Does your holiday let need its own website?

If you let a cottage in Southwold, a flat in Aldeburgh or a barn conversion inland, the chances are most of your bookings come through Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo. They’re very good at what they do: millions of people search them, and they handle the payments, the messages and the reviews.

But every booking through them costs you a cut, and the guest belongs to the platform as much as to you. A website of your own won’t replace them, but it can sit alongside them and earn its keep. This guide explains how.

What the platforms charge

Each platform takes a share of every booking, and the amount varies:

• Airbnb is moving all hosts to a single fee taken from your payout. According to Airbnb’s help pages, most hosts on that fee pay 15.5%.
• Booking.com charges commission on each booking. Its partner pages say the rate varies by country and property, with a global average of 15%. Your exact rate is in your agreement with them.
• Vrbo has a pay-per-booking option. Its help pages list a 5% commission plus a 3% payment processing fee.

So on a £1,000 week, that’s roughly £155 to Airbnb, around £150 to Booking.com, or about £80 to Vrbo. Over a season, it adds up.

When a guest books with you directly, you still pay to take their card. For example, Square’s online card rate is 1.4% + 25p for UK cards, which is about £14 on that same £1,000 booking.

What your own website can do

Win repeat bookings without the fees. The guests who loved their stay are your best customers. If they can find you directly next year, through your website, you keep the whole booking.

Show off your place. Platform listings all look the same. Your own site can have as many photos as you like, a full description of each room, the walk to the beach, the pub you’d recommend and what makes the area special. That helps the right guests choose you, and puts off the ones who’d be disappointed.

Be found for the area, not just the platform. Guests often start with a Google search for the place they want to stay, something like “dog-friendly cottage Southwold”. A website of your own can show up in those searches, where a platform listing is competing with every other property on the platform.

Talk to guests before they book. On a platform, your messages go through their system. On your own site, a guest can ask you a question directly, and you can answer it the way you would in person.

Protect yourself from changes. Platforms change their fees, rules and search rankings, and you have no say. Having your own route to guests means a change on one platform hurts less.

Use both, not one or the other

The platforms bring you new guests you’d struggle to reach on your own, especially when you’re starting out. Your website does its best work with guests who already know you, or who find you by searching for the area.

The one thing to get right is availability. You don’t want two guests booking the same week. Most platforms let you sync calendars so that a booking in one place blocks the dates everywhere else. Airbnb explains how in its guide to syncing your calendar with other websites, and a good booking system on your own site will do the same.

What a holiday let website needs

You don’t need a big site. A good one usually has:

• Great photos, with the best ones first, on a site that loads quickly on a phone
• An availability calendar that’s always up to date
• Clear prices, including cleaning or dog fees, so there are no surprises
• An easy way to book or enquire, with secure card payments
• The practical bits: sleeping arrangements, parking, Wi-Fi, accessibility, check-in times
• The local area: what’s nearby, how far the beach is, where to eat
• Your reviews, or a link to them

And make sure your website, your Google listing and every platform listing use the same name, so guests who’ve seen you in one place recognise you in another.

If you’d like a website for your holiday let, or want the one you have to bring in more direct bookings, get in touch. A site that takes bookings online is one of our bigger projects. If you’d rather start with a site that shows off your place and lets guests send an enquiry, our Simple site is a good fit.