As a small short-term rental manager/owner, you need to invest in your direct booking website, and at the same time, increase your exposure by listing your rentals on different channels, which in turn can even lead to direct bookings in the long-run. So, the best case is working with a PMS that allows commission-free bookings arriving through it, a free direct booking website, and lets you connect through 2-way API connections with many different channels around the world based on your target market and niche.
As your business grows, the management, accounting, reporting, sales, and marketing functionalities can get complicated. In this context, it is imperative to look for a solution that includes options that ease capturing direct bookings, automates as many processes as possible, and allows a property manager of any kind to scale their business and add more rentals to their portfolio.