Best alternatives to Airbnb for advertising your holiday home
7 great alternative platforms that you can use to list your holiday rental property
August 2025
Everyone knows Airbnb, but if you’re not using other holiday rental websites to advertise your holiday home, you’re missing out on valuable exposure and potential sales. Here are some of our favourite holiday rental portals similar to Airbnb that you can also use to list your property rental.
Why look for Airbnb alternatives?
With so many holiday rental websites out there, only a very naïve landlord would advertise their holiday home on just one. Here are some of the reasons why you should be casting a very wide net:
- Every user has their own preference. Some people are loyal customers of another website and don’t enjoy Airbnb.
- Different sites offer access to different parts of the market. Airbnb is very popular in the English-speaking world, but you might find that guests from other countries tend to use a different platform.
- Airbnb can be controversial. Some guests choose to boycott it for various reasons, using other rental websites instead.
- Each site has its own model for commission and payment. You might find some that suit you better than Airbnb.
- Put simply, the more you advertise, the more people you’ll reach.
There is one thing to be cautious about, however. If you advertise your holiday home on multiple platforms, you can soon run into problems with double bookings, inaccurate listings, and even different prices on different websites. You may also find that you are wasting hours and hours updating listings on several different platforms.
To stop these issues, you can use channel manager software, such as Holidu. There are many of these programs available, which let you synchronise your listings across platforms. They also allow you to update all your profiles at once from a single user interface.
Here are some top alternative booking platforms to Airbnb, as well as some channel managers:
Booking.com
Booking.com is one of the biggest Airbnb competitors, with over 28 million listings. It has a presence in every country in the world, so it’s very popular with travellers who frequently go abroad.
The sheer reach of Booking.com makes it a popular choice for holiday rental owners who want to advertise. However, it does have one major drawback. Unlike most of the websites on this list, Booking.com features hotels as well as holiday rentals. This means that your humble holiday flat may have less visibility in its listings, and may have to compete with large and established hotel chains and resorts. To mitigate this, you can sign up for the Booking Genius Programme, but you’ll have to offer a discount on your rates.
Holidu
Holidu is a fantastic alternative to Airbnb, especially if you’re looking to tap into the continental European market, as most of its customer base reside in European countries.
The main benefit of advertising your property on Holidu is that you don’t really need to choose which rental portals you advertise on – you can simply create one ad in the Holidu portal, and publish it across multiple other platforms (including Booking.com, Vrbo, and Airbnb)! This means less work updating and publishing ads individually.
Another benefit of this multi-platform system is that all bookings are automatically synced to your calendar – so you can also avoid overbooking.
Vrbo
Vrbo is part of the Expedia group, one of the biggest travel giants on the internet. It particularly appeals to guests looking to rent a holiday home with their family or in a large group. In general, Vrbo guests tend to book longer stays than guests on other platforms, making it a lucrative Airbnb alternative.
In the holiday rental category, Vrbo only lists entire homes, while many other sites list single rooms in shared accommodation. Hosts can choose free or paid listings. When you first sign up to Vrbo, your new listing will be automatically optimised for a short time, so you’ll have some analytical data to work with.
Wimdu
Wimdu, Airbnb’s competitor from Germany, features a mostly European customer base. Many of its listed properties tend to be located in large cities. If your holiday rental is out in the countryside, you might not see that much benefit from a Wimdu listing. However, if you want people to rent holiday flats in the city centre, this is a great way to tap into the European market.
TripAdvisor
You may not have realised that TripAdvisor has a holiday rental booking service similar to Airbnb. Most people just use it to read and write reviews about their travel experiences. Nevertheless, guests can also book accommodation on this famous site.
TripAdvisor is a good choice if you’re looking for similar websites to Airbnb with a global reach. One of its most important features is the ability to automatically translate content into 26 world languages. This makes it a popular choice with non-English-speaking travellers, a market you might otherwise find difficult to tap.
When you list on TripAdvisor, your guests are more likely to review you on TripAdvisor. As it’s the largest review site in the world and trusted by thousands of travellers, advertising rentals here is a great way to increase your reputation and the number of bookings.
Google Vacation Rentals
Google remains the world’s most visited website, with over 140 billion monthly visits. Listing on its new Vacation Rentals service is one of the best ways to improve your reach and attract new guests.
It’s free to list on Google Vacation Rentals, which is a little different from the other sites on this list. It functions as a meta-search engine, so guests won’t be able to book a stay in your property through Google itself. Instead, they’ll be redirected to your holiday rental website. That’s another handy bonus — guests book directly through your site, so you won’t have to pay any commission fees.
Golightly
Golightly is the smallest site on our list, but we’ve included it because it offers a specific market niche. It’s a site that emphasises safe travel for women. Unlike the other Airbnb alternatives, it functions as a private club. Users need to pay a one-time fee of $100 to sign up. Only female travellers can join the site. Male hosts are allowed to register, but in practice, the vast majority of the hosts on the site are also female.
Golightly is also known for its very low fees, which makes it attractive to both hosts and guests. It’s an interesting site with a set niche in the market and a very loyal customer base.