all reachable from the Property Hosting section of your dashboard once you're set up.

Getting started checklist

Six things to do, in order, before your first booking can come in. Each is covered in its own section below.

• Create your account and complete your host profile.
• Connect a payout account under Payments so you can actually get paid.
• Accept the Data Processing Agreement and confirm your trader/private status.
• List your first property — either build it step by step, or import it from an existing listing.
• Set up room types (or whole‑property pricing) and availability.
• Publish, and keep an eye on your dashboard for your first enquiry.

Your host profile

Your profile is what guests see on every listing you publish, and it controls how booking requests behave. Find it under Property Hosting → Profile.

Connecting payments

Villario pays hosts out via Stripe Connect. Nothing can be booked on your properties until this is set up — go to Property Hosting → Payments.

The same Payments page is also where you'll see a read‑only summary of your trader/private declaration (see Legal & compliance) and, where it applies, a short notice about additional use of your Stripe onboarding details for the platform's own EU marketplace‑disclosure obligations — you'll be asked to explicitly acknowledge this once, separately from Stripe's own terms.

Legal & compliance

Villario operates across multiple jurisdictions, so a few pieces of paperwork are built into the flow rather than left to chance. None of this is optional busywork — each piece unlocks something.

Trader / private status & business info

Whether you're hosting as a private individual or as a registered trading business affects what's shown on your listing and what Villario must disclose about you under EU marketplace rules. This is captured once, in your Organisation → Business Info settings (outside the Property Hosting section) — Villario suggests a status based on your Stripe business type or how many properties you list, but you can correct it. The Payments page shows a read‑only summary with a link back to that page if you ever need to update it.

Short‑term rental registration

Many countries and cities require a registration or licence number for short‑term rentals. The property wizard's Legal & Compliance step asks for this automatically when your property's country requires it, and shows you exactly which label/format is expected. You can save a draft without it, but you won't be able to publish until it's filled in for a country that requires one.

Guest ID & the Data Processing Agreement

Where a property's country requires it, Villario collects a guest's ID ahead of check‑in on your behalf. Because you (the host) are legally the data controller and Villario is the processor, you must accept the current Data Processing Agreement once before ID collection can be triggered for any of your bookings — you'll be prompted the first time it's relevant. See Guest ID & check‑in codes for how this looks day to day.

Adding a property

From Property Hosting → Properties → Add property, the listing wizard walks through the following steps. You can save a draft at any point and come back — nothing publishes until you choose to.

Once the property has been created, four more steps appear for managing it going forward:

A property is created as a Draft. It only becomes bookable once you set it to Active from the Review step — that's the point to double‑check every step (the Review page links straight back to any step still showing an error).

Importing an existing listing

Already listed elsewhere? Property Hosting → Properties → Import offers an AI‑assisted 3‑step import instead of typing everything by hand (available where the property‑import AI capability is enabled for your account):

1. Paste the listing URL

   Point it at your existing Airbnb, Booking.com or other listing page and start extraction.

2. Review the extracted fields

   Check and edit everything the AI pulled out — name, description, amenities — and choose which photos to bring across.

3. Confirm

   You land straight on your new draft property, ready to finish the Legal & Compliance, Policies, and remaining steps above.

Room types & availability

Room Types mode

If your property lists by room type, add each one from the property's Room Types screen: name, description, capacity (adults/children/infants), bed configuration, size, room‑specific amenities and photos, nightly base price and currency, how many identical units you have, and an optional damage deposit (charged or authorized). Guests then book a specific room type rather than the whole property.

Availability calendar

Each room type (or the whole property, in Whole Property mode) has a per‑date calendar. Leave a date untouched and it's available at your base price with all units open; block dates out, or override the price for specific dates (a long weekend, a local event) directly from the calendar.

Pricing, taxes & add‑ons

Pricing rules

Layer automatic adjustments on top of your base price, at the property or a specific room type, applied in priority order:

Add‑ons

Optional extras a guest can add at booking — cleaning fee, early check‑in, airport transfer, whatever's relevant to your property — each with its own price.

Taxes

Configure the local occupancy/VAT tax rules that apply to your property so they're calculated and itemised automatically on every booking, rather than something you have to remember to add.

Cancellation policies

Build a custom policy per property under Property Hosting → Properties → Cancellation Policies, or use one of the built‑in presets (Flexible, Moderate, Strict). A custom policy is a set of refund rules by how many hours before check‑in a guest cancels — the most generous applicable rule wins.

Whatever policy is active at the moment of booking is locked into that booking — changing your policy later never retroactively affects a guest who already booked under the old terms.

Dashboard

Your landing page after logging in — a snapshot of upcoming check‑ins/check‑outs, pending booking requests awaiting your response, unread messages, and recent activity across every property you manage.

Bookings

Every reservation across every property, filterable by status. Open one to see the full guest, stay, and payment detail, confirm or deny a pending Request‑to‑Book, or cancel where your policy allows it.

Messages

One conversation thread per booking with your guest, from first enquiry through to after checkout. Response rate and response time shown on your public profile are calculated from how quickly you reply here, so treat it as your first line of guest service.

Reviews

See every review left on your properties, with your overall rating shown on your public profile. Post a public response to any review — a level‑headed reply to an unfair one often matters more to future guests than the review itself.

Disputes

If something goes wrong with a stay — property condition, a cancellation disagreement, a payment issue — either you or the guest can open a dispute from the booking. Villario mediates:

1. Open & discuss

   State what happened (with photos/evidence if useful) and message back and forth with the other party directly in the dispute thread.

2. Escalate

   Either party can escalate to the Villario team at any point, and it escalates automatically if the thread goes quiet for 48 hours.

3. Resolution

   Once escalated, Villario reviews the evidence and issues a binding resolution — a refund, a damage‑deposit claim, or another outcome — and both parties are notified.

A dispute can only be opened within a window around the stay dates (through 14 days after checkout), so it can't resurface indefinitely.

Guest ID & check‑in codes

Guest ID verification

For properties in countries that require it, Villario sends the guest a notification ahead of check‑in telling them to log in to their Villario account, where they'll find a link on the booking itself to submit ID for everyone who needs to be identified — you don't have to chase this yourself. There's deliberately no clickable link in the notification that submits ID directly: the guest has to sign in as the booking's own guest first, which avoids training guests into the "click a link and hand over your ID" habit scammers rely on. From a booking's detail page you can see whether it's been submitted, and only ever see the minimal fields you're legally entitled to (name, date of birth, nationality) — full documents and scans stay restricted to platform administrators for regulatory reporting. Your view of a submitted ID is time‑boxed to a set number of days after checkout, then it disappears from your side automatically.

If a guest still hasn't submitted their ID close to check‑in, you'll get an alert so you can follow up or decide whether to cancel — nothing cancels itself automatically.

Check‑in codes

If your property uses a smart lock or keypad, generate a door code per booking from the booking detail page and revoke it any time — your guest sees their active code from their own trip page.

Damage deposits

Set an optional refundable damage deposit per room type (or for the whole property, in Whole Property mode). It's charged upfront as part of the guest's single booking payment — not a separate hold — and shown as its own line on their receipt.

• Released automatically a set number of days after checkout if nothing's wrong (14 days by default, configurable per property).
• You can release it early yourself, straight from the booking, if you're satisfied sooner.
• If there's damage, open a dispute before the auto‑release date — Villario mediates a partial or full claim.

Property managers & team access

Delegate day‑to‑day running of a property to someone else — a co‑host, a cleaner who also handles messaging, a full‑time manager — without handing over your login. Add them from the property's Managers step and grant exactly the permissions they need:

A manager with no permissions granted still has read‑only visibility. You (the owner) always keep full control regardless of what's delegated.

Companies & multi‑property

Running more than one property — or operating under a registered business rather than as an individual? Create a Company profile (trading name, legal name, registration/VAT number, business address) and assign properties to it, so listings can be grouped under a brand.

If your account belongs to a Villario organisation and you're its owner, a Business page appears with an org‑wide action to suspend or reactivate every listing at once — useful if you need to pause everything temporarily (a renovation, an off‑season closure) without archiving each property individually.

Channel manager & calendar sync

Still listed on Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo or Expedia? Connect them from a property's Channels screen to push blocked dates and rates outward, or pull availability in via a plain iCal feed.

Villario also publishes its own iCal feed per property (optionally per room type) so any external calendar tool can subscribe and stay in sync — this is what actually prevents double‑bookings across platforms.

PMS connections

Already running a property‑management system? Connect it from a property's PMS screen (Mews, Cloudbeds, Opera, protel, or Apaleo) and choose, independently, whether to sync bookings out, pull rates in, and pull availability blocks in — a master switch turns the whole connection on or off.

Invoices & earnings

Property Hosting → Invoices is where your generated financial documents live, across two tabs:

Frequently asked questions

Getting support

Stuck on something this handbook doesn't cover? Reach out to the Villario team from the support option in your portal, or via hosts@villario.co.uk. For anything involving a specific guest or booking, opening a dispute (if it's a stay‑related disagreement) gets you a faster, better‑tracked resolution than email alone.