The Rental Business Guide to Splitt Hosting

You already know how to rent things out

The gear is bought. The season is short. The phone rings on a Friday and someone wants the whole fleet by Saturday. None of that is the hard part, because you have been doing it for years.

What eats the day is everything wrapped around the rental. The calendar that lives in a wall planner, a spreadsheet, and somebody’s phone. The deposit you meant to take and didn’t. The waiver in a binder under the counter. The machine that comes back with a scratch nobody photographed on the way out.

Splitt is built for that business: a marketplace that brings renters to gear you already own, with the booking, payment, and operations tooling sitting underneath it. Run it beside the reservation system you already pay for, or run the rental side of the shop on it outright.

A storefront, and renters walking past it

Every listing gets a public page that does the selling: a full-screen photo gallery, what’s included, your rules, your reviews, and a booking box that takes the money. Paste the link into a text and it unfurls with a branded preview.

Renters find that page without ever knowing your name.

Browse with a map, filtered by category, price, location, and dates.

Destination pages that gather the gear near a park or a lake, so a visitor planning a trip lands on your fleet.

A trip planner that builds an itinerary from a place and a set of dates, and pulls in gear close enough to use.

Saved-search alerts that reach renters who have been waiting for exactly the thing you just listed.

Getting the fleet online

A guided builder walks a new machine from photos to price, saving as it goes, so you can stop halfway and come back. After that, every setting lives on a single editor page.

Photos that land right

Pick a batch at once, drag them into order, star the cover, and tap the part of the frame that must never get cropped. Big photos off a phone are shrunk in the browser before they upload, so the upload doesn’t die on the yard’s wifi.

Price the way you actually rent

Hourly, daily, both, or per night for cabins, campsites, and RV sites. Weekly, monthly, and early-bird discounts apply themselves at quote and at checkout. Paid add-ons for helmets, paddles, trailers, or fuel carry their own daily price and an optional cap on quantity, and the renter picks them when booking. On daily-rate gear, Splitt will suggest a starting price drawn from comparable live listings nearby.

Your rules, per listing

Security deposit, delivery with its own fee and radius, the shortest and longest rental you’ll accept, how much notice you need, how far ahead people can book, the weekdays you’re closed, a minimum age. Cancellation terms are set per item, from flexible through to non-refundable, with an optional full refund when severe weather stops the rental. Renters see the exact wording and a refund preview before they pay.

Everything they need in order not to break it

Icon chips for what’s included, and a care guide with steps, safety warnings, and a return checklist that renters read before they book and again from inside their booking.

Build a fleet quickly

Duplicate a listing that already works and change only what differs. Tick several and unpublish, archive, or reprice them together. When the season ends, unpublish to draft and every setting waits there for spring.

A calendar that stays honest

Block a day with a tap, or a range with a reason, and the booking engine refuses those dates outright rather than greying them out and hoping.

Then connect the calendars you already sell on. Splitt imports busy dates from Google Calendar, Airbnb, FareHarbor, Peek, Booqable, or anything else that publishes an iCal link, re-checks them on a schedule, and reads them again moments before a booking goes through. Every connected feed has its own switch. It works outward too: a private subscribe link publishes your Splitt bookings into Google, Apple, or Outlook, per listing or for the whole shop.

A month view lays the fleet out with bookings color-coded by status, and you can overlay a listing’s blocked dates and imported holds on top. Hourly slots follow each listing’s own timezone.

If a connected calendar stops responding, Splitt releases its holds and emails you rather than silently blocking your best weekend. A possible double booking is flagged with the dates attached. When confirmations land at the same moment, they are checked against live bookings and your unit count in sequence: whoever gets there first wins, and the other renter’s hold is released and they are told.

Straight talk, because it matters here: iCal is a polling format, so no platform anywhere can promise this never happens. What Splitt does is re-read your feeds seconds before taking a booking, refuse any date it knows is gone, and tell you when a feed goes quiet.

Every booking arrives paid

There is no accept-or-decline queue to sit on. A renter picks dates and pays, and the reservation confirms the moment the card authorizes. Your control lives in the calendar and the listing rules you set once, working while you sleep.

The booking itself carries what you need for the handover.

Status tabs with live counts, and search by gear or renter name.

A renter card: how long they’ve been on Splitt, rentals completed, rating, ID and phone checks, boater card status where that matters, and whatever they told you when they booked.

Contact details that unlock once the booking is paid and close again after the rental ends, with every reveal recorded, so renters keep trusting the platform they found you on.

A message thread tied to that specific booking, so a repeat customer’s rentals never blur together.

New dates you can propose when the weather turns, which the renter accepts or declines inside a set window.

A private note field only the owner account can read.

Cancel from your side and the renter is refunded in full. Flag severe weather and it stays off your cancellation record.

The fleet, unit by unit

A listing sells a kind of machine. The fleet tracks the actual machines.

Register each ATV, jet ski, or kayak under its listing with make, model, year, VIN or HIN, registration, and purchase value, or add a batch of identical units in one go. Flip a unit to maintenance and the bookable count drops with it, without you blocking a single date by hand. If every unit is down, the listing simply stops selling instead of leaving a phantom slot open.

Work gets logged as service, repair, or inspection with a description, hour meter, and cost, stamped with the date and the person, and it can’t be edited away afterwards. When a machine goes down with a reservation already on it, hand that booking to a free unit from the calendar instead of calling the customer.

Departure and return run off condition checklists built for the category, covering fuel, hull, tires, and lights, with a photo on each line and its own window to complete. The return report attaches itself to a damage claim if you open a claim. At the counter the renter shows a code and you scan it at pickup, then the other way round at return, each scan timestamped.

Write a booking confirmation and a thank-you once, with merge fields for the renter’s name, the item, the dates, and the pickup spot, and Splitt sends them for you.

The dashboard, the bookings list, and the calendar all work at phone width in the browser, so the day’s arrivals, a renter’s number, or a date you need to block are reachable from the yard instead of the office.

What stands behind the handover

High-value gear leaves with a stranger. That moment is where a rental business actually lives or dies, so it’s worth knowing exactly what is holding it up.

Require a verified driver’s license on the gear that worries you. Nobody can book until a person at Splitt has reviewed and approved it, and the block is enforced before any money moves.

Flag a listing as needing a boater education card, and Splitt asks for it where the state requires it, then shows you whether it is verified, in review, or expired.

Set a security deposit per listing. Splitt authorizes it against the renter’s saved card ahead of the rental and keeps the hold fresh, and it is only taken if you file a claim.

Paste your own rental agreement into the waiver editor. Once Splitt reviews it, every renter reads it and types their name before the booking completes, and the signature, the timestamp, and a frozen copy of the wording are kept.

Bill incidental charges after the fact for fuel, cleaning, late return, mileage, or damage, with photo or receipt evidence. The renter can accept or contest, and a contested charge is decided by Splitt.

Open a formal damage claim against a held deposit with photos, and Splitt’s operations team adjudicates it.

Report a problem and it is tracked from open, through review, to a decision made by a person.

File your liability and property policies once, and Splitt warns you before a verified policy lapses.

One thing worth saying plainly, because a shop with employees will ask: staff logins are set up by Splitt today rather than by you, so mention your team during onboarding.

Charging what the day is actually worth

Most rental businesses price once in spring and leave it alone until fall. Splitt will recommend a daily rate that moves with the season, real public holidays, weekday against weekend, how busy your calendar and your area are, how far ahead the booking sits, and the weather forecast. It is rule based, and every rule shows you what it did, so it is never a black box. You set a floor and a ceiling it can never cross, choose how aggressive it is allowed to be, and switch on automatic updates if you want it working overnight.

Cabins, campsites, and RV sites get seasons and per-night rates instead, with a starter year you can generate and a calendar showing what each night will cost.

Promo codes discount any listing, with a date range, a redemption cap, and a limit per renter, live the moment you save them.

And the fleet doesn’t have to stay a fleet. Package gear with a guide, a route, and a schedule, and sell it per person or per group on the same storefront, bookable through time slots you set. Bundle a rental into an experience and the rental’s own page starts offering the trip as an upgrade. Draw a route or import a GPX file, attach it to any listing, and it gets its own public page with the file to download.

Where the money lands

The renter pays in full at the moment they book. Splitt is the merchant of record, so the card is authorized for the rental and kept on file for a deposit or a later charge. You aren’t invoicing anybody, and you aren’t chasing anybody.

When the rental completes, your share is credited to your Splitt balance. A short hold runs against damage claims, incidental charges, and card disputes. After that it transfers on its own through Stripe Express and lands in your bank account. There is no payout to request. Your payouts page shows what is ready, what is still inside the hold, and what upcoming trips should bring in. If a booking is refunded, Splitt gives back its commission in the same proportion, so you never pay commission on money you didn’t keep.

Nothing is charged until a rental happens: no listing fee, no monthly subscription, nothing to move money to your bank. The commission and the full fee schedule live in the vendor agreement.

Knowing what the fleet actually earns

Revenue, gross and net side by side for any range, compared against the period before it. A payout and fee ledger carrying every payment, refund, deposit, release, and claim. Booking volume, completed against cancelled, and how far ahead people book, which is what staffing really depends on. And rental performance, every item ranked by what it netted, with bookings, views, and rating, so you know which machines to buy more of and which to let go. Each one exports to CSV, and a summary lands in your inbox every Monday with whichever sections you want in it.

Getting started

Splitt is curated rather than open signup, so there is a short review before you can list.

Apply at go-splitt.com/partners with your name, your email, and a few lines about the business and the gear you rent. An invite code from Splitt skips the queue.

A person reads it. You get an email when you’re admitted, and until then your login shows where the application stands.

Work through the onboarding wizard: your business profile, payouts connected through Stripe Express, and the Splitt vendor agreement signed. Every step saves, so an interruption costs you nothing.

List your first machine, publish it, and it goes live on the marketplace once it clears a quick content review.

Start with the corner of the fleet that generates the most paperwork rather than the most revenue: the machines that go out constantly, come back filthy, and never quite get inspected. That is where having the calendar, the agreement, the deposit, and the photos in the same place stops feeling like software and starts feeling like your evening back.