Mark Simpson walks through whether Airbnb hosts should launch their own booking site. He breaks down the math (Airbnb takes roughly 17% in fees), tackles four host fears like double-booking and insurance gaps, then gives five concrete steps: calculate your costs, pick a booking platform, make your property googleable, update your insurance, and automate guest communications.
By the end of this video, you will know if launching a direct booking site in 2026 is a gold mine or a colossal faff. Short term rentals are everywhere. Barns, city lofts, beach bungalows, jungle cabins. I made notes and found four questions every host asks before they pull the trigger on their own direct booking website. Today we will answer all four. Then I will hand you a five step action plan you can copy this afternoon. The first is are the savings only for guests. If you knock 14% off the rate, the guest wins and you stand still. The fix is simple. Split the difference, drop the nightly rate a touch, add a lean service fee around 7%, remove your host fee, both sides, save and you net more. I will get double booked and look like a muppet. So for this you can use a channel manager. You can sync your calendar across Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com and your website. Obviously, every single one of these channel managers and property management software tools, they sync every few minutes faster than I can set my morning alarm. So that way you'll never get double booked. The third is also fear that no platform protection is too risky. So if you use a proper short term rental insurance provider, they add small damage waivers, which is their version of air cover. With this in mind, you become the merchants of record. And so that means that payouts are more in your hands and not in the algorithm mood. So this may sound a bit complicated, but in 2025, building a website is pretty much now drag and drop. You do not need to be a web coder. If you can upload a profile picture, if you can embed a booking widget, that is all the work that's needed. Now the real work is behind brand and trust and that is what we're going to tackle next. So let's make this real. Meet Sarah, who runs Pinecone Cottage. She picked a search friendly name and what she did is she put that URL and that name on a welcome card on a fridge magnet. She pays about 30 pounds a month to her channel manager. So here's what the software does. It auto syncs her calendars so there's no double bookings. It also generates smart lock codes and texts to guests. It pushes the reservation to Sarah's phone and to the cleaner's phone in under a minute. So it means that everything is running on automation for her. It also nudges the thermostat to eco mode two hours after the guest has checked out. And what it mostly means is that Sarah's first direct guest found the cottage on Airbnb. But because she had a searchable name, she was able to google search it. The name of her cottage came up on Google, but also was her boosted direct booking website. So the guest booked on a direct booking website all because she had a very googleable name. Not bad for the price of a takeaway curry. So make sure you get a channel manager, make sure you get a googleable name and make sure that you know how to guess. Now how to book direct. Okay, so here's some homework. Step one Run the numbers. Export last year's bookings from your main platform. Let's say it's Airbnb. Multiply total revenue by 17%. That is the number that you and your guests have paid in fees. If it is more than about £1,500 in your currency, a simple site usually pays for itself in year one. Step 2 Pick your platform, decide your monthly budget. Then choose a solid channel manager or property management system that includes a booking engine. Some of the names you may have heard of before, Hostfully, hospitable, guesty, hostaway, boom, etc. There's loads. So enter your budget, have your basic features and make sure that it can handle its own payments. Once you grow, you can then go into the into the middle range budget. One that has automation, a hosted website and once you get the higher budgets, when you are growing past 2030 properties have one that's got more deep analytical tools built in. Step 3 Brand it for search. We are in a property right now. What you can do is you can choose and brand this property name, whatever it may be. Pinecone Cottage, like we had Sarah's example. But you need to have it where it's simple for a guest to to type in and search. Don't have complicated names. Then what you'll do is go to namecheap and go and buy a domain, try and find it that matches as closely to your property name. Then you can get the URL, you can get the name and you can put it around your property. For example fridge magnets, you can pop it on here and make sure that the guest knows that they are staying at Pine Cottage and not just another Airbnb. Then once you can do that, you can put it in your Airbnb listing, you can put it on your booking.com listing. So when a guest is searching they will know how to then take your property name. Pinecone Cottage. Go and search in the location where you're at. And again the more times that guest will then come back to you direct. Also as well, on your website, what I want for you to do is to add testimonials, case studies, guests that have been in stage review before. Because people buy from people, 93% of all online transactions are on the back of a guest review. The final thing that I want for you to do is to update your insurance to cover your direct bookings. You can go to companies like Truvy, you can go to other insurance companies where they build in a guest waiver fee instead of having to pay a high deposit. But it still means that you are covered so you don't have to rely on air cover. And the final thing is a welcome package. You can have this to be digital, you can have it to be offline, where it's a nice little printout that sits in your, it sits in your house. But you've got to get one. The main one about having a digital one is that it is automated. So when a guest books, they will then get a series of emails, a series of messages before they arrive with how to get into your property, how to get the WI fi codes, how to use those automatic door codes and everything in between. You can still reinvest these extra funds into making sure that you've got better coffee, better shower rails, everything. That just makes your guest experience much, much better. Finally, what you need to do is you need to get an email list. You've got to make sure to be able to build that guest database. You've got people that you can contact when you need to have reservations coming in. You've got slow season coming up. Now, if all of that sounds like a lot of work and if you want help setting this up the right way, I've got a link in the description below where you can book a call with our team and we will help map your numbers, we will show you how we work and we'll figure out if we are going to be the best fit for you. So click on that link, book a call with our team and let us show you how you can get to 65% direct bookings. And if you've liked this video, and if you want more, click on this video because YouTube has recommended that you watch this next.
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