Guide for hosts
How to host an experience: your own page or a marketplace
An experience host runs a paid session, usually a single sitting of a few hours, built around one specific thing you know how to do: a cooking class, a hike, a photography walk, a tasting. You can put that session on your own page, list it on a marketplace built for this kind of thing, or do both, and the choice decides who controls the price, who owns the relationship with the guest, and how much work falls on you to get people there in the first place.
What is an experience host?
An experience host is someone who sells a seat in a single session rather than a multi-day stay. No lodging, no meals plan, usually no deposit schedule stretching out over months. You show up, you teach or guide or lead for a few hours, and the guest goes home the same day. It's the shortest version of the same underlying job every host in this world has: a fixed number of seats, a date, and a price that has to cover what the thing actually costs you.
That makes an experience a reasonable place to start if you've never hosted anything before. The stakes of one afternoon are lower than the stakes of a retreat with a venue deposit already down, and you find out quickly whether people actually want what you're offering.
How do you host an experience, start to finish?
Decide who it's for, price it to cover your time, pick where people will find it, and run one before you plan a second. Those four decisions, in that order, cover most of what separates an experience that fills from one that doesn't.
Start with the guest, specific enough that you could picture the actual person booking: a couple celebrating an anniversary, a group of coworkers who want something other than happy hour, a solo traveler with three hours free before a flight. Then price it against everything it actually costs you, counting your own prep and the hours you're there, not just the ingredients or the gear. From there you choose a channel, your own page, a marketplace, or both, the decision the rest of this piece is mostly about. Run the first one, see who actually shows up and what they ask, and let that shape the second one.
Should you build your own page or list on a marketplace?
Build your own page when you want to control the price, the terms, and the relationship with a guest who might book again. List on a marketplace when you want to be found by people who weren't already looking for you by name. Plenty of hosts end up doing some version of both, just not always from day one.
Your own page means every detail is yours to set: what you charge, your cancellation terms, what you ask guests for beforehand. It also means every visitor has to arrive some other way, through a search result, a social post, an email, a referral, because a page nobody finds doesn't book anyone. A marketplace flips that. Something like Airbnb Experiences puts your listing in front of people who are already searching that marketplace for something to do, which solves the discovery problem for you. In exchange, you're working inside someone else's page design, someone else's review system, and someone else's rules about what you can charge and what they take. Those terms, and any fees involved, are specific to the platform and they change, so read the current terms straight from the marketplace itself before you build your pricing around them. Don't go on what a friend told you worked last year.
What does hosting through a marketplace like Airbnb Experiences actually involve?
It usually means an application or host-profile step before you can list, a set of requirements about what you can offer and how you describe it, and guest reviews that shape whether new people find your listing at all. Marketplaces built for experiences generally want to know who you are, what you're qualified to lead, and how the session actually runs, before they'll put your listing in front of their users. Exactly what's required, and how review and ranking systems work, is set by the platform and changes over time, so check the current rules directly rather than planning around last year's version.
One thing worth knowing going in: a marketplace's reviews and ratings often carry real weight in whether you get seen again, more so than they would on a page you fully control. That's a reasonable trade if the volume of bookings is worth it to you. It's also a reason some hosts run a new or unusual format on their own page first, where a slow start doesn't follow them into a ratings history, and only bring it to a marketplace once they know it works.
If what you're hosting ever shifts from a single session into something that includes travel, flights, or a packaged trip rather than just the time together, that's a different category with its own rules, and it's worth a conversation with a licensed travel advisor before you price or sell it that way. None of this is legal advice; requirements for permits, insurance, or business registration vary by what you're teaching and where you live, so check with a licensed professional in your area before you lean on either channel as your main source of guests.
Can you do both at once?
Yes, and plenty of hosts run the exact same experience on their own page and on a marketplace at the same time, usually at a different price, since a marketplace listing often carries fees that your own page doesn't. The two aren't in competition with each other so much as two different doors into the same room. A marketplace brings you strangers who weren't looking for you specifically. Your own page is where the guest who had a good time goes to book you again, or where you send the people who already follow you, because you'd rather keep that booking, and that relationship, entirely in your own hands.
Running both does mean keeping your calendar straight across two places, so a seat someone books on the marketplace doesn't double-book against one sold on your own page. A shared calendar, even a simple one, solves most of that before it becomes a real problem.
What makes people book an experience again, or send a friend?
People come back when the session delivered exactly what it promised and you made it easy for them to find you again afterward. That second part is the one hosts skip. Get an email address, a follow, or some way to reach that guest again before they leave, not days later when the moment's passed and the follow-up feels like an ask instead of a thank-you.
Questions hosts ask
Do you need a license to host a paid experience?
It depends on what you're teaching and where you live. Some activities and locations require a permit, an insurance policy, or a business registration before you can legally charge for them, and that varies by city and country. This isn't legal, tax or insurance advice, so check with a licensed professional in your area before you commit to a format or a marketplace listing.
How much should you charge for an experience?
Add up what the session actually costs you, including materials, any space you're renting, and your own prep and teaching time, not just the hours a guest sees. Only once that's covered do you decide what's left is worth charging for. The fuller version of that math, including what changes once you're running the same session on a repeat schedule, is on retreat pricing.
Is hosting an experience the same as being a tour guide?
Not usually. A tour guide typically leads people through a place; an experience host is usually teaching or leading a specific activity, even if it happens somewhere scenic. The overlap grows if your experience moves people between locations or includes travel, which brings in a different set of considerations. Tour leading goes further into that version of the job. ## Every guide in this section Experience hosting sits next to workshops and classes inside the same part of the Guild. Turning a workshop into a business covers what changes once a session repeats on a schedule and becomes real income. How to run a workshop people remember is about the few hours themselves, once you've decided to run one. Back up to hosting experiences and workshops for where all of this fits together. If you're weighing your own page against a marketplace, building a retreat website walks through what your own page needs to actually convert a stranger, even though it's written with a retreat in mind; most of it applies at experience scale too. ## Members' experiences Some of what members are already running as paid experiences, alongside workshops and full retreats, is on members' trips. The Residency puts five days around the business behind your experience, in person, January 14 to 18, 2027, at Lakemore in Traverse City. It's built for retreat hosts and experience hosts alike. You leave with your price and plan set and your founder's video filmed, the same work covered above, done with Anna, Robert and Stacy across the table instead of on your own. See what you leave with.