Earlier this year, I wrote about our experience after the first month of renting our cottage in Port Franks, Ontario. At that point, we had only a handful of bookings behind us. We were still figuring out pricing, cleaning, minimum stays, guest expectations and whether the entire idea of combining a family cottage with a short-term rental actually made sense.

Now the first summer is over.

We deliberately approached 2026 differently than someone buying a cottage primarily for personal use. Our objective for the first year was to establish the property as a rental, build reviews and generate as much revenue as reasonably possible. We didn’t spend a single night there recreationally as a family during the rental season.

The result was just over $21,000 in rental revenue, 75 nights booked through Airbnb, and a much better understanding of both the potential and limitations of trying to make a cottage help pay for itself.

This is what our first full season actually looked like.

The Numbers: Our First Summer

According to Airbnb’s year-end performance summary, the cottage generated $18,633.50 in paid Airbnb earnings during 2026, with another $941.87 in upcoming earnings already booked.

That puts total Airbnb earnings at:

$19,575.37

We also generated approximately $1,800 outside Airbnb, primarily through direct rentals.

That brings total booked rental revenue for the year to approximately:

$21,375

Airbnb reports 75 nights booked and an average stay of 3.9 nights.

Our detailed transaction history is slightly different because it only includes completed stays. It shows 18 completed Airbnb reservations covering 72 nights and $18,633.50 in payouts. The difference is simply timing: the Airbnb dashboard includes upcoming bookings that had not yet been completed when I pulled the transaction history.

I think it is important to make that distinction rather than presenting $21,375 as money already sitting in our bank account.

At the time of writing, approximately $20,433.50 has actually been earned or received between completed Airbnb stays and our roughly $1,800 of non-Airbnb revenue. Another $941.87 is booked through Airbnb.

For a first season, I consider that a respectable result.

$21,375 Sounds Great. But This Isn’t $21,375 of Profit.

This is probably the most important point in the entire article.

It’s very easy to look at an Airbnb dashboard showing almost $20,000 and conclude that someone made $20,000 renting their cottage.

We didn’t.

Airbnb revenue is not profit, and owning a cottage is expensive.

As I discussed in my original article, our carrying costs are roughly $3,600 per month, or about $43,200 per year if you simply annualize them.

Against that number, $21,375 of booked rental revenue covers approximately 49.5% of our annual carrying costs.

Looking only at the roughly $20,433.50 already earned, the number is about 47.3%.

That’s meaningful. But it certainly doesn’t turn the cottage into a free property.

There are also expenses associated specifically with renting it.

Cleaning is the most obvious. We generally pay approximately $100 to $150 per turnover. With roughly 20 stays between Airbnb and direct bookings, cleaning alone represents a few thousand dollars over the season, depending on the exact number and cost of turnovers.

There are also consumables, additional utilities, wear and tear, occasional maintenance and the inevitable little things that come with having multiple groups of people using a property.

So I would never describe our $21,375 as profit.

What it does represent is a substantial contribution toward the cost of owning an asset we wanted to own anyway.

The Mortgage Makes the Calculation More Complicated

There’s another wrinkle when comparing rental income with our approximately $43,200 of annual carrying costs.

Part of our mortgage payment isn’t really an expense in the same way property taxes, insurance or electricity are expenses.

It’s principal repayment.

Every dollar of mortgage principal paid increases our equity in the property. From a cash-flow perspective, the money still has to leave our bank account every month. But economically, paying down principal is very different from paying an electricity bill.

That’s why there are at least two ways to look at the cottage.

From a cash-flow perspective, we have a property costing us roughly $43,200 per year to carry, and the first year of rentals generated roughly $21,375 against that cost.

From a net-worth perspective, some of that $43,200 is converting cash into home equity.

Neither perspective is wrong. They are simply answering different questions.

There’s also the tax treatment to consider. Legitimate rental expenses, including mortgage interest rather than principal, may be deductible against rental income. That changes the after-tax economics, particularly for a higher-income household. I’ve covered the rules, eligible expenses and some of the complications in Rental Property Taxes in Canada: What High Earners Need to Know.

And if you’re considering buying a cottage with the expectation that Airbnb will “pay the mortgage,” it’s worth understanding all of these distinctions.

We Sacrificed Personal Nights to Establish the Rental

One unusual aspect of our first season is that we didn’t sleep at the cottage ourselves at all.

That wasn’t because we didn’t enjoy the property.

Quite the opposite.

We spent days there, used the beach and enjoyed having the cottage. I personally spent probably 10 to 15 days at the property between guests, working from there, dealing with things around the cottage and enjoying the area.

But we intentionally didn’t block off prime rental periods for ourselves.

This was year one, and our priority was revenue.

There was also a practical reason for doing it this way. A new Airbnb listing starts without the reviews, booking history and reputation of an established property. We wanted to get guests through the door, accumulate reviews and learn what worked before deciding how much prime summer inventory we were willing to reserve for ourselves.

That makes our first-year numbers useful, but it also means they shouldn’t automatically be extrapolated into the future.

If we decide next year that we want two prime summer weeks for ourselves, those are potentially two weeks that aren’t generating revenue.

That’s the fundamental trade-off with a cottage that serves both purposes.

Every night can be used by your family or sold to someone else, but it can’t do both.

Occupancy Isn’t As Simple As It Looks

Airbnb shows 75 booked nights for the year.

If you divide that by 365 days, occupancy looks terrible.

But that’s not a particularly useful calculation for a seasonal cottage.

The real opportunity is concentrated around summer, weekends, holidays and other high-demand periods. A Tuesday night in February isn’t economically equivalent to the Saturday of a July long weekend.

We also weren’t trying to operate a hotel with 365 available nights.

The more relevant question was whether we could generate enough revenue during the desirable rental periods to materially offset the cost of owning the property.

The first-year answer appears to be yes.

Seventy-five Airbnb nights plus our direct bookings generated more than $21,000 in booked revenue without us having an established rental history at the beginning of the season.

That’s a useful starting point.

Direct Bookings Matter More Than I Expected

One interesting lesson from the first year was the value of rentals outside Airbnb.

We generated approximately $1,800 in direct rental revenue.

That’s less than 10% of our total rental revenue, so Airbnb was overwhelmingly responsible for finding our guests this year.

But direct bookings become interesting as a property develops a reputation.

Airbnb provides something enormously valuable: distribution. It puts your property in front of millions of potential guests, handles payment processing and provides an established booking platform.

You pay for that convenience.

A repeat guest who already knows the property doesn’t necessarily require the same customer-acquisition machinery.

That doesn’t mean I intend to abandon Airbnb. Far from it. For a property like ours, I think the platform is extraordinarily useful.

But over time, having some combination of Airbnb and legitimate direct bookings could improve the economics.

Cleaning Is One of the Biggest Operational Variables

Our cleaning costs generally run around $100 to $150 per turnover.

That makes length of stay surprisingly important.

Consider two hypothetical ways of renting eight nights.

Four separate two-night stays require four cleanings.

Two four-night stays require two.

At $125 per cleaning, that’s a difference of $250 even though both scenarios produce eight occupied nights.

There is also considerably more work involved with four guest turnovers than two.

This is one reason I increasingly appreciate longer stays.

Our Airbnb guests averaged 3.9 nights per stay, which I think is a reasonable balance for a cottage property. It allows us to capture weekend demand without turning the property over every second day.

Minimum-stay requirements and cleaning fees therefore aren’t just administrative settings buried inside Airbnb. They directly affect the economics and workload of the property.

Revenue Isn’t Evenly Distributed Through the Summer

Another lesson was how seasonal cottage revenue really is.

Not all booked nights are worth the same amount.

Prime summer weekends and holiday periods can command significantly more than shoulder-season weekdays. Longer bookings can produce large payouts with relatively little turnover. And getting pricing wrong on a few high-demand weeks can matter much more than leaving an undesirable weekday vacant.

This changed the way I think about occupancy.

I don’t necessarily want maximum occupancy.

I want profitable occupancy.

If lowering the nightly rate dramatically fills a few extra weekdays but creates another cleaning, more wear on the property and more work, those bookings aren’t automatically beneficial.

This is something we were still learning during our first season.

The Cottage Still Has to Work in the Winter

Summer was only one half of our original strategy.

Our hope was to combine short-term rentals during the high-demand season with a longer-term winter tenant.

That would produce something closer to a hybrid rental model:

higher nightly rates when vacation demand is strong, and predictable monthly income when short-term demand is weak.

We are currently trying to find a winter tenant.

So far, we haven’t had any luck.

That’s an important part of this experiment too.

It’s tempting when evaluating an investment to construct a spreadsheet where every piece works perfectly: summer Airbnb revenue hits the target, a winter tenant appears immediately, maintenance stays low and the property is never unexpectedly vacant.

Reality doesn’t cooperate with spreadsheets quite that neatly.

If we find a winter tenant, the economics of the cottage improve considerably.

If we don’t, then the approximately $21,375 generated during our first rental season may represent most of the property’s rental revenue for the year.

That is a materially different outcome.

Did Airbnb Make Our Cottage Cash-Flow Positive?

No.

And I think that’s worth saying clearly.

Even with more than $21,000 of booked rental revenue, the property doesn’t suddenly become a high-yield investment property.

Our annualized carrying costs are roughly $43,200 before considering some of the additional costs associated with operating it as a rental.

The summer revenue offsets a large portion of that.

It doesn’t eliminate it.

If we eventually add meaningful winter rental income, the gap becomes much smaller. If rental revenue grows as our reviews and booking history improve, it gets smaller again.

But I wouldn’t buy a recreational property at today’s prices on the assumption that Airbnb automatically makes the numbers work.

For us, that’s not the investment thesis.

So Why Own It?

This gets back to something I wrote after our first month of hosting, and even earlier when I was weighing the decision to buy a cottage versus upsizing our primary residence.

I don’t view the cottage purely as an Airbnb business.

It’s an asset that serves several purposes.

It gives our family access to a cottage and the beach. It is real estate that we own over the long term. Mortgage principal repayment gradually builds equity. And when we aren’t using it, the property has the ability to generate income.

That last part dramatically changes the economics.

Without rental income, we would simply absorb the entire cost of owning the property.

With approximately $21,375 in first-year booked rental revenue, almost half of our annualized carrying cost is being offset before accounting for the distinction between mortgage interest and principal.

That’s meaningful to us.

But there is also something about getting away from the city that doesn’t show up in any of these calculations.

I’ve written about this before in Algonquin Doesn’t Rest You. It Resets You.. Camping and cottage life are obviously different experiences, but I think they offer some of the same things. Time outside, kids playing at the beach instead of staring at screens, a slower pace, and the opportunity to step away from the usual routines.

A cottage is certainly a more expensive way to accomplish that than a week in a tent. But the underlying appeal is similar. It’s about having somewhere to go where the days feel different.

That’s difficult to put a financial value on, and I don’t think we need to.

But the rental arrangement only works because we’re comfortable with strangers using the property.

Someone who wants their cottage available every summer weekend would have a very different experience.

Would We Do It Again?

After one summer, yes.

But I would do it with realistic expectations.

Airbnb isn’t passive income. Someone has to communicate with guests, coordinate cleaning, solve problems, manage pricing, maintain the property and make sure everything is ready before the next arrival.

And the gross revenue number displayed in an Airbnb dashboard isn’t your return.

Still, our first season answered the question I was most interested in when we started.

Can renting a cottage when we’re not using it meaningfully reduce the cost of owning it?

For us, the answer is clearly yes.

Approximately $21,375 of booked revenue in the first year isn’t enough to make the property self-funding. But it is enough to substantially change the ownership equation.

And we did it while starting from zero reviews and zero rental history.

The next question is whether we can improve on that.

Next year we’ll have actual booking data, an established Airbnb profile, reviews from previous guests and a much better understanding of which dates are valuable. We can make more informed decisions about pricing, minimum stays and how much time we want to reserve for ourselves.

We may also decide that maximizing revenue isn’t the objective forever.

After all, there’s not much point owning a cottage if you never stay in it.

For year one, though, we wanted to find out what the property could do.

The answer was roughly $21,375 in booked rental revenue, 75 Airbnb nights, and almost half of our annual cash carrying costs offset by people paying to enjoy the cottage when we weren’t there.

For a first summer, I’ll take it.