The year Airbnb paid for our business class seats to Japan

I made €8,000 profit from Airbnb in a single year. Another year, it funded flights to Tokyo — in business class — for the whole family. Here’s what I learned, and how you can start from wherever you are right now.

I want to be upfront about something: I’m not going to tell you Airbnb is easy money. It isn’t. It’s a real business, and it behaves like one — meaning the effort you put in determines what you get out.

What I will tell you is that it worked for us in a way that felt genuinely life-changing at the time. Not life-changing in a “quit your job and buy a yacht” sense. Life-changing in a much quieter, more meaningful way: it funded experiences we wouldn’t otherwise have had, and it gave us a financial buffer that changed how we made decisions.

We didn’t start with a portfolio of investment properties. We started with a spare space and a willingness to figure things out as we went. The mistakes were real. The income was also real. Over time, we got much better at the former and much more consistent at the latter.

What most people get wrong about Airbnb

The biggest misconception is that you need to own property to participate. You don’t. There are people making serious income from Airbnb right now who don’t own the properties they manage, don’t own the apartments they list, and in some cases don’t even leave their house to do it.

There’s a model called rental arbitrage — where you rent a property on a long-term lease and sublet it short-term — that has genuinely created income for people who couldn’t get a foot in the door of the traditional property market. There’s co-hosting, where you run the day-to-day of someone else’s listing in exchange for a percentage of revenue. There’s even Airbnb Experiences, where you sell access to something you already know how to do.

The platform is more of a marketplace than most people realise. What it’s actually selling is trust and access — guests trust it to vet hosts, and hosts trust it to deliver guests. If you can provide something genuine on either side of that equation, there’s a place for you in it.

The thing that actually determines success

It’s not location, though location matters. It’s not the size of the property, though bigger helps. The single biggest factor we’ve seen separate thriving Airbnb hosts from struggling ones is how seriously they treat the guest experience.

The hosts who treat Airbnb like a passive income machine — set it up, check the calendar occasionally, respond to messages when they feel like it — end up with mediocre reviews and inconsistent bookings. The hosts who treat each guest like someone they’d genuinely like to welcome into their home consistently earn five-star reviews, unlock Superhost status, and get to charge more because guests trust them more.

That sounds simple. In practice it means answering messages within the hour, leaving a handwritten note, noticing when the shower pressure is getting weak before a guest complains about it. Small things, done consistently.

The good news is that most of the operational work can eventually be systematised and automated. We got there. But in the beginning, showing up fully is what builds the foundation everything else rests on.

So where do you actually start?

That depends entirely on your situation — what you have access to, how much time you can commit, and whether you want to be hands-on or more operational. The paths look very different depending on your starting point, and choosing the wrong one for your situation is a fast way to get frustrated and give up early.

I wrote a full guide that breaks down every viable model in detail — hosting, arbitrage, co-hosting, and Experiences — with honest numbers, the tools worth using, the regulations worth checking, and a step-by-step checklist for each path. It covers everything I wish someone had laid out clearly before I started.

It’s free. No email required. Just a long, practical read for anyone who’s serious about exploring this.