Host Agreement

This agreement applies to any business that lists on Y3NKO, or claims a page we have listed: a restaurant, a stay, a tour or guide, an event, or an event venue. We call you a host. It sits on top of the Terms of Service, which also apply to you. Where the two differ for hosts, this agreement wins.

You must be approved by us before a page goes live under your account. A person on our team checks that you really run the business, and may contact you or ask for identity documents or a business licence to do it. We can decline a claim or an application, and we will tell you why.

Some pages are put together by us from information your business has made public, before you have claimed them. Once your claim is approved, the page is yours to keep accurate. If you would rather not be listed at all, email contact@y3nko.travel and we will take the page down.

You are an independent business. You are not our employee, our agent, our partner or our franchisee, and nothing here creates any of those relationships. You decide your prices, your availability, how you run your space and who you employ.

We run a directory and trip planner that puts your business in front of people planning a trip. When online booking opens, we will also take payment for bookings made through the Platform. We do not supervise, direct or control what you do.

Listing and claiming are free, and we take no commission from you. None, on any tier. Today, guests contact you and pay you directly, and no money passes through us.

When online booking opens, we will make our money from the guest, not from you. On top of your price we will add a 10% service fee, which the guest pays and we keep. We will add no tax line of our own, so the price you set should already include any VAT or levy you charge. The guest sees both lines before they pay.

A booking at GHS 1,000 therefore costs the guest GHS 1,100 and pays you GHS 1,000. Nothing is deducted from your side of that.

If we ever introduce a host-side commission, we will give you at least 60 days’ notice in writing before it applies, and it will never apply to a booking already taken.

This section applies only once online booking opens. Until then, guests pay you directly and none of it applies.

For a booking paid through the Platform, the guest pays us. We hold the money and pass it to you after the booking is completed, so that a guest who cancels within the refund window can be refunded from funds we still hold rather than from money you have already spent.

• Payouts are made in Ghana Cedis, to the bank account or mobile money number on your host profile. Keep those details current — a payout sent to stale details is your responsibility to recover.
• Payouts are prepared by a person and recorded against each booking. You can see every payout we have made to you in your host dashboard.
• We aim to pay within 7 business days of a booking completing. We are a small team and we are being deliberately conservative rather than promising same-day.
• We will not withhold a payout without telling you why. If we hold one back because of a live dispute, a suspected fraudulent booking or a chargeback, you will hear from us in writing with the reason.

If a guest reverses a payment through their bank after we have paid you, we may recover that amount from your next payout. We will show you the evidence before we do.

You are responsible for everything in your listing: descriptions, photographs, prices, capacity, facilities and rules. It must describe the thing a guest will actually get.

• Photographs must be of your actual space, taken recently, not stock imagery or a competitor's.
• You must have the right to use every image you upload.
• Capacity, facilities and included items must be accurate. If a facility is out of service, update the listing.
• Your price must be the whole price of what you are offering. You must not add mandatory charges on arrival that were not in the listing.

Where a listing is materially misdescribed, and the guest paid through the Platform, we will refund the guest in full and recover it from you. Repeated misdescription gets you removed.

You are responsible for holding every permit, licence, registration and insurance your business needs under Ghanaian law, and for keeping them valid. That includes any tourism, hospitality, food-handling, alcohol or event permit that applies to what you list.

You are responsible for the safety of your space and your guests while they are with you, and for your own tax on the income you earn. We do not withhold tax on your behalf and we do not file anything for you.

We may ask you for evidence of a licence or insurance. If you cannot produce it, we may unpublish the listing until you can.

This section applies to bookings paid through the Platform, once online booking opens. For anything a guest arranges with you directly, your own terms apply, so say what they are on your listing.

For paid bookings, Y3NKO sets one cancellation policy. You cannot set your own, make it stricter, or make it looser. The full ladder is in the Cancellation and Refund Policy.

You may write notes about your own arrangements into your listing. They are useful context, but they do not override the policy, and we will not enforce them against a guest.

Treat guests fairly and without discrimination. You may decline a booking for a genuine operational reason. You may not decline one because of someone’s race, nationality, religion, sex, disability, or who they are married to.

Reviews are written by guests who completed a booking with you. You cannot edit or remove them, and neither can we simply because they are unflattering. We will remove a review that is abusive, that is not about a real stay, or that we can see was written to manipulate a rating. Asking a guest for a good review in exchange for anything is not allowed.

Once online booking opens, you must not move a booking a guest started on the Platform off it in order to avoid the guest’s service fee. It leaves the guest with none of the protections we offer them, and it ends this agreement. Guests contacting you directly from your page, as they do today, is fine.

Today every listing works this way, and event venue listings always will. We publish your page and your contact details so guests can reach you directly. No money passes through us, we charge nothing on it, and any agreement you reach with a guest is entirely between you and them.

The contact details you give us are shown on your page. Give us details you are happy to be contacted on.

Hosts sit on a Free tier or a Pro tier. Pro adds priority placement in search results, a founding partner badge on your listings, and access to your booking analytics.

Our first cohort of Accra hosts — our founding partners — get Pro free for twelve months from the date we approve them. We are not billing anyone during that period. Before the twelve months end we will tell you what Pro costs and you can decide. Your listings do not disappear if you decline; they move to the Free tier.

Priority placement means Pro and founding partner listings rank above Free listings within whatever sort a guest has chosen. It does not fabricate ratings, reviews or availability, and we will not pretend it is neutral: it is a paid advantage and we say so on this page.

When a guest sends you a reservation or enquiry through the Platform, or books once online booking opens, we pass you their name, the dates, the party size, any note they left and the contact details they gave. You need that to host them.

You become responsible for that information in your own right. Use it only to provide and manage the booking. Do not add guests to a marketing list, sell their details, or pass them to anyone else. Delete them when you no longer need them, subject to your own record-keeping obligations. If a guest asks you about their data, tell them and tell us.

You keep ownership of your photographs and listing text. You give us permission to display and distribute them on the Platform and to use them to market the Platform, without payment, for as long as your listing is live and for a reasonable period afterwards in archived marketing material.

Where we arrange professional photography for you, you may use those photographs anywhere you like, including on your own channels and on other platforms. They are yours.

You can leave whenever you want. Unpublish your listings, or email contact@y3nko.travel and ask us to close your host account. You must honour bookings already confirmed through the Platform, and we will pay you for any that were paid through us.

We can suspend or remove a listing, or close a host account, if you:

• Materially misdescribe what you are offering
• Cancel confirmed bookings repeatedly or at short notice
• Cannot produce a licence, permit or insurance we have reasonably asked for
• Put a guest's safety at risk
• Discriminate against guests
• Once online booking opens, take bookings off the Platform to avoid the guest service fee
• Break the law, or this agreement, in some other serious way

Except where a guest is at immediate risk, we will tell you first, say what the problem is, and give you a fair chance to fix it. We will pay you everything you have already earned through the Platform.

You are responsible for what you provide to guests. If a guest, a neighbour or an authority brings a claim against us because of something you did, failed to do, or misdescribed, you cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it.

We are responsible for running the Platform with reasonable care and skill, and, once online booking opens, for taking payment correctly and paying you what you are owed. We are not liable for lost bookings or lost profit caused by ordinary faults, outages or ranking changes.

Nothing here limits either side’s liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law.

We may change this agreement. For anything that materially affects what you earn or what you are responsible for, we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email before it takes effect. Bookings already taken stay under the version in force when they were taken.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the Republic of Ghana, and the courts of Ghana have jurisdiction.

If something is going wrong between us, email contact@y3nko.travel before it becomes a legal matter. We would far rather fix it than argue about it.