For Hosts

This section is for hosts — the owners and operators of the lakes on LakeBooking. The angler-side documentation is one section above; you can ignore it unless you're also planning to fish someone else's lake.

The pages here are operational — what to click, what each setting does, what to expect once bookings are open. For the policy / contractual side, the Become a Host page is the long-form version.

Free setup for our first 100 lakes

If your lake is among the first 100 on LakeBooking, you don't have to read any of this: setup, help and support are free. On your dashboard you'll see a Claim free setup card — answer a ~10-minute questionnaire about your lake, fish, swims, prices and rules, and our team builds the whole listing for you. We ask in Messages if anything is unclear, and nothing goes live without your approval. Prefer the DIY route? Carry on below — and ask us anything along the way, support is free for you either way.

What's covered

• Swims and pricing — the billing-unit model, charging periods, multi-tier pricing, and what to do if your existing pricing doesn't map cleanly.
• Calendar and bookings — blocking dates, request-to-book vs instant-book, handling conflicts, and the message inbox.
• Payments, payouts, and taxes — how the v1 split works, RO e-Factura, ANAF reporting, what changes when we add full online payments.

What this section doesn't cover

• The legal contract. That's in Terms & Conditions.
• The cancellation rules. Those are in Refund Policy.
• The verification and fish-welfare standard. That's Trust & Safety.
• What you're paid and what we keep. Summary: the angler pays a flat 10% booking fee to LakeBooking online via Stripe (which we retain as our commission per your Host Agreement); the 90% remaining balance is paid by the angler directly to you at the lake. We don't hold the remaining balance — never have, never will. Full mechanics on Payments, payouts, and taxes.

Three principles worth knowing up front

These three rules shape how the dashboard behaves, why some things are restricted, and where your control ends and the platform's begins.

1. Hosts own pricing, calendars, rules, and stock. We never override your prices, block your dates without your action, or edit your declared stock. The platform's role is to surface your listing fairly in search, take the booking fee by card (retained as our commission), and mediate disputes when they happen — that's it.

2. The remaining balance is your business, in both senses. The platform doesn't hold it, doesn't issue invoices for it, and doesn't intermediate refunds on it. Your fiscal compliance on the remaining balance — receipts, cash registers, ANAF reporting — is yours to handle. We provide an export to make the bookkeeping easy; we don't take responsibility for it.

3. Fast replies win bookings. There's no penalty for a slow answer, but an angler with an unanswered question books another lake — aim to reply within a day, ideally sooner.

The order to do things in your first week

If you're starting fresh, work through the section in this order:

1. Complete the listing builder (the dashboard walks you through it).
2. Read Swims and pricing and set your billing units before you publish. Changing pricing after you're live is fine, but doing it before saves the first wave of confused inquiries.
3. Read Calendar and bookings and block any dates you know you don't want (your own use, planned maintenance, fish welfare closed season).
4. Skim Payments, payouts, and taxes so you know how the money flows.
5. Turn on Accept bookings in Lake settings (and hit Request verification for the public badge).
6. Watch the dashboard for the first days — it tracks revenue, occupancy, bookings and reviews, and your first inquiries will land in Messages.

Talk to us

For situations the standard onboarding doesn't fit — federation-managed waters, hotel-attached lakes, river beats, syndicate waters, multi-site operators — email contact@lakebooking.com before formally signing up. We'll set up a short call. A real person reads it, not a ticketing queue.