Calculator
Retreat break even calculator
Find out how many of your beds have to sell before your retreat starts putting money in your pocket.
Free tools
Calculators for pricing and planning a residential retreat
Two working calculators for the two questions that decide whether a retreat is worth running: what it must earn, and what it will cost you in hours.
Most retreat pricing goes wrong in the same place. A host picks a seat price that sounds right for the market, fills eight of twelve beds, and only afterward works out that the venue and the food had already eaten the whole take. The first calculator on this page runs the arithmetic in the other order: fixed costs first, food per head per night second, and the bed count you have to sell before anything is yours.
The second calculator counts hours rather than dollars. Collecting waivers, chasing balances, redoing the bed chart when a friendship group reshuffles and gathering dietary notes are all real work, and hosts routinely undercount them by a factor of three. Put your own numbers in both, then read them together, because a retreat that clears its costs but takes sixty unpaid hours is a different decision than it looks.
Calculator
Retreat admin hours calculator
Count the hours a single retreat cycle takes you in intake, chasing and rooming before anyone has arrived.
Working document
The retreat roster sheet: one row per guest, one page on arrival day
A fill in template that puts every fact you need about a guest on a single line, from her bed number to her allergy to the flight she lands on.
Why both retreat calculators are open with no sign up
Every host doing this by hand starts in the same place: the venue quote for the week divided by the beds she thinks she can fill, a guess at food per head per night, and a seat price picked because it sounds about right for a five night stay. That sum gets done on the back of a venue contract late at night, and it gets done wrong often enough that the shortfall only shows up after the last guest has driven away. Nobody should have to hand over an email address to learn that a twelve bed farmhouse does not break even until bed nine.
So both calculators run in the page, keep nothing and ask for nothing. Use the first to set a seat price you can defend before you announce dates, and the second to see what one registration cycle of waivers, balance chasing and bed chart redraws really takes out of you in hours. Write those two figures on the front of your venue contract and you are better armed for your next negotiation whether or not RetreatSeats ever comes into it.
Once you have the bed count and the hours
A break even bed count and a pile of unpaid admin hours are the two numbers that decide whether next season is three retreats or five. RetreatSeats is built to bring the second one down without touching the first, by holding beds, deposits, waivers and dietary needs in a single roster. Book a demo and we will start from the figures you just worked out rather than from a sample retreat.