Hi P-Ranchers,

London host here, same happen to us. I have heard that most of guests through VRBO comes from USA because its well known over there. I asked VRBO about it and they denied but checking on some reddits, they also confirmed. So VRBO is depending on the area your units are I think. In london for me VRBO is not going well while bdc/bnb going quite well. 

I’m in the USA and can also confirm I have 0 bookings from VRBO and constantly booked (90% occupancy) with airbnb.

The increased service fee to 15% on airbnb for having Hospitable as the PMS is a real burden though.

.I have high occupancy through Airbnb, super host status and guest favorite status and almost no VRBO booking and not one BDC booking. I can’t see to figure out why. I have 2 STRs and 1 MTR

Here are my numbers for 2025 YTD per channel on 3 STR in Vermont, taken from the Metrics screen.

We just enabled Booking.com in January and I’ve been surprised at the amount of bookings it brings in. VRBO is almost non-existent. One trend we’ve noticed with VRBO is that people LOVE to book big expensive vacations in the future and then cancel them. Very few follow through.

Here are my numbers for 2025 YTD per channel on 3 STR in Vermont, taken from the Metrics screen.

 

We just enabled Booking.com in January and I’ve been surprised at the amount of bookings it brings in. VRBO is almost non-existent. One trend we’ve noticed with VRBO is that people LOVE to book big expensive vacations in the future and then cancel them. Very few follow through.

Jason, did you do anything specific with yourbookings.com listing? Was it pretty much the same as an Airbnb listing or did you adjust pricing, your approach… I’m just trying to figure out why I can’t get any traction.

For our home in Northeast Iowa, our metrics screen below.

 

​@Jason Congrats on making Booking.com work so well! Do you mind sharing some insights and which market that is? 

Here are my numbers for 2025 YTD per channel on 3 STR in Vermont, taken from the Metrics screen.

 

We just enabled Booking.com in January and I’ve been surprised at the amount of bookings it brings in. VRBO is almost non-existent. One trend we’ve noticed with VRBO is that people LOVE to book big expensive vacations in the future and then cancel them. Very few follow through.

Jason, did you do anything specific with yourbookings.com listing? Was it pretty much the same as an Airbnb listing or did you adjust pricing, your approach… I’m just trying to figure out why I can’t get any traction.

Weird! I don’t know what I did! This is for STR in Vermont. We are a small B&B so these are primarily single-room rentals with a bathroom attached, although some of them are bookings in which you can rent the entire home as a vacation rental (but we get very few of those). 

I honestly don’t know that I did much different between the two platforms, but if you want to pick it apart have a look:
https://airbnb.com/h/spooner-atwater

https://www.booking.com/hotel/us/spooner-house.html

Here are my numbers for 2025 YTD per channel on 3 STR in Vermont, taken from the Metrics screen.

 

We just enabled Booking.com in January and I’ve been surprised at the amount of bookings it brings in. VRBO is almost non-existent. One trend we’ve noticed with VRBO is that people LOVE to book big expensive vacations in the future and then cancel them. Very few follow through.

Jason, did you do anything specific with yourbookings.com listing? Was it pretty much the same as an Airbnb listing or did you adjust pricing, your approach… I’m just trying to figure out why I can’t get any traction.

 

Weird! I don’t know what I did! This is for STR in Vermont. We are a small B&B so these are primarily single-room rentals with a bathroom attached, although some of them are bookings in which you can rent the entire home as a vacation rental (but we get very few of those). 

I honestly don’t know that I did much different between the two platforms, but if you want to pick it apart have a look:
https://airbnb.com/h/spooner-atwater

https://www.booking.com/hotel/us/spooner-house.html

I see you got some great reviews on BDC and they were all US travelers. That’s awesome. Did you experience any guest issues on this platform? Heard so many horror stories so I’m testing BDC with caution. 

Jason, Booking.com found a glitch in their system that had my properties blocked and unbookable for the next year. I finally got someone from customer service to find the issue and help me resolve it. Something had gone wrong with my settings! I have one more property that looks to be active but is not findable on Booking.com and someone from Hospitable is looking into that one. So strange! So many glitches! I’m hoping performance will improve from here on! 
 

Thanks for sending your listings for my reference! I really appreciate your insights! It forced me to persevere. 

Hey ​@Evolz373 : keep on those guys! It took me about 3 calls to get our settings the way we needed them.. but once we did it was ok. Also, do you have instant book turned on for BDC? We found that without it, we got about 0 bookings. A risky bet for sure….

Thanks ​@Jeana D! Yea, the BDC crowd is certainly a mixed bag. Like. They just really don’t know what the hell is going on most of the time. 

When we first started on BDC, we had people showing up hours early, wandering around our backyard with suitcases, showing up with like 7 people for a 3-person booking, assuming we don’t live here…. etc. It was such a hot mess. 

However, the number of bookings they were sending our way seemed worth it, so I worked with their admittedly terrible system to iron out all the kinks I could. 

The number one thing I found after talking to a few guests is that the app experience on their end is so bad that they just don’t get any of the host messages. The app also doesn’t work at all if they are offline, so international travelers would show up here and have no way to get the checkin info. And, in some cases, the messages were delivered but completely missing line and paragraph breaks. They just show up like a wall of text.

So I proceeded with the assumption that Booking itself should be taken out of the loop as much as possible if I want to be able to effectively communicate with the guests. 

The approach I took was:

1. Shorten the length of any BDC messages to be a succinct as possible - so if they arrive without formatting, it’ll still be ok. Rather than sending one big checkin message, I broke it up into 3 different ones, each sent a few hours after one another. This gets around the formatting bug while also having a higher chance of catching the guests’ attention. 
2. Assume messages sent through the BDC platform (even via Hospitabe) would not reach the guest. To work around this, I make a point to send the most important checkin info (which in our case is our Touchstay guide) via SMS. You do get a valid phone number for all BDC bookings. Use it. 
3. If the guest does not reply to that text, I call them the morning of their booking to make sure they have what they need (annoying and barbaric, but yes it needs to be done for some). 

There are a few ways i’ve been able to make this less painful by automating most of it. Given your comfort with tech, you might have luck as well. This gets nerdy, but is worth sharing. Buckle up. 

1. I use the Hospitable Zapier integration to pipe all new bookings to a google sheet, where I store all sorts of info like guest name, phone, email, booking ID, dates, property, etc. Included in here is a column where I store what the guests preferred method of communication is: sms/email/platform
2. For all BDC guests, that same Zap marks their preferred to be sms
3. Another zap monitors messages sent through Hospitable. For each, it looks up the guest ID on that sheet and reads the contact preference. If it is sms, it sends a copy of that message via OpenPhone to the number associated with the guest. That means they get an SMS version of anything that comes to them from Hospitable. If their preference is email, it reads the email address from the sheet and sends all messages to that guest via email through my icloud account via imap.
4. There are a few bonus things that really don’t get used as much but handle edge cases that i’ll share as well: in the BDC new-reservation email, I ask the guest what their preferred method of contact is (even though i’m going to send them SMS no matter what) and invite them to share their email address if they want info sent to their email.
5. The zap that is monitoring messages going out of Hospitable also keeps an eye out for any messages coming from guests that include an email address. If it sees one, it updates their record on the master google sheet with the new email address, and flips the communication preference to email. 
6. This system was worth investing the time in building because it powers a bucket ton of other remarketing and review automations as well. I could get into that another time.

So yea. The long of it is: don’t ever assume BDC messages get to guests. Even if they do, don’t assume the guest actually reads them. Why you have to be so insanely proactive for this crowd, I don’t know. They are seriously an interesting group. It definitely makes me appreciate the time and thought Airbnb has put into their guest experience. We almost never have problems with Airbnb guest communication. For BDC, it seems like communication was an afterthought. Just hammer them with all of the messages, repeated, on all available channels. 

​@Jason wow! This is impressive and a little disheartening! I don’t currently subscribe to Zapier but seeing the way you use it makes me very curious about the benefits! It sounds like a bear to set up, but might be worth it in the long run, especially for scale ability! Are you a Mogul user in Hospitable? I have been contemplating it, but haven’t pulled the trigger. We don’t have enough properties to really warrant it, but I do like some of the features that they’re advertising. I want to use all the tools and have the right tool stack, but I also don’t want to be overly equipped for my three existing properties. Of course we’re looking to scale up, but I’m not sure that the short term cost is worth it. Still processing what the necessary tools are and making sure I use them extensively before adding more.

Same here, we have a 2 STR in Tuscany, and no bookings through VRBO or Agoda. We are around 60% bookings through BDC, 20-30% Airbnb, and the remaining 20-10% are Direct Bookings.

Hello guys,

Antonello here from London. In four years working in the industry I only got 4 bookings through Vrbo, I called and checked many times, all seemed fine but still same story, a mystery to me (and them too).

But not worry, Arbnb and BDC work well so, happy days.

​@Matteo how have you gained traction on your BDC listing? I have no movement there! Did you use a different pricing strategy or what got your STRs noticed on their platform?