65% of Traveler Spending Is Walking Right Past Short-Term Rental Hosts

01 /The Concept

InHouse launched in 2021 helping owners furnish and equip short-term rental properties – from interior design through furniture procurement. The business was generating revenue on its own, but the team recently raised its first $3 million for a new product built inside InHouse: Frontdesk.

Frontdesk is a tool that lets short-term rental hosts sell additional services to their guests – both their own offerings and those from nearby local providers.

Hosts can offer remarkably personal options: homemade baked goods from the host's kitchen, a fishing trip with the host, a neighborhood bike tour with a family member, a guided visit to local shops. Beyond the personal touch, the platform includes a broader catalog of third-party services: restaurants, food delivery, local sightseeing tours, nature excursions, entertainment venues, wineries, clubs, airport transfers, and more.

Hosts send guests a link to the Frontdesk app. Guests download it because it contains useful information they actually need: house rules, door codes and Wi-Fi passwords, emergency contacts, and a local area guide. But the app also includes a dedicated "Boutique" section – a marketplace where guests can browse activities, local experiences, and add-on services from the host.

Hosts curate their own personal marketplace from whatever the platform offers, selecting only what they're confident recommending to their guests.

The key insight behind Frontdesk: travelers typically allocate their travel budget with 35% going to accommodation and 65% to food, shopping, and activities during the trip. Hosts currently capture only that 35%. The goal is to intercept a portion of the other 65% that would otherwise flow directly to third parties.

When a guest places an order through the marketplace, it routes automatically to the service provider. Hosts monitor orders, fulfillment status, and their own earnings in a dashboard. Both the host and the platform earn a commission on each completed transaction.

InHouse claims hosts can earn up to 40% more than rental income alone – a figure supported by early results from the platform's pilot program.

Frontdesk costs $5 per month per property. Multi-property operators and annual subscribers pay less per location.

02 /Why It Matters

The model Frontdesk implements is cross-selling – offering a customer who already bought one thing something complementary. This is easy to conflate with upselling (getting the customer to pay more for a better version of what they already bought), but the mechanics and potential are quite different.

To use a food analogy: suggesting a larger burger patty is upselling. Offering fries and a drink with the burger is cross-selling – because those are independent products. Cross-selling has a higher revenue ceiling: the add-ons typically cost more than upgrades, and McKinsey research suggests cross-selling can account for up to 35% of a company's total revenue.

InHouse's promise – that hosts can earn meaningfully more by facilitating third-party purchases – is well-grounded. Travelers budget for those purchases in advance. The only question is whether the spend flows through the host or around them. Frontdesk makes the answer "through."

The psychological barrier many sellers face is a preference for cross-selling only their own products. But sourcing, holding inventory, and tying up working capital is a burden. A much simpler path is earning commissions on other people's goods – which requires a platform intermediary. And those platforms are emerging across verticals.

SalonInteractive ([covered here](/review/prosto-pomozhem-zarabotat)) built exactly this for hair salons and beauty studios, enabling them to sell personal care products from a third-party catalog to existing clients. They raised an additional $16.6 million after that review was published.

InterLnkd ([covered here](/review/trendy-horosho-a-ih-peresechenie-eshhjo-luchshe)) raised €1 million to build a similar platform for travel agencies, enabling them to sell travel-related products from third-party retailers to customers who've already booked tours – with AI matching product recommendations to each customer's specific destination.

35up ([covered here](/review/kritichnyj-srednij-chek)) inserts third-party product options on e-commerce checkout screens, with recommendations driven by what's already in the cart. That startup has raised $8.5 million, $5 million of which came in after publication of that review.

03 /Opportunities

The appeal of a cross-selling platform is its pitch: "Want to earn 30–40% more from your existing customers without much additional effort?" Once the initial psychological hurdle of selling "someone else's products" is cleared, the model tends to run itself.

The build direction: cross-selling platforms purpose-built for specific seller categories where third-party goods or services naturally complement the primary transaction.

Food, tours, and experiences for travelers. Personal care products for salon clients. The interesting question is which adjacent categories naturally follow a primary purchase – and whether the adjacent market is large enough to justify building the infrastructure to intercept it.

If no better idea comes to mind, InHouse's own path is worth pursuing. If travelers spend only 35% of their travel budget on accommodation, the market for services sold to them during their stay is twice the size of the short-term rental market itself. That's a lot of money to reach for with a relatively simple platform.