Which eight vacation rental booking sites bring you the most reservations is a question that is often asked and discussed within hospitality circles. Any hospitality owner should know how to drive more traffic and increase vacation rental website bookings. At the same time, it is common knowledge that it is not sufficient to only count on them. Almost no short-term accommodation provider can survive without advertising their listings on Online Travel Aggregators (OTAs).
The detailed breakdown of actual figures depends heavily on where you are located and who your target market is. However, below is a rough guide as to which vacation rental booking sites will get you the largest number of bookings (ranked alphabetically rather than in order of importance):
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The Best Vacation Rental Booking Sites
1. Agoda
Agoda is Asia’s largest online travel agency, so it’s sure to bring you some good vacation packages. The number of bookings you receive may not be as high as others on this list. However, its customers generally seem happy to pay high price tags for properties they like. Hopefully, this will land you the odd high-value booking!
List your property on Agoda by clicking here.
2. Airbnb
Airbnb is the most popular and trusted listing site based in the USA. It started off as AirbedndBreakfast.com (the idea being that you could rent out spare rooms in your home to travellers). The site quickly grew to become one of the leading listing platforms to let entire homes. It is very popular with tourists and travellers. More recently, Airbnb has been attempting to cater to business guests. Airbnb has also launched Airbnb Plus and Luxe, a hand-picked list of curated homes. Using Airbnb is a great way to increase vacation rental bookings and get more traffic.
List your property on Airbnb by clicking here.
3. Booking.com
Booking.com is a relatively young company. It has grown aggressively over the past few years. It is now the leading booking site for cheap hotels and alternative accommodation providers such as holiday homes, vacation rentals and serviced apartments. Booking.com also offers hotel deals and last-minute hotels. Most channel managers and property management systems link to Booking.com. It can bring in many bookings with a healthy mix of leisure and corporate customers.
List your property on Booking.com by clicking here and get five commission-free bookings!
4. Ctrip
Ctrip is probably the least well-known in this list of top vacation rental booking sites. It is China’s largest online travel agency, so if you list here, make sure to try and cater to things that Chinese guests may find appealing. Top tips include providing slippers and pot noodles. Take a close-up photo of a pot noodle and add it to your listing. If you’re ready to tackle this massive market and are up for a challenge in how to attract a larger number of guests, you want to look into this.
List your property on Ctrip by clicking here.
5. Expedia
Expedia is a massive group that owns dozens of other sites and distributes your inventory across them. This vacation booking site can help you attract many corporate clients and increase vacation rental bookings. However, as there are often many systems involved in inventory distribution and retrieval of bookings, it is not always easy to contact the guest booking the accommodation ahead of time. So, if there is no reception at the property, you need to spend more time and energy trying to contact the guest through Expedia once you get a booking.
List your property with Expedia by clicking here.
6. Vrbo/HomeAway
Vacation Rentals by Owner or Vrbo ‘ver-boh’ is one of the most reliable booking sites based in Austin, Texas, with over 2 million listings. Vrbo is a thriving online travel aggregator (OTA) owned by Expedia Group, the parent company of CarRentals.com, Expedia.com, HomeAway, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, and Trivago.
Hosts who list their properties on this vacation rental booking site will not only benefit from the robust search function and innovative tools of Vrbo but can also take advantage of having their rentals automatically listed worldwide on HomeAway for more exposure and with each targeting a wide variety of guests.
List your property on Vrbo by clicking here.
7. Google Hotel Ads
As the most visited website worldwide and the most used search engine on the web, owning 92.86% of the market share, Google needs no introduction. With millions of potential guests searching for accommodations on Google every day, it advertises a variety of hotels, vacation rentals and serviced apartments with unprecedented visibility across the Google search engine results pages, Google Maps, and Google Assistant.
By showing your rental’s real-time availability and rates, as well as your guest reviews, location, description and photos of your listing, Google Hotel Ads attracts people who are most likely to convert and book direct rentals in your area.
You can allow your guests to make bookings without leaving Google or lead them to book directly on your property’s direct booking website.
Google Hotel Ads also provides you with performance data and insights to help you run more effective data-driven marketing campaigns.
Learn how to list your property on Google Hotel Ads here.
8. Google Free Booking Links
You can receive more bookings and expand your exposure by listing your properties on Google Free Booking Links at no cost. This service displays your properties along with the booking availability and rates. The visitors will be redirected to your landing page when they click on your link.
Learn how to list your property on Hotel Free Booking Links here.
Note: Some of the above sites manage payments and security deposits for hosts; others manage them partly or not at all. Suppose you wish to automate the distribution of your rates and availability, retrieval of bookings and processing of payments, security deposits, communications, and guest vetting. In that case, you may wish to take a look at Zeevou’s Online Check-in Process.
Your Direct Booking Website Is the Best One to Increase Your Bookings
In this article, we have introduced 7 OTAs and large vacation rental booking sites where you should be advertising your properties. This will help you increase your occupancy rates for your short-term rental. However, the number one site you should focus on is your own website. Promoting this correctly will help you drive direct, commission-free bookings. Many software for serviced accommodation operators or guesthouse/B&B owners will automatically generate a website for you (for example, take a look at Zeevou Direct Booking Website).
How Can Zeevou Help You to Drive More Traffic?
Not every provider will give you a good enough website to rank high on search engines such as Google. Moreover, it will not necessarily provide a good booking engine. You should be looking for one that allows you to offer promotions or voucher codes for direct bookings. You may be unhappy with what your channel manager or property management system currently offers. If this is the case, look at Zeevou Direct – a commission-free, centralised booking platform that anyone can join without paying any fees while retaining control over their cancellation policies, payment terms, and guests.
Furthermore, when signing up for the free Spark plan, Zeevou allows you to easily set up your #bookdirect website, which will attract the attention of bots and humans alike. Finally, it will enable you to add custom pages and a blog to drive more traffic to your booking engine to convert interested visitors to your site into paying guests.
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