Direct Booking Tax Structure

Investor · Greenville, SC · Member since 2022 · 69 posts · 38 votes

Hi! We own an STR property in Murrells Inlet, SC and have a few guests who want to return and we'd like to book them direct! However, can anyone advise on how to set up the tax structure for direct bookings? We use Guesty for our PMS right now and have a direct booking link through them. We just want to ensure we set that up correctly to allocate the correct amount towards taxes!

Thanks!!

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Lisa Graesser

Rental Property Investor · The Villages, FL · Member since 2017 · 338 posts · 396 votes

1mo

Contact your State Department of taxation. If they are anything like Florida, they will gladly walk you through what you need to do. Once set up, if like Florida, you will be able to easily take of it online

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John UnderwoodPro Member
Investor · Greer, SC · Member since 2014 · 13k+ posts · 17k+ votes
1mo
Quote from @Shane Bishop:

Hi! We own an STR property in Murrells Inlet, SC and have a few guests who want to return and we'd like to book them direct! However, can anyone advise on how to set up the tax structure for direct bookings? We use Guesty for our PMS right now and have a direct booking link through them. We just want to ensure we set that up correctly to allocate the correct amount towards taxes!

Thanks!!

Isn't Guesty already kinda a direct booking site?
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Lisa Graesser
Rental Property Investor · The Villages, FL · Member since 2017 · 338 posts · 396 votes
1mo
Contact your State Department of taxation. If they are anything like Florida, they will gladly walk you through what you need to do. Once set up, if like Florida, you will be able to easily take of it online
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Mike GrudzienPro Member
Lender · Eugene, OR · Member since 2019 · 2k+ posts · 1k+ votes
1mo
Contact your state and county tax offices and explain your situation.
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Michael BaumPro Member
Olympia, WA · Member since 2016 · 8k+ posts · 7k+ votes
1mo
Everyone got it right. Easy to do. You can even look at what AirBNB and VRBO is taking out for taxes and just copy that.
You will have to pay it quarterly (contact the state/county/city).
That is what I do with the rare off site booking.
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Andrew SteffensBusiness Member
Tampa, FL · Member since 2022 · 3k+ posts · 3k+ votes
1mo
In FL even if you are only on Airbnb (who collect and remit on your behalf in most jurisdictions) you should be filling out $0 monthly returns. That said, you need to be registered to pay state and local tax. From there input into Guesty the correct percentages and it should calculate.
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Shane Bishop
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Investor · Greenville, SC · Member since 2022 · 69 posts · 38 votes
1mo
Thank you everyone for the suggestions! We’ll try and call this week. Yes, Airbnb has remitted taxes for us, we were still notified that we had to pay a Hospitality and Accommodations Tax that Airbnb didn’t remit. Is that typical?
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Raul Alcazar
Member since 2026 · 4 posts · 0 votes
1mo
Shane, yes, that's very typical, and it catches a lot of hosts off guard. What's happening is that Airbnb only remits the taxes it has a legal agreement to collect in your specific state and county, usually the state sales tax and sometimes a state level accommodations tax. A separate local tax, like a county or city Hospitality and Accommodations Tax, is often not covered by that agreement, so it just doesn't get collected or filed on your behalf even though it looks like part of the same "lodging tax" bucket to you as the host. Airbnb's own tax pages usually list this out jurisdiction by jurisdiction, but it's easy to miss since the difference isn't obvious from the guest side.

The part that makes this genuinely tricky, and worth watching closely now that you're adding a direct booking channel through Guesty, is that every channel has a different starting point. Airbnb might remit the state tax automatically, Guesty for a direct booking remits nothing since there's no marketplace facilitator involved, so you're on the hook for all of it yourself, and if you ever add VRBO that could be a third set of rules again. So the same property can end up with three different tax handling situations depending on which channel booked the guest. The only way I've found to stay ahead of it is to keep a simple record per booking of which channel it came from and what tax, if any, was already collected on it, so at filing time you're not trying to reconstruct which platform did what months later.

Once you get the state squared away, I'd also ask them directly whether that Hospitality and Accommodations Tax is filed with the same state department or a separate county office, since in a lot of states those local lodging taxes are administered completely separately from the state one and have their own registration and filing calendar.
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