Starting an accommodation business in Czechia: what to sort before your first booking

Opening an accommodation business is mostly admin nobody enjoys, plus a few decisions you will live with for a long time.

What the state expects

Providing accommodation in Czechia is a licensed trade. Several obligations come with it, they are unrelated to each other, and they are handled in different places — the premises being approved for the purpose, reporting foreign nationals to the immigration police, and keeping a guest register.

Confirm the specifics with your own local authority. They vary by municipality, by type of property, and by whether you host foreign nationals. This is an orientation, not legal advice.

The accommodation fee

Municipalities levy a stay fee per person per night. Each sets its own rate, so it varies between towns — and it changes.

Two things new operators underestimate:

• The fee is recorded as you go, not reconstructed at the end of the quarter. The guest register doubles as the basis for calculating it.
• There are exemptions, typically by age or reason for stay. You need to be able to evidence them.

Pricing your first season

The most common mistake is pricing off the place next door. They have different occupancy, different costs, and possibly a different guest entirely.

A saner approach: work out how many nights you need to sell to cover fixed costs. That is your floor. You build seasonal pricing above it — not alongside whatever the neighbour charges.

Full at a low rate looks good in a spreadsheet and bad in the accounts.

Direct bookings from day one

Portals will bring your first guests, and using them is sensible. The commission is what you pay for nobody knowing you exist yet.

The problem starts when, three years in, everything still comes through a portal — including guests who have stayed five times and would have come anyway.

So from the start it is worth:

• having a working booking form on your own site, not just a phone number and an inbox,
• collecting guest contacts with consent to contact them later,
• giving returning guests a reason to book direct.

This is not about abandoning the portals. It is about the direct share going up rather than staying flat.

Things that catch people out

• Set cancellation terms before the first cancellation, not after.
• Double bookings come from lag between calendars. The fewer places availability lives, the better.
• Deposits should be sorted early, not after the first no-show.

When you get to deciding where bookings, pricing and the guest register are going to live, get in touch. We will tell you straight whether Hesty makes sense at your stage — for very small operations, sometimes it does not.