Where to list your vacation rental property online

You’ve furnished your vacation home. Stocked it with all the guest necessities. And now you’re ready to open the doors to your first guests. But where do you find those guests? Or, rather, where will they find you? Travelers today have more places to browse vacation rentals than ever before. The key to your success is to diversify, instead of simply listing on one site. The equation is simple: More websites your home is listed on = More exposure + more earnings.

Here, we’ll sum up some of the biggest booking sites where individual homeowners can list their properties. Focus your efforts here first. Then, you can explore more niche sites to fill in the gaps.

The largest vacation rental listing sites

Airbnb

Who hasn’t heard of Airbnb by now? Since its founding in 2008, Airbnb first revolutionized the industry by allowing hosts to rent out even individual bedrooms in their own homes (merging the sharing economy with short-term rentals) and alternative accommodations like glamping sites, boats, and treehouses. Today, they are a household name around the world. While most vacation rental sites focus mainly on larger homes in traditional vacation destinations, Airbnb also offers many studios and urban lofts that attract solo travelers and couples.

Reasons to list your vacation rental on Airbnb:

• Brand recognition. The term “Airbnb” has now become synonymous with vacation rentals.
• They attract some of the biggest numbers of travelers seeking vacation rentals worldwide. Since their inception, they've hosted more than 800 million visitors.¹
• They are big with millennial travelers. In 2018, 58% of their hosts and guests were millennials.²
• It’s free to list your property, but you pay a fee per booking.

Vrbo

Owned by the Expedia Group, Vrbo merged with its sister vacation rental site HomeAway in 2019. Vrbo was one of the first vacation rental sites that developed a prominent, loyal following in the U.S., mostly made up of families looking for vacation homes with multiple bedrooms. In fact, 70% percent of Vrbo properties are big enough to include two or more bedrooms and can sleep up to six guests.³ Today, Vrbo garners 15.9 million unique worldwide visitors each month.⁴

Reasons to list your vacation rental on Vrbo:

• As part of the Expedia Group, Vrbo offers the possibility for your home to be distributed on the group’s other sites, such as Expedia or Travelocity, multiplying your exposure across the web.
• They’re popular with families. According to a recent Vrbo survey, 87% of their guests travel with a family member.⁵
• You can choose from two payment models: a fee per booking, or an annual subscription fee for unlimited bookings.
• If you consistently go the extra mile for guests and have exemplary reviews, Vrbo may ask you to join their free Premier Host program, which gives you a boost in the search results and a trusted badge to put on your listing.

Booking.com

A travel industry veteran, Booking.com is one of the oldest online travel agencies (OTAs) and one of the largest. It was founded in 1996 and now lists more than 28 million accommodations, including vacation homes, hotels, luxury resorts, and B&Bs.

Reasons to list your vacation rental on Booking.com:

• Its sheer audience size and name recognition. More than 1.5 million room nights are booked on their platform every day.⁶
• Because your property will show up in search results alongside hotels in your area, you can effectively compete with nearby hotels for bookings. About 42% of nights booked on Booking.com are for vacation properties other than a hotel.⁷
• It's free to list. However, Booking.com charges a commission for each booking.
• The platform is available in 43 languages, making it easier for international guests to book.
• Bookings are instantly confirmed, meaning no back and forth communication with potential guests.

Tripadvisor & FlipKey

Although best known for its unfiltered hotel reviews, Tripadvisor has joined the ranks of online travel agencies by allowing travelers to book accommodations directly from their website. It boasts 463 million monthly users worldwide,⁸ one of the largest audiences of any travel site.

Reasons to list your vacation rental on Tripadvisor:

• The platform shares its inventory with its vacation rental site, FlipKey. So, you pay for one platform and are featured on both.
• It’s a trusted platform, known for its unbiased, honest traveler reviews.
• Potential guests can communicate with you directly through the Tripadvisor platform.
• It is free to list, although you pay a commission for every booking made on the site.

Other vacation rental listing sites

With the popularity of vacation rental sites like Vrbo and Airbnb, many other sites have popped up that market to niche travelers. Other sites to look into include:

• HomeToGo
• Cottages.com
• Homestay.com
• Kid & Coe

The right partner can simplify it all

The more places you can showcase your vacation rental online, the more exposure you get to travelers looking for a home just like yours. That's why many owners choose to list their vacation homes on multiple sites—even though staying on top of all those listings can consume a lot of time and energy.

Feeling overwhelmed with juggling too many listings and calendars? We’re here to help. Vacasa is a property manager and partner who can make channel marketing simple as ever. That’s because we’ll handle everything for you—managing, syncing, responding to guest inquiries, and marketing your listings across Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and more. (It's all automatically included in our management fee, so you get maximum rewards with minimal effort.)

Even better? Access to prestigious vacation rental listing sites beyond what we’ve mentioned here so far. For one, Vacasa.com is a powerful e-commerce platform and the source of about a third of our overall bookings—in other words, a major source of revenue, exclusively for our homeowners. Your home could even potentially appear on highly curated sites like Homes & Villas by Marriott International, which only partner with select professional management companies like Vacasa.

And those are just a couple of the perks of working with the pros.
See what it’s like to have it all >

Want even more help marketing your vacation home? Let’s chat about all the ways to get more visibility.