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Dates that are really free
Guests pick from what is actually open, so nobody enquires about a week you already sold.
For vacation rental operators on Airbnb and Vrbo
You’re already earning these bookings. Stop paying 15.5% to process them.
Turn more of the demand you already create into bookings on your own site. Guests see real availability, get the real price and book without being handed back to a platform.
The cost
The fee moved to your side. Here is what it adds up to.
- Airbnb
- 15.5%
- Of every booking subtotal, cleaning fees included, now taken entirely from your payout. The host share used to be about 3%.
- Vrbo
- About 7%
- About 7% of every booking can disappear before it reaches you.
- A portfolio doing $2M a year through the platforms
- About $195,000
- In platform fees every year, with revenue split evenly between Airbnb and Vrbo.
The $2M example uses Airbnb’s current 15.5% host fee on the subtotal and a measured 6.8% for Vrbo. Across the historical portfolio we measured, Airbnb fees worked out to about 12.7% of recorded revenue, because that was an older period and a different base.
Airbnb’s change made something new possible
Airbnb moved its whole fee onto the host. For anyone who didn’t reprice, that was bad news.
For everyone else, it opened a gap. A week that used to list at $10,000 now goes up to $11,500 on Airbnb to cover the fee. On your own site, the same week can cost the guest $1,000 less and still leave you with more.
Both of you come out ahead, out of Airbnb’s margin. That only became true in the last year.
Booked on Airbnb
Guest pays$11,500
Airbnb host fee, 15.5%−$1,783
You keep$9,718
Rate raised to cover the fee, so the guest pays about what they did before.
Booked on your site
Guest pays$10,500
Card processing, 3%−$315
You keep$10,185
The guest saves $1,000. You keep $467 more, on one booking.
Where rental sites fall down
Can a guest actually pay on your site?
Plenty of rental sites look the part, then send the guest to a third party to pay. That handoff is where people drop off. It is also the moment your brand stops being the one they are dealing with.
The difference worth having is a site that takes the booking itself, start to finish, without the guest leaving.
| Part of the booking | Brochure with a button | Booking system |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Dates checked on a separate page | Live availability straight from your own system |
| Price | A starting price that changes at checkout | The real price, to the cent |
| Booking | Handed off to a booking engine or a platform | Taken on your domain, start to finish |
| Payment | Taken on a separate checkout page | Card saved, the booking lands in your system, payments run as they always did |
| Extras | Offered by message after the booking | Sold at checkout and added to the reservation |
| Emails | Your software’s plain-text defaults | Branded emails from confirmation to review request |
What we build
What direct booking should actually feel like
Guests can search the whole portfolio, see the right price and finish the booking without leaving your brand.
Live availability and pricing
Guests see every home that fits their dates, with the real price for those nights. No opening ten tabs, no waiting on a quote.
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Your own checkout
Guests book directly with you while the payment schedule you already use keeps working exactly as expected.
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Upsells at checkout
Guests can add the extras that make the stay more valuable before they finish booking.
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Branded guest emails
Direct guests hear from your brand from confirmation through to the review request, not from the platform they happened to book through.
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Reviews in one place
Airbnb, Vrbo, Google and direct reviews gathered into one section guests can filter.
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Event and wedding inquiries
Weddings and retreats don’t fit a normal checkout. Guests pick dates and a home, then tell you about the day. You follow up with a real quote.
Proof it works
Montana Luxury Escapes,
Whitefish
The situation
Nine luxury properties across Whitefish, Flathead Lake and Whitefish Mountain Resort. Strong revenue, more than half of it arriving through Airbnb and Vrbo, with the platforms owning the guest relationship.
What changed for the guest
A custom site integrated with Hostaway: live availability across all nine properties, real pricing from Hostaway’s own engine and a checkout on their own domain that saves the card and hands the reservation back to Hostaway’s payment schedule. Plus an upsell catalogue, eight branded guest emails, an aggregated review system and a property matching quiz as their own lead magnet.
What keeps demand coming
Paid search, social content and email keep bringing the right people back to the properties instead of leaving the site to wait for traffic.
What the content produced
A content format we run every week. It brought property owners to them about adding homes to the portfolio. The reach has kept growing since.
The growth engine behind the website
Growth comes from putting the brand in front of the right people and giving them a reason to book. Repeat guests, referrals, paid advertising, email and content all working together to keep demand coming in.
We run the marketing that keeps that building.
- Google Ads
- Reach the people already searching for a stay in your area, at the moment they are looking for one.
- Meta ads
- Put the homes in front of people who were not looking yet, then stay in front of the ones who showed interest.
- Email marketing
- Turn more past guests into an audience you can reach again without paying a platform to reach them.
- Weekly organic content
- Reels and posts for Instagram and Facebook, built on a format that’s proven to travel.
- Landing pages and site content
- Carry the promise of the ad into a fuller property story, so the guest sees the context, proof and experience they need before they book.
How we create demand
Demand that keeps building.
863,000
Views across their seven best Reels since July 2026
Not a lucky one-off. The same format keeps landing, which is what makes it worth running every week.
6 of 7
Passed 50,000 views
232K
Best performing Reel
11,340
Shares across the seven
10,000+
Instagram followers
Every one is a real post you can go and watch.
The landing page has to finish the story.
The ad earns attention. The page it lands on has to give the guest enough context to picture the stay, understand the property and feel confident enough to keep moving toward a booking. These films and property stories reinforce what the ad already showed them instead of making the click start over from scratch.
Tap to play with sound.
What the audience created
The audience brought us the properties.
Property owners started approaching Montana Luxury Escapes about putting their homes into the portfolio.
The right path from where you are now
Your route to direct bookings
Whether you already have booking software or you are starting from Airbnb and Vrbo alone, there is a clear route to taking bookings yourself.
Keep what already works
Already on Hostaway
You already have the part that can take the booking. The opportunity is giving guests a site that lets them actually use it.
Nothing moves, nothing gets rebuilt. We build on what you already run.
Start clean
Running on Airbnb and Vrbo with no management software
You can start with the right direct booking setup from day one instead of building around platform limitations.
You end up with the setup that usually takes years to arrive at, without the years.
Check what you have
On Guesty, OwnerRez, Lodgify or something else
The first question is whether a guest can finish paying on your own site today. If they can, we build on it. If not, we will show you the cleanest route to one that can.
Done once, properly, so you never have to think about it again.
Find out what the platforms are costing you
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