Extras, tourist tax and arrival emails for a vacation rental on Wix
By Kayabyte
Disclosure: I make Stay Direct, a booking app for Wix sites that I describe near the end. The first sections are about the problem and what you can do by hand, with no app needed. Checked on 3 November 2026.
If you rent out a cabin, a flat or a few rooms and take bookings on your own website, the nightly price is only part of what you charge. Guests also pay for breakfast, early check-in or a pet, and in many places they owe a city or tourist tax. Then comes the work after the booking: sending the address and the door code, and telling the cleaner who leaves and who arrives.
What do hosts usually need on top of the nightly price?
- Extras: early check-in, late check-out, breakfast, a pet fee, an extra bed, a cleaning fee. Some are optional, some should always be added.
- A tourist or occupancy tax shown as its own line, so the guest sees what is the room and what is the tax.
- A message before arrival with the address, key box or lock information, wifi and parking.
- One search across several cabins or rooms, so a guest can pick dates and see what is free.
- A calendar for the cleaner that lists every check-out and what comes next.
How can you do this by hand?
It works, and for one or two bookings a month it is fine.
- Extras and tax: put them in the booking confirmation or in an invoice you send, or add a fixed “cleaning and service” amount to the nightly rate. The downside is that the guest does not see the full price before paying, and you do the arithmetic for each booking.
- Arrival message: keep a template in your mail app and send it a few days before each check-in. The risk is forgetting one, or sending it to the wrong booking.
- Cleaner: share a Google Calendar and add each check-out yourself, or forward your Airbnb and Booking.com calendar links to the cleaner. Imported calendars usually show “reserved” blocks, not who arrives next.
If you are not sure how your tourist tax has to be charged or reported, ask your municipality. That part is a legal matter and no booking tool decides it for you.
What should you look for in a booking tool?
- Can extras be optional or required, and are they charged per stay, per night, per guest or per guest per night?
- Does the guest see each extra and the tax as separate lines in the price, and does the checkout total match?
- Can the tax be per person per night, per person per stay, per stay or a percentage, with children left out if your rules say so?
- When you take a deposit, do the extras and the tax follow it, or does the total stop adding up?
- Is the arrival message sent by the tool, once per booking, and can you preview it first?
- Does the cleaner calendar leave out guest names and contact details?
Where Stay Direct fits (mine)
Full disclosure: I built Stay Direct, a booking app for vacation rentals and cabins on Wix sites. It has a Host Pack with these parts:
- Extras (all plans). Add early check-in, breakfast, a pet fee and so on to a property. Each is counted once per stay, per night, per guest or per guest per night, and can be marked as always added. Guests tick the optional ones in the booking widget, and each extra is its own line in the price and at checkout. Extras are counted once per booking, not per room.
- Tourist or occupancy tax (all plans). Charge a fixed amount per person per night, per person per stay or per stay, or a percentage of the stay price. For per-person taxes guests can say how many children are in the party so they are left out, and you can cap the number of taxed nights. The tax is a separate line. You still pay it to your municipality yourself; the app only collects and shows it.
- Pre-arrival email (Pro and Business). Write the message once per property. Stay Direct sends it to each guest with a confirmed booking a number of days before check-in (you choose 0 to 14), once per booking, and the guest’s reply goes to your site’s business email. You can preview it and send yourself a test.
- Search across properties (Pro and Business). A search widget where guests pick dates and the number of guests, see which of your properties are free with the total price, and book from the results.
- Cleaner calendar (Pro and Business). A calendar link with one entry on every check-out day, saying when the next guests arrive or that no check-in is booked yet. It works in Google, Apple and Outlook calendars and never shows guest names or contact details.
There is no commission on bookings, and guests pay through your own Wix checkout. Prices and plans are on the help page.
Where it is not the right fit:
- There is no quantity for an extra: one tick is one charge on its basis (for example, two pets are not two charges).
- The search widget handles single-room bookings.
- The arrival email is plain text with an English footer, with no attachments.
- Stay Direct is not a channel manager. Calendars are connected by iCal links, which carry dates only.
See Stay Direct on the Wix App Market
FAQ
Can I show a tourist tax as a separate line on my own Wix site? Not with a plain price. You need a tool that adds it as its own line, or you add it by hand to each booking.
Is a city tax the same as VAT or sales tax? Usually not. Occupancy taxes are set by your city or country and often have their own rules, so check with your municipality.
Do I need a paid plan for extras and the tax? In Stay Direct they are on every plan. The arrival email, search widget and cleaner calendar need Pro or Business.
Is the cleaner calendar safe to share? Anyone with the link can read it, so give it only to your cleaner. In Stay Direct you can make new links, which stops the old ones at once.
Last checked: 3 November 2026. Spotted something out of date? Write to support@kayabyte.dev and I’ll fix it.