VRBO's Big 2026 Update Every STR Host Must Know

If your VRBO bookings have been suffering lately, well, VRBO made a pretty big change on the back end that you might not be aware of. Today's show, we're going to break down all the details. Let's go ahead and get right into it. VRBO recently changed their Premier Host status. This is what you could consider the equivalent of Airbnb's Superhost status, which we know has a really big impact on your listing visibility. So what changed? Well, they went from a portfolio-wide status, meaning if you had more than one Vrbo listing and you achieved the status, it went to your whole portfolio. Well, now it's just listing specific. So while you don't get the visibility on the portfolio, you do get it on an individual listing. Now, for those of you out there that have portfolios and are thinking, bummer, I no longer have the status, there's actually a bright side to it too. If you have a property that you brought on and unfortunately it got an early review that wasn't so great, before this would remove the status from your whole account, but now it's still going to give you the status on all of those great properties that deserve it. So as of January 2026, these changes are in place and there is a process to make sure that each of your listings qualify. We're going to break down exactly what those steps are. There's actually more than one visibility layer. So we'll get to that in a second as well. I'm going to go ahead and read off my list here. The core requirements for you to achieve the Premier Host status again on the listing level, not on a portfolio level, are a booking acceptance rate of 99%. or more. So yeah, basically every single reservation you need to be accepting. You can't have any cancellations or the owner-initiated cancellation rate has to remain zero. There's a timeline to when they evaluate you for this status. We'll get to that in a second. The third core component is an average review rating of 4.6 or higher. So that's not that hard to achieve, right? In fact, if you have a 4.6 average with your properties, you're probably not getting a lot of visibility. You've probably got some operational things going on on or some housekeeping things that you really need to get buttoned up because 4.6 in today's world doesn't earn you a lot of money. The fourth core component, you need at least 5 reviews on VRBO to qualify. And the fifth one, your property has to have at least 5 bookings or 60 nights booked. Consider if you have a property that maybe has a week-long rental period, you might consider shortening that minimum stay so you can get some more reservations up front and get the status. Maintain those good reviews and then you've got this status for the long run versus drying the process out for a long time and maybe earning less on the reservations because they had less visibility. Now, you don't need to meet each of these 5 core components every quarter. You don't need 60 days booked, for example, every quarter. Vrbo is going to evaluate you every quarter. So every 3 months and they're going to look at the last 12-month period. So you do need 60 days booked out of the last 12-month period, for example, to make sure that you get the Premier Host badge. It's pretty easy to find out if you have this badge already. If you're looking at your public listing, well, if you scroll down where your host badge is, it's going to have that status right there for you. But if you're unsure, just log into VRBO. You can go to the performance page and there's a nice little dashboard there that shows you your Premier Host status. Now, good news for those of you out there that maybe don't have a lot of reservations coming in from VRBO. There are still some milestones that you can achieve that give you more visibility. All this information is available online, but we get the behind the scenes things look sometimes because we do have an account manager now that we're managing over 220 properties in over 40 cities around the U.S. If you've got a property and you're looking for a little help with it, well, our team would love to chat with you. You can go to strriches.com. There's a little partner with us button. You'll find some more information. We can book a time. I'd love to jump on a call with you personally to see if your property makes for a good fit. So there's actually 3 milestones. The first one gives you sort of this good status, whatever that means. It's a little bit arbitrary, but it's better than nothing. And so if you've met some of the core components, you do get a little bit of visibility. The second milestone is actually achieving the Premier Host status, but there is a third one that gives you extra visibility and you stand out more on the listings. The way that VRBO displays these isn't 100% crystal clear and even coming from our account manager. But for this third milestone, essentially if you are in the top 1%, well, you're getting much more visibility and you're going to be standing out. All right. So let's talk about some of the benefits. One of them I've been railing on about already, and that's that you get a little bit more visibility. But there are some other benefits. A very big one is that when people search on VRBO's platform, just like they search on Airbnb and filter out Superhost status, they can now filter out Premier Host status. And so if someone's used to using the platform, they prefer VRBO, and they know that they want to stay with a really good quality host and a good property, well, they can simply filter you out if you do not have the Premier Host status. Another side benefit is that you do get priority support. And as much as we'd like to think that 100% of all of our guests' experiences are perfect and top notch, we know that especially if you've been doing this for a while, that there's going to come a time where you do need to involve support and getting on the phone with Airbnb or VRBO or especially Booking.com is not the most pleasant experience. So you do get a little bit of priority support if you are a Premier Host. Now, one last one, and this is a little subtle, hard to say how much impact impact this actually has. But VRBO does do promotions. Remember the OTAs, the online travel agencies, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do their best to market your properties so that they get booked and they earn a commission. And so from time to time, they'll be sending out email promotions, things like that. They can be targeted based on cities. And if you do qualify as a Premier Host, then you're much more likely to be included in some of these email and marketing efforts. Let's talk about an actual takeaway for most of you that maybe you don't have the Premier Host status, but you are heavily on Airbnb, well, you could snooze your Airbnb calendar for a short period of time to get this status on Vrbo, helping you to balance out your property across the OTAs. Now, this might sound like a crazy thing, and obviously you don't want to snooze your calendar to the very last second if you're not getting reservations. But let's say your booking window, the amount of time before someone books your property, is quite long and you have a longer grace period. Well, you might consider just snoozing your listing on Airbnb again if you're already doing well on Airbnb so that you get more visibility on VRBO. Because what happens is if you're primarily booked on one channel, then you're very likely going to continue to stay booked more on that channel, and you may be missing out on some big opportunities. If your calendar is always booked, which is a great thing, don't get me wrong, it doesn't leave any opportunity to get bookings on other platforms. So just a quick tip for any of you out there that are looking for a little more diversification. And remember, VRBO isn't an amazing OTA in every market. It started as vacation rental by owner, so it is predominantly in vacation rental areas. Of course, we always recommend that you've always got your property on VRBO, especially if you're in the US. South America, not so much. Europe and those places, not so much. But if you're in the US, especially if you're in a vacation rental market, having the Premier Host status can go a long way to driving your visibility. Visibility. So this might not seem like a really big deal, especially if you're not getting a lot of bookings on VRBO, but according to our account manager, this Premier Host status can significantly boost your visibility. So it's worth taking a look at. Until next time, I hope that gave you a little bit more insight, and have a fabulous week.