Retreats sit at the intersection of the yoga industry and the travel industry, and they’re one of the most rewarding things you can do as a teacher. You take a group of yoga enthusiasts to somewhere beautiful, you teach them twice a day, you share meals, you watch them transform over a week, and when it works, you get paid well for the experience.
When it works. Retreats can also lose you thousands in a weekend. This post is about what the difference looks like.
I’ve been running retreats since 2014. Some of them have been excellent. Some have been expensive lessons. Everything below is what I actually do and what I actually know, not what gets repeated on the retreat-planning blog circuit.
There Are Two Kinds of Retreat
Before anything else, you need to pick which kind you’re running. They’re very different animals.
Short, local retreats are designed for your existing students. A Friday afternoon to Sunday evening somewhere within a two-hour drive of your home base. Easy for your clients to say yes to: no time off work, no flights, small cost, short commitment. Easier for you to organise. Lower risk. Lower profit, but a reliable way to build your confidence and your retreat reputation.
Longer, international retreats are a bigger undertaking. Higher financial risk, higher marketing demands, exposure to things outside your control (flight prices, natural disasters, political unrest), but also significantly higher profits when they go well. You can’t rely on your local students alone to fill these, so you need to market further afield.
Start with the short local retreat. Get two or three of those under your belt before you touch an international one. I’ll come back to both below.
How to Plan a Short, Local Retreat
First, decide exactly who this retreat is for. This step gets skipped constantly, because teachers start by planning their own dream weekend getaway. Who do you actually want to come? What would they like to do? Where would they want to go? How much would they expect to pay? Answer those four questions before anything else.
Second, find a venue. You want somewhere affordable, within easy driving distance of your home base, with great photos you can use in marketing. Critically, you want a favourable cancellation policy. The best venues let you cancel rooms up to a month before the date without a fee. If bookings are slow, that flexibility saves you from paying for empty rooms. More on this below, because it’s the single biggest way retreats lose money.
Third, build the back end. A webpage for the retreat. A simple poster or flyer. Email templates for enquiries, bookings, and payment reminders. An info pack PDF that answers the common questions people ask before booking. None of this needs to be fancy, but it needs to look professional. It’s the difference between “this person has done this before” and “this is their first time and it shows”.
Fourth, start marketing to your students. Don’t be pushy. Just make sure everyone knows it’s happening and that it’s going to be wonderful. The people who are interested will look into it. If you’ve made the materials professional, some of them will book.
Don’t be afraid of losing out a little on your first. You might have to reschedule the date if numbers are low. You might not make much money, or any. That’s fine. That’s how you learn. What you absolutely have to do afterward is sit down, build a proper profit and loss spreadsheet, and collect feedback from your students. Those two things are what make the next one better.
Also: collect reviews and professional photos from your first retreat. They’ll make the second one much easier to sell.
The Real Numbers: Weekend Retreat Maths
This is the part most guides skip. Let me walk you through a real weekend retreat, with numbers.
Let’s price the retreat at $600 per person, twin share, for a two-night weekend retreat.
Per-person expenses:
- Accommodation (twin share): $160
- Food and catering (6 meals at $10 each): $60
- Marketing (budget 5% of ticket price): $30
- Payment processing fees (roughly 2% of ticket): $15
- Total per person: $265
Your own expenses (fixed, regardless of student numbers):
- Fuel and travel: $20
- Your accommodation and your assistant’s: $440
- Total fixed: $460
Now the profit at different student numbers:
- 6 students: ($600 × 6) – ($265 × 6) – $460 = $1,550 profit
- 10 students: ($600 × 10) – ($265 × 10) – $460 = $2,890 profit
- 12 students: ($600 × 12) – ($265 × 12) – $460 = $3,560 profit
- 20 students: ($600 × 20) – ($265 × 20) – $460 = $6,240 profit
It’s not going to make you a millionaire, but it’s a substantial chunk of money for a weekend. If you run two or three of these a year alongside your regular teaching, it adds up fast.
The numbers will be different for your market (pricing in Europe, the US, and Asia all vary significantly), but the structure is the same. Build a spreadsheet, fill in your numbers, and see what the profit looks like at different attendance levels. This is the single most useful exercise you can do before committing to anything.
Stepping Up to International Retreats
Once you’ve done two or three short retreats and you understand the mechanics, you can start thinking about a longer, international retreat. The numbers are bigger in both directions.
Here’s a 6-night retreat at $1,400 twin share, in a destination like Bali or Sri Lanka.
Per-person expenses:
- Accommodation (6 nights): $300
- Food and catering (breakfast only, $5 per day): $30
- Extra activities (e.g. two surf lessons at $30): $60
- Marketing (5% of ticket): $70
- Payment processing fees (~1%): $14
- Total per person: $474
Your own expenses:
- Flights and transport: $800
- Your accommodation (shared with assistant): $200
- Total fixed: $1,000
Profit at different numbers:
- 6 students: ($1,400 × 6) – ($474 × 6) – $1,000 = $4,556 profit
- 10 students: $8,260 profit
- 12 students: $10,112 profit
- 20 students: $17,520 profit
If you’re more established and pricing aggressively — for example, a well-branded studio charging $4,000 per person for a premium Bali retreat with 20 students — you can push profit up to $50,000+ on a single retreat.
If you’re looking at Sri Lanka specifically, we offer retreat venue hire at Lanka Yoga on Koggala Lake, which gives you a purpose-built shala, accommodation, meals and logistics in one place. It’s the setup I wish I’d had on my first international retreat.
How to Fill an International Retreat
Your local students alone usually can’t fill a longer retreat. You need to market to two distinct audiences:
Your existing students, who’ll come because it’s you running it.
Strangers, who are looking for “a yoga retreat in Bali in October, around this price” and end up finding yours.
If you can nail just one of these, you can fill retreats. If you can do both, you can run them comfortably.
For the strangers, the path is the internet. People searching “yoga retreat Bali” find the top listings on BookYogaRetreats.com (owned by Tripaneer, by far the dominant listing site for yoga retreats globally). You can fight them with Google Ads, but you’ll spend a fortune learning the ropes. The pragmatic move is to list on their platform, accept their commission, and use them as a top-of-funnel while trying to convert the booking back through your own website.
Getting Your BookYogaRetreats Listing to Perform
If you do list on BookYogaRetreats, here’s what actually works:
- Complete the listing properly. Fill in every prompt they give you. It matters.
- Study the top result in your category. Search “yoga retreats Bali” or whatever applies to you. Look at the listing ranked first. Look at their photos, their copy, their videos, the length and structure of their description. Mirror it.
- Move all your existing reviews onto the platform. Reviews directly affect ranking.
- Run a few test enquiries before you go live for real. Having active enquiries on your listing temporarily boosts its visibility. That first sale is worth more than anything else for your ranking.
- Email or call your account representative and ask directly how to improve your listing. They’ll help. Their commission depends on you selling.
How to Convert Bookings Back to Your Own Site
You want people to discover you on BookYogaRetreats, then book directly on your site to avoid the commission. This is standard practice, and it’s fair game as long as you maintain a live listing on theirs. A few tactics:
- Set a smaller deposit on your own site. A lower upfront cost is often enough for people to choose your site over theirs.
- Walk through the full user journey yourself, from their listing to your site. Fix anything that looks unprofessional. Make sure your site is HTTPS, not HTTP. People notice.
- Make the terms on BookYogaRetreats slightly harsher than on your site (higher deposit, earlier full payment, less flexible cancellation). Your site becomes the preferred option.
- Offer a small bonus for booking direct. A free massage on arrival, a free one-on-one session, something with perceived value but low cost to you.
How to Lose Money Running a Retreat
Now the other side. Here’s how a retreat goes from “great income for a week of work” to “I paid money to run this”. These are the big ones.
Committing to more rooms than you can sell. You book 10 rooms and fill 5. Your accommodation bill is double what it should be. Easily the most common way retreats lose money.
The fix: start small. Five-person retreat sold out beats twenty-person retreat half full. Every time. Negotiate a cancellation policy that lets you drop rooms a month before the date without fees.
Underestimating your own expenses. It’s not just the obvious stuff. It’s booking fees, flyer printing, the Airbnb upgrade, the transfer fees, the “oh I forgot” category.
The fix: overestimate everything. I keep a line item on every retreat spreadsheet for $500-$1,000 of unknown expenses. It’s almost always used.
Being too generous with discounts. Filling spots with friends and family at mate’s rates is tempting, especially on your first retreat. It’s fine in small doses. But never give away a spot at a rate below your per-person expenses. You’re literally paying for them to come.
Natural or political disruption. Volcanoes in Bali. Political unrest in Sri Lanka. Regional conflicts that affect flight routes or travel confidence. Even events far from your actual venue can cause last-minute cancellations as people sit on the fence and overthink.
The fix: have clear, written cancellation policies with both your venue and your students. Make the full retreat fee due at least a month before the start date. At that point, students have committed both financially and emotionally, and the cancellation rate drops dramatically.
The Bigger Picture
A yoga career built on regular classes alone is a tough financial proposition in most markets. Retreats, workshops, and teacher trainings are what turn a modest teaching income into something genuinely comfortable.
A rough picture of what this can look like, once you’re a few years in and running two or three weekend retreats plus one international retreat per year alongside your regular teaching: you can realistically add $15,000–$20,000 to your annual income from retreats alone. More once you’re established and filling your international retreats consistently.
It takes time. First retreats rarely make real money. Expect three or four runs before things click and the profit is reliable. But once they do, retreats become one of the most enjoyable and lucrative parts of a teaching career.
If this is the direction you want your teaching to go, the business of yoga is one of the things we cover in depth across our Yoga Teacher Trainings at Lanka Yoga. We cover retreat planning, pricing, marketing, and the rest of the income-stream picture, so you leave with a realistic plan rather than just a certificate.
If you’re looking for more on the teaching side, have a read of How to Plan a Yoga Class Using Block Structure or, for the philosophy side, The 8 Limbs of Yoga, Explained Properly.
Written by
Stefan Camilleri
Stefan is the founder and lead trainer at Lanka Yoga on Koggala Lake, Sri Lanka. He’s been running yoga teacher trainings for over 10 years and teaches the Yoga Synergy method — an evidence-based approach to movement, anatomy, and breath.