How to split an Airbnb when the rooms are not equal

Give each bedroom a weight, add the weights up, and everybody pays that share of the booking. The master with its own bathroom counts for more than the attic room you have to duck to get into, and the sofa bed counts for less than either.

The arithmetic is the easy half. The booking went on one card in February, and by the weekend the beds are claimed and the money has not been mentioned. It often stays that way: somebody does four nights on a sofa, pays what the couple with the balcony paid, never mentions it, and is busy the year after. Let Split by Peanut do the asking.

Doing it in the right order

  1. Agree the weights in the hallway

    Do it while people are still deciding who sleeps where. Once the bags are in a room it is a complaint rather than a decision.

  2. Put the booking in under whoever paid it

    Type each person's share in rather than letting it divide evenly. The weights decided the shares; the room holds them.

  3. Paste the link into the group chat

    The invitation is the link and nothing else, and everything the weekend costs after the booking goes on top of it.
    Jules took the attic and paid attic money for it.

Weights people actually agree on

A weight is one number per bedroom, argued about once, before any money moves. Most groups land on 1.4 for the master, 1.0 for an ordinary double and 0.6 for a sofa bed or a bunk.

Divide the booking by the total of the weights to get what one weight costs. Four people at 1.4, 1.0, 1.0 and 0.6 come to four weights exactly, so the master pays 1.4 of them and the sofa 0.6. Cleaning and service fees usually come off the top and split evenly, on the grounds that nobody's bedroom made them bigger.

So is the person in the master also paying extra for the good chair and the two extra minutes of hot water? No. A bedroom is one decision that holds all week; the rest is a running argument that costs more than it settles. Where the gap between the best bed and the worst comes out at about the price of a round, split it evenly and go to the beach.

When an equal split is the better tool

Four rooms much of a muchness do not need weights; weighting them invents a difference nobody had noticed. Weights are for the trip where one bed is obviously worse and nobody wants to be the person who brings it up.

Good to know

Split is free forever, with nothing to upgrade to. Peanut makes it to introduce people to Peanut, which is how Split gets paid for, so there is no paid tier and nothing to move behind one later.

158 currencies, converted at the day's rate, which is indicative rather than your bank's. A room holds up to twenty people. Split records a payment rather than making one. It does not check with a bank and cannot.

Put the weights where everyone can see them

Takes ten seconds. No email, no password, no download.

Start a split

Questions

How do you split an Airbnb cost when the rooms are not equal?
Weight each bedroom, then give everybody their weight's share of the booking. There is no standard set of weights, because what a sloped ceiling is worth depends on how tall you are. Agree the numbers before the first night, not after the last.
Is there a calculator for rooms of different sizes?
There is one for rent, and it runs on floor area rather than on which bed you got. A holiday let is settled by the bed rather than by the tape measure, so the weights above are the closer method.
How do we work out who owes who at the end?
One card paid the booking, so the room opens with everybody owing one person. That stops being true once the taxis and the food shop are in. The room nets the lot down, so the group makes two or three transfers instead of twenty.