It is important to take into account the commissions earned by these sales channels when setting the prices of your holiday flat.
It is undeniable that advertising your property on these platforms gives you a competitive advantage over other properties. This success, in large part, is due to the ease with which anyone can publish their accommodation.
The numbers don't lie, Airbnb has more than 4 million hosts and more than 1 billion guests who have stayed at one of its accommodations.
In short, advertising your property on these platforms allows us to have greater visibility, better guarantees and a fairly intuitive and simple booking process, but it is very important that the rental rates are correct.
¿What is the booking platform commission?
The service fee is a percentage that Airbnb, Booking or Vrbo (formerly HomeAway) among others charge hosts for each booking made through their platform in order to maintain the platform and cover the associated costs.
How much is the commission?
The commission varies depending on the platform. In the case of Airbnb, in most cases the service fee amounts to 16%, Booking.com has a service fee of 15% and other platforms such as Vrbo or Tripadvisor range from 8 to 12%.
The large variability and the number of different percentages to take into account when calculating Airbnb, Booking or Vrbo rates, sometimes makes it very difficult to determine the net income.
At the end of the guest's stay and upon leaving the accommodation, the platform releases the payment in question by automatically deducting the service fee.
If we put real figures with a platform like Airbnb we would get the following:
2 nights stay at 50€ = 100€.
Airbnb service fee: 16€.
Net amount for the owner: 84€.
Intelligent price management:
You have probably been in the situation of buying a flight and, depending on the portal where you search for it, you find a different price, well, that has a lot to do with intelligent price management.
At Sereno we have tools that allow us to manage prices intelligently, that is to say, our price will vary according to the platform's service commission, thus mitigating the commission of the sales channels.
Our price management platform goes further, we not only mitigate the service fee, but we also take into account the occupancy of the area and the competition, thus increasing the profitability of our owners.
The importance of receiving direct bookings
If we want to avoid these commissions, it is important to have our own booking portal, as we will achieve a considerable reduction of secondment. It will also allow former guests to book directly with the owner/manager instead of having to book through holiday accommodation sites such as Airbnb or Booking and paying extra commissions.
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