Finding Retreats uses Stripe Connect to pay hosts directly. Rather than routing your earnings through a central Finding Retreats account, each booking payment is split at checkout: your portion transfers to your own Stripe account, and the platform fee is retained separately. To receive any payout, you need a connected Stripe account first, and bookings won't fully process without one.
New hosts set this up from account settings, under Payments (the payouts subsection). Hosts who connected Stripe before this moved to the newer settings page still use the older Payment Setup page in the vendor dashboard — both lead to the same underlying Stripe Connect account, so nothing is lost by having started on the older flow.
When you start the connection, you choose:
From there, Stripe takes over. You're sent to Stripe's own onboarding flow, hosted on Stripe's site, where you provide identity details, business information if applicable, and the bank account details payouts will go to. Finding Retreats never sees or stores this information directly — it stays with Stripe, and Finding Retreats only receives back a status: whether your account is verified, and whether it can accept charges and send payouts.
Once you finish Stripe's onboarding, you're returned to Finding Retreats, which checks your account status with Stripe and shows one of three outcomes:
Behind the scenes, Finding Retreats also tracks whether your account can accept charges and whether payouts specifically are enabled, along with any outstanding requirements Stripe still needs from you, such as a document that's pending or past due. If Stripe is still waiting on something, bookings can still come in and be confirmed, but payouts for them won't move until that requirement clears. It's worth checking your payment setup page periodically if you know you have paperwork outstanding with Stripe.
Stripe's onboarding links are time-limited for security reasons. If you leave the flow partway through and come back later to find the link no longer works, Finding Retreats generates a fresh one for you automatically and redirects you straight back into Stripe. You don't need to start the whole process over, and any information you already gave Stripe is preserved on their side.
For more on choosing how you get paid out and understanding the timing of a payout, see "Choose your payout method" and "When you're paid for a booking" in the help centre.