What are the commissions of the main holiday rental portals?
Discover the differences in commissions and conditions for the biggest holiday rental websites.
May 2025
If you’re trying to rent out your holiday home, then you’ll probably already be familiar with holiday rental portals — but which one is right for you to advertise your holiday home? Check out the differences in commissions and conditions for some of the biggest holiday rental websites. This guide should help you find a rental portal that’s right for your needs.
Why do I need a holiday rental portal to rent my holiday home?
New holiday home owners often try to go it alone, but that can be a tricky proposition. Some benefits of using a holiday rental portal include:
- Advertising. These days, holidaymakers looking for accommodation are more likely to go straight to a portal rather than searching on Google. This means that if you don’t use a rental portal to advertise your holiday home, a huge number of potential guests may never see your property.
- A booking platform. Not everyone is a natural techie, and setting up your own website for bookings can be difficult. When you sign up on a holiday rental website, you won’t need to worry about that.
- Protection if something goes wrong. Booking platforms have strict terms and conditions that are designed to protect both guests and landlords.
- Easier guest vetting. When you use a rental portal, you’ll be able to see your potential guests in advance and easily screen out anyone who raises red flags.
For all of these reasons, it’s well worth using a holiday rental platform.
How do holiday rental portal commissions work?
Here’s where things start to get complicated. Every platform has its own system of commissions. In fact, some have more than one payment system, offering landlords the chance to pay commission or follow a fixed-price model. Some have a yearly subscription.
Before you sign up to a holiday portal, it’s important that you’re completely clear on how the payments work. This will allow you to set your prices accordingly.
Many landlords choose to put their property on multiple holiday portals. That’s a good way of spreading your net wide and reaching more potential customers, but it does mean you’ll need to stay on top of two or more different systems of payment.
Holiday rental platform commission rates
Holidu commission rates
Choosing to advertise your holiday home with Holidu is a budget-friendly choice. Unlike many other platforms, it operates a very simple system: if you don’t get any bookings, you don’t pay anything. That makes it an attractive, risk-free prospect for landlords who want to rent their holiday apartment or home.
Holidu charges a one-time activation fee of between €100 and €150. However, you’ll only need to pay that fee when you receive your first booking. You don’t have to pay anything to advertise your property.
With each booking, you’ll pay 5-6% commission. There are no hidden fees. If you find that you enjoy being a holiday rental owner, you can look at the various optimisation packages that Holidu offers. These include increased visibility on 27 popular booking portals, professional photoshoots for your listing, a personalised website and more.
Holidu also runs a referral program. If you have friends or family members with holiday homes of their own to rent out, give them your referral code. As your friends list their properties, you’ll receive bonuses, which start at €75 and go up to €1,000 or more.
How much commission does Booking.com charge?
Booking.com is a popular site used by hosts and landlords all over the world. It charges no fees for guests; instead, landlords are responsible for all the fees.
The percentage of commission for Booking.com varies. Factors that affect it include the country, region, type of property, and specific location of the rental. There’s a commission calculator on Booking.com, where you can see how much you’ll have to pay before you make your listing. On average, Booking.com host fees are around 15% of the listing price.
In addition to the Booking.com commission, the website also has a payment fee of 2.2%.
If you find that you are not getting enough reservations through Booking.com, you can sign up for the Visibility Booster programme. You’ll need to pay a higher commission, but in exchange, you’ll get a higher ranking in the platform’s search results.
How much does Airbnb charge hosts?
Airbnb has become a household name and may well be the best-known holiday rental platform in the world at the moment. Its fee structure can be slightly complicated. Most hosts will pay a 3% fee from the total booking account. However, this fee can vary according to your location and a few other factors.
Airbnb also uses your cancellation policy to calculate the host fee. Hosts with stricter cancellation policies must pay more, usually around 2% higher than the standard fee.
To complicate matters, Airbnb also has service fees, which are usually between 9% and 15% of the total reservation cost. You can choose to set these as split fees or host-only. A split-fee structure means that the guest and the landlord share the cost, while host-only will see you shouldering the bill. Host-only properties tend to be more popular with guests.
What are the Vrbo commission rates for hosts?
Vrbo is one of the oldest holiday rental websites around, although nowadays, it is not as well-known as some of its competitors. Today, it forms part of the Expedia group, so you’ll have to pay Expedia commission rates if you want to use this platform. Vrbo is also known by different names in some markets: it is called Arbitel in France, while in Germany, it goes by FeWo-direkt. Now that Vrbo is part of Expedia, it offers you the chance to share your property with an enormous network of potential customers.
Vrbo has two separate systems of payment. You can either choose to pay on commission or via an annual subscription. If you’re paying a commission, the base rate is 5% per booking. There’s an added surcharge of 3% if your guest pays by credit card. If you register your account as an online travel agency, you’ll need to pay an additional 5% booking fee.
The annual subscription is set at a fixed price of $499 USD. This is a cost-effective option for landlords whose properties receive a lot of bookings and may be wise if you’re managing multiple properties. However, if you’re a new host, it’s probably not advisable to sign up for an annual subscription until you know how many bookings to expect in a year. What’s more, you’ll be left out of pocket in the case of unexpected events that force you to close your property for a while.
One benefit of listing on Vrbo is the company’s free Premium Host Programme. You’ll automatically become a premium host if you maintain a minimum 4.3 rating and accept at least 90% of booking requests. Additionally, you must not cancel less than 5% of your bookings. Premium Hosts get more visibility in search rankings. Other platforms tend to charge for this perk.