A retreat is not just a ticket. It is a ticket plus a bed, and until the bed is part of the same purchase, someone ends up spending the week before the retreat matching a spreadsheet of registrations against a spreadsheet of rooms by hand. That work is invisible until it goes wrong — until two guests are assigned the same bunk, or a cabin is oversold because the ticket count and the room count were tracked in two different places.
BrightStar treats lodging as real inventory rather than a separate list to reconcile later. You describe your rooms once, and they become bookable units that checkout can hold and claim exactly like a limited ticket type. When a guest buys a bed in a shared cabin, that bed is gone from what other guests can select. When they abandon the payment before finishing, it comes back automatically. There is no manual reconciliation step because there is nothing left to reconcile — the room count and the booking count are the same number.
One room library, shared across all your events
Your rooms belong to your BrightStar account, not to any single event. You build the library once — either in the accommodations step of the event builder, or from the Rooms tab under Stays — and then choose which room types to offer on each event you run, with an optional per-event rate override if one retreat needs to charge differently for the same cabin.
Both entry points use the same editor, so there is never a second version of your inventory quietly drifting out of sync with the first. Add a cabin while building this year's retreat, and it is already sitting in your library for the next one, without you re-entering its description, its photos, or its bed count. If you also rent the property outside of your own programming, the same room is available to standalone stays too.
What you set up for each room type
Each room type you build carries the same set of fields, whether you're describing a single yurt or a twelve-bed dorm:
- 1Name — what guests will see, like "Forest Private Cabin" rather than "Type B".
- 2Style — whole room, or shared and sold by the bed; this decides how the inventory is counted.
- 3Nightly rate — priced in your event's currency, with an optional per-event override.
- 4Sleeps — how many people the room admits, which feeds your event's overall capacity.
- 5Description and photos — the view, the amenities, the walk from the hall; the first photo becomes the cover image.
- 6The rooms themselves — each row is one physically bookable unit, with shared rooms giving you a bed count per room.
- 7Minimum stay — optional; leave it empty if there is no minimum.
What a guest sees when they book a room
On your event page, room options appear in the same ticket selector as your ticket types, priced at your nightly rate and dated to your event's stay window. A guest picks a room the way they pick a ticket, and it lands in the same cart, to be paid for in the same single transaction as everything else they're buying for the retreat.
The claim happens at payment, not before it. BrightStar reserves the specific room or bed for that guest right as the charge is being processed. If the last bed in a shared cabin was taken by someone else while this guest was still entering their card details, the payment is cancelled rather than completed, and they're told plainly that the room is gone. That ordering matters: a guest is never charged for a bed that no longer exists by the time their card is run.
Once payment succeeds, the booking is confirmed, a room is assigned automatically wherever that's possible, and the guest receives a confirmation email with their dates and their room.
How lodging is charged
Lodging is charged in one of two ways, depending on how it was booked.
A room sold inside an event checkout behaves like an ordinary ticket line. It follows the same fee math as the rest of that ticket: your plan's platform fee, applied per ticket, plus a processing fee of 3.05 percent plus $0.40 taken once for the whole order.
A standalone stay — booked directly on your property rather than through one of your events — runs on Elevate economics instead, and is always seller-absorbed. The guest pays exactly the room price you quoted, with nothing added at checkout. The platform fee for that booking, 1.85 percent of the stay total plus $0.89, comes out of your side rather than being added to what the guest pays. If a standalone stay is later cancelled and refunded, that platform fee comes back to you as well, so you're never left paying a fee on a booking that didn't happen.
Do you need Elevate to sell rooms?
Accommodations are part of BrightStar's Elevate feature set. If you run your event on Seva, the accommodations step still appears in the builder, but only as a preview — you can see what it looks like, but the room library, the booking engine, and the tools built on top of it stay locked. To actually offer rooms or beds for sale alongside your tickets, the event needs to run on Elevate.