How to get direct bookings for your vacation rental

Where direct bookings come from

• Search. Each home has its own page with its own title, description and share image, and the page carries structured data built from the fields you already filled in: name, photos, address, bedrooms and amenities. Structured data helps search engines read a page. It doesn't decide how a result looks.
• The place around your homes. The rental templates include area pages and guide pages. An area page lists the homes in that city. A guide page is yours to write: what to pack, where to eat, how to get from the car to the door.
• Your own ads and social pages. Link to one home's page, not your front page. Add your GA4 and Meta details under Integrations and the confirmation page sends one purchase event per paid booking. A request you hold for approval sends a lead event instead. No guest name, email or dates go to either tag.
• Guests who booked on your site. A box on the booking card, unticked, asks if they want offers for future stays. Guests who tick it show in Past guests on the Members screen, and you can send them a book-again email with one promo code you make in the composer.
• Guests who started and left. A guest who agreed to offers, reached payment and left gets one email with a link back to the same dates. If the nights have gone, the email says to pick new ones.

Where to start

1. Publish your homes with your own photos and a description that says what is special about each.
2. Write one area page and two guide pages. Real detail beats filler.
3. Connect GA4 and Meta so every paid booking is counted.
4. Put each home's link in your social profiles and ads.
5. Check which source sent each booking in GA4 or Meta, and put more into what worked.

Make the booking easy to finish

• A price the guest can read. The guest sees the nights, the cleaning fee and the tax as separate lines before they pay.
• Longer-stay discounts and promo codes. Type a weekly and a monthly percent on a home. Make a code in Shop under Checkout & shipping, and guests type it into Have a code? on the booking card.
• Pay part now. Set a Pay first percent on a home. The guest pays that share and agrees to the rest on the same card. You press Charge balance when it's due, or send a pay link.
• Rules the guest signs. An agreement the guest signs by typing their name, and a refundable hold on their card, are both optional and set per home.

Keep platform guests on their platform

Airbnb and Vrbo each have rules about links, messages, discounts and payments for their own guests. Nothing on this page is for a guest who booked through a platform. Read what each platform allows before you decide how to tell people about your site.

What a booking costs

Airbnb's host service fee is 15.5% for most hosts, according to Airbnb's help center. A booking made on your own site is paid into your Stripe account.