What to actually charge — anchored to your costs, your margin, and the market you are really in.
Pricing is the decision most retreat leaders agonise over, then make at the last minute by copying whatever someone else charged. It deserves more than a guess. Get it wrong on the low side and you fill the room but work for almost nothing. Get it wrong on the high side and you stare at empty beds, wondering whether to discount and signal that the price was never real.
The way out of that bind is to stop pricing against your fear and start pricing against two things you can actually measure: what the retreat costs you to run, and what the market you're in typically pays. Your price lives where those two meet.
Your direct cost per guest is everything it takes to put one more person on the retreat: their share of the venue, their food, their transfers, the materials, the bit of staff time their presence adds. Work that number out honestly before you look at anyone else's price. It's your floor. Charge below it and every booking costs you money — there is no volume that fixes that.
On top of the floor you add a margin. That margin is what pays you for the months of planning, the risk you carried, and the years it took to be worth booking. A retreat is not a break-even hobby; the margin is the point.
A price that makes sense on your spreadsheet can still be wrong for the room. If similar retreats in your kind of destination sell for a clear range and you land far below it, you may be leaving money on the table — or quietly telling people the experience is lesser. Land far above it and the burden shifts to you: the photos, the location, the reputation all have to justify the premium, or the beds stay empty.
The calculator below shows both signals side by side: your cost-plus-margin target, and the industry-typical range for your location tier. It tells you which side of the market you're sitting on and by how much.
A healthy margin per guest only becomes profit when enough guests show up. A high price into a half-empty room can lose to a modest price into a full one. So treat the number here as the start of the conversation, not the end of it — then take it next door to Chapter 2 and find out how many guests it actually takes to break even.
No sign-in. Enter your numbers, get a price range and a shareable result you can come back to.
The number that actually matters: how many guests you need before the retreat pays for itself.
Leader Chapter 3Where your next guests actually come from — matched to your audience, your budget, and the hours you have.
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