Most UK holiday let owners are not short of bookings. They are short of bookings they own, and the difference between those two things is the single biggest lever on what the property actually earns.
The commission problem most owners never solve
A property that runs at 70% occupancy through Airbnb, Booking.com and a traditional cottage agency can look like a success on the calendar and a disappointment in the bank account. Platform commission typically runs from around 15% on the major online travel agents to 20% and beyond on full-service UK cottage agencies, and it is charged on every night, every year, forever. On a property turning over £40,000 a year, moving even a third of your bookings from a 20% channel to your own site is roughly £2,600 back in your pocket annually, with no extra guests, no extra cleaning and no extra wear on the property. That is the whole argument for holiday let marketing: you are not trying to fill more weeks, you are trying to change who owns the relationship with the guest who books them.
The trap is treating the online travel agents as the enemy. They are not. They are the most efficient discovery engine ever built for accommodation, and a new property with no reviews and no brand needs them. The goal is to use them for what they are genuinely good at, first contact, and then build the machinery that converts a first-time platform guest into a repeat direct booker. Owners who get this right usually end up with a blend rather than a clean break, and the blend is what a sensible digital marketing strategy is designed to produce.
Six pillars of a holiday let marketing strategy
A direct booking website you own
Your own site is the only channel where you set the price, keep the margin and own the guest data. It needs live availability, instant online payment and a booking flow that works on a phone at 9pm. Anything that sends an enquiry into an email inbox is a brochure, not a booking engine.
Listing optimisation on the platforms
Your OTA listings are still where most first-time guests find you. Photography, title, the first two lines of the description and your review score do almost all of the work. Treat each listing as a landing page you are actively optimising, not a form you filled in once.
Search engine visibility
People search for "cottage with hot tub near Bath" long before they search for your property name. Ranking for those location and feature phrases puts you in front of guests at the point of research, which is the only stage where you can win them before a platform does.
Paid search and paid social
Bidding on your own property name protects the guest who has seen you on a platform and is now checking whether booking direct is cheaper. Broader location targeting fills the shoulder season, when organic demand thins out and the platforms discount hardest.
Email and the guest lifecycle
A guest who has already stayed is the cheapest booking you will ever get. Capturing an email address at or after the stay, then contacting past guests before you release next season's dates, is the highest-return activity in this entire list.
Reviews and social proof
Review score drives platform ranking and it drives direct conversion. A property sitting at 4.6 will lose bookings to an identical property at 4.9 on the same street. Systematically asking for reviews is marketing, even though it never feels like it.
Where to advertise your holiday let
There is no single best platform, only a portfolio that suits your property type, location and how much control you want. Most successful UK owners run three or four channels at once and measure each one on net revenue after commission, not gross bookings.
The big three online travel agents
- Airbnb. The largest source of first-time guests, strongest for shorter stays, city properties and anything with a distinctive feature. Fastest to launch, hardest to build a brand on, because the platform deliberately owns the guest relationship.
- Booking.com. Enormous reach, particularly for international and last-minute travellers. Commission is higher and the guest expectation is more hotel-like, so cancellation terms and instant confirmation matter.
- Vrbo. Skews towards families and larger groups booking whole properties for a week or more. Often overlooked by UK owners and frequently the least competitive of the big three.
One change here deserves more attention than it has had from UK owners. Airbnb historically split its service fee, charging the host roughly 3% and the guest the larger share. It is now moving all home hosts onto a single host-paid fee, under which most hosts pay 15.5% and the rest typically pay between 14% and 16%, with nothing charged to the guest. The headline nightly rate the guest sees falls, which helps conversion, but the commission now comes out of your payout rather than theirs. If you priced your property under the old split fee and have since been migrated, your net per night has moved and your direct-booking maths has moved with it. Check which structure your listing is on before you set next season's rates.
UK cottage agencies
Sykes, Cottages.com, Original Cottages and the regional independents. Highest commission of any channel, commonly 20% and upwards, but they handle marketing, pricing and often guest communication, and they bring a genuinely different audience of older, repeat, UK-based holidaymakers who would never open Airbnb. For an owner who wants a hands-off property, an agency is a management decision as much as a marketing one. For an owner building a brand, it is the hardest channel to convert to direct, because the agency guards the guest relationship more tightly than the OTAs do.
Regional, niche and free listing sites
Local tourism boards, county-level directories, national park visitor sites, and the specialist directories for dog-friendly, hot-tub, accessible and large-group properties. Individually the volumes are small. Collectively they are cheap or free, they reach guests who search by interest rather than by destination, and they build the local link profile that helps your own website rank. This is the most consistently under-used tier in UK holiday let advertising.
Your own website
The only channel where the margin is yours and the guest data is yours. It cannot replace the others on discovery, and an owner who delists from the platforms in year one usually regrets it. What it can do is capture the repeat guest, the referral, the brand searcher and the platform guest who is checking whether direct is cheaper, and those four groups are where the profit sits.
What it costs to advertise a holiday let
Advertising cost splits into two kinds and owners routinely compare them as if they were the same thing. Commission channels cost nothing up front and a great deal over time: at 15% to 20% of every booking, a property turning over £40,000 pays £6,000 to £8,000 a year for its distribution, invisibly, forever. Fixed-fee channels cost a defined amount regardless of how much they deliver: a subscription listing site is typically in the low hundreds of pounds a year, a regional tourism listing is often free to under £100, and your own website is a one-off build plus hosting, a booking engine subscription and whatever you choose to spend on search visibility.
The useful comparison is cost per booking, not cost per year. A £300 annual listing that produces eight bookings costs £37.50 a booking. The same eight bookings through a 20% agency on a £900 average stay cost £1,440. That is the arithmetic that should drive the channel mix, and it is why the fixed-fee tier and your own site deserve far more attention than most owners give them. A practical rule: if a channel cannot tell you what it costs you per booking after commission, it is not being managed, it is being tolerated.
How to advertise a holiday let for free
Plenty of the highest-return work here costs nothing but time, which is exactly why it gets skipped. If your budget is zero, this is the order to work through.
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Self-catering accommodation is eligible, and a completed profile with real photos puts you into Google Maps results for local searches.
- Get listed on your regional tourism site. Most UK counties and national parks run a visitor site that accepts accommodation listings, often free or for a nominal fee, and they carry genuine domain authority.
- Post in regional and interest-based Facebook groups. Dog-friendly travel, walking, coastal and county groups all exist, and members are actively planning trips. Read the rules first, because most ban blatant promotion but allow genuine participation.
- Ask every departing guest for a review. Free, and it compounds on every channel simultaneously.
- Build an email list from day one. Even a simple form on the site plus a note in the welcome pack will accumulate a list worth more than any single paid campaign within two seasons.
- Write genuinely useful local content. A page on the best walks, pubs and beaches within twenty minutes of your property costs an afternoon and earns organic traffic for years.
Free advertising has one honest limitation worth stating. It builds slowly and it rewards properties that already have something distinctive to say. A generic two-bedroom flat in a crowded seaside town will get less from this list than a shepherd's hut with a hot tub and a footpath at the gate. If your property is the former, the free tier still matters, but the paid and platform channels will carry more of the load for longer.
How to increase direct bookings for a holiday let
Direct booking share is the number the entire strategy exists to move, and it responds to a surprisingly short list of actions. Most owners attempt them in the wrong order, starting with social media and finishing with the two things that actually work.
- Run a brand search campaign on your own property name. Almost nobody else bids on it, so it is cheap, and it intercepts the guest who found you on a platform and is now checking whether direct is better. This is the highest-return paid activity available to a holiday let and the one most owners never run.
- Give the guest a real reason to book direct. Pricing parity rules on some platforms limit advertising a lower headline rate, so use added value instead: no booking fee, free late checkout, a welcome hamper, a discount on a return stay. "Book direct and save" is a reason. "Welcome to our cottage" is not.
- Capture the email address of every guest, whatever channel they came through. At booking on your own site, and through the welcome pack and post-stay message for platform guests, within the platform's rules on off-platform contact.
- Email the past-guest list before you release next season's dates. Repeat guests booking direct is the single cleanest source of high-margin nights, and it costs nothing but the sending.
- Make the direct booking easier than the platform one. Live availability, instant confirmation, card payment, two minutes start to finish on a phone. Any friction here hands the guest straight back to the channel they came from.
What is a good direct booking percentage?
Benchmarks matter here because owners either despair at 10% or congratulate themselves at 20% without knowing which is which. A new property will typically sit at or near zero and be entirely reliant on platforms, and that is correct rather than a failure. An established property with an active website, an email list and a brand campaign commonly reaches 25% to 40% of nights direct. Above 50% is achievable for well-known properties with strong repeat custom and a distinctive offer, but it generally takes several seasons of compounding rather than a single push. The trajectory matters more than the absolute number: a property that has moved from 5% to 20% in two seasons is doing the work, whatever the headline figure says.
Build a direct booking website that actually converts
The most common failure in holiday let marketing is a site that looks lovely and cannot take a booking. A guest arriving from a platform is comparison shopping in real time, and if your own site cannot confirm availability and take payment in under two minutes, they will return to the platform and book there.
The non-negotiables are live availability pulled from the same calendar as your other channels, instant confirmation and card payment, mobile-first design, and a clear, honest statement of why booking direct is better.
Speed and structured data do the technical work. A slow site loses mobile guests before the gallery loads, and marking up your property with the right schema helps search engines understand what you are and where you are. Google's structured data documentation sets out the properties worth implementing. We covered the build side of this in detail in our guide to holiday let website design, and the same conversion principles apply across the sector, as our web design for travel agencies guide sets out.
Holiday let SEO: getting found in organic search
Organic search is where direct bookings are won, because the guest searching "dog friendly cottage Northumberland hot tub" has intent but no allegiance yet. The platforms dominate the broadest terms and you will not outrank Airbnb for "cottages Cornwall". You can absolutely outrank them for the specific, feature-led, location-led phrases that describe your actual property.
The work breaks into three parts. First, a property page that names the location, the sleeping capacity, the standout features and the nearest recognisable landmark in the title, the H1 and the opening paragraph. Second, genuinely useful local guide content that answers what guests research before they book, which also gives regional sites a reason to link to you. Third, the technical hygiene of fast loading, clean URLs, correct schema and an XML sitemap that search engines can actually crawl.
Results take time. Realistically you are looking at three to six months before a new property page holds a stable position for its target phrases, and longer in competitive holiday regions like Cornwall and the Lake District. That is why SEO is the channel to start earliest and judge latest. Owners running rooms rather than whole properties will find the same principles applied to a different model in our bed and breakfast marketing guide.
Holiday let social media marketing
Social media rarely produces a booking on the day you post, and owners who judge it on immediate conversions abandon it before it works. What it does produce is a warm audience that already knows the property when they eventually search for it, and a library of content that makes every other channel look better.
Instagram and Facebook carry the UK holiday let audience. Instagram suits the property and the location: interiors, the view, the hot tub at dusk, the walk that starts at the gate. Facebook suits the practical and the community side: availability for a specific week, local events, and participation in regional travel groups where holidaymakers actively ask for recommendations. TikTok is worth testing if your property has a genuinely distinctive hook, a shepherd's hut, a converted chapel, a treehouse, because the format rewards novelty over polish.
Three things separate accounts that work from accounts that do not. Post the surroundings as much as the property, because people book a holiday, not a building. Show the property occupied and lived in rather than styled and empty. And put a bookable link in every profile, because a guest who has to search for you again is a guest the platforms will intercept.
Paid channels that earn their keep in low season
Paid advertising for a single property has to be tightly targeted or it burns money fast. Two campaigns do most of the work for most owners.
The first is the brand campaign on your own property name described above. The second is a location and feature campaign targeting phrases like "hot tub cottage Peak District", pointed at your property page rather than your homepage, and scheduled to run hardest in the shoulder and low seasons when organic demand falls away. Budget follows the calendar rather than the month: there is little point bidding hard in the weeks your peak season sells out on its own.
Paid social works differently. It is poor at capturing existing demand and good at creating it, particularly for retargeting people who visited your site and did not book, and for reaching lookalike audiences in the cities that feed your region. Practical guidance on both sits in our Google Ads management and Facebook Ads management pages.
Marketing software for holiday lets: the stack that earns its keep
Marketing software for holiday lets is where owners either buy too much too early or nothing at all. The honest answer is that a single property needs far less than the industry sells it, and a portfolio of three or more needs almost all of it. Work through the categories in this order.
- Channel manager. The first thing to buy. It syncs availability across every platform and your own site so you cannot double book. Without it, running multiple channels is a manual risk rather than a strategy.
- Booking engine. The component that takes payment on your own site. Some website platforms include one, some channel managers provide one, and for a single property a good booking engine is often the only software you genuinely need.
- Property management system. Handles guest messaging, cleaning schedules, owner statements and automated pre-arrival emails. Worth it from roughly three properties, or one property with high turnover.
- Dynamic pricing tool. Adjusts nightly rates against local demand, events and lead time. The gains are real, particularly on midweek and shoulder-season gaps, but only once you have enough booking history for the model to learn from.
- Email marketing platform. A basic account is free at low list sizes and is the tool that turns past guests into repeat direct bookings. Do not wait until the list is big to start collecting.
- Analytics and call tracking. Free, and the only way to know which channel actually produced a booking rather than which one claimed credit for it.
What a single self-catering property actually needs
For one property, the working minimum is three things: a channel manager or a booking engine that includes channel syncing, a way to take card payment on your own site, and a free email platform. Everything else on the list solves a problem a single property does not yet have. Dynamic pricing needs booking history to learn from and will make worse decisions than you would in its first season. A full property management system is built for the messaging and housekeeping load of a portfolio, and for one cottage it is an expensive way to automate work that takes ten minutes a week.
Buy in that order, and stop when the next tool solves a problem you do not yet have. A single cottage running a channel manager, a booking engine and a free email platform is better equipped than one paying monthly for a full enterprise suite it uses at 10% capacity. The upgrade trigger is almost always property number three, or the point at which you are turning over enough that a 2% pricing gain exceeds the subscription.
Turn one stay into many
The guest who has already stayed is the most undervalued asset in the business. They know the property, they know the area, they need no persuading on quality, and they cost nothing to reach. Yet most owners let them leave and never contact them again.
The mechanics are simple. Capture the email address, either at booking on your own site or through the welcome pack and post-stay message for platform guests, subject to the platform's rules on off-platform contact. Send one genuinely useful message after the stay thanking them and asking for a review. Then contact the list once when you release next season's dates, and once with a shoulder-season offer. That is three emails a year, and for an established property it routinely fills more weeks than any paid campaign of comparable effort.
Measure what actually matters
Occupancy is the number owners quote and the number that misleads them most. A property at 85% occupancy sold entirely through a 20% commission channel earns less than the same property at 70% with half its bookings direct. Track these instead.
- Net revenue per available night. Total income after commission and platform fees, divided by nights available. The single best measure of whether marketing is working.
- Direct booking share. The percentage of nights booked through your own site. This is the number the whole strategy is designed to move.
- Cost per direct booking. Everything you spend on marketing, divided by direct bookings. Compare it against the commission you would have paid on the same booking.
- Repeat guest rate. The proportion of guests who have stayed before. A rising number here means the lifecycle work is landing.
- Review score and velocity. Both the score and how recently the reviews arrived, because platforms weight freshness.
Owners with several properties, or those who also run rooms, events or a restaurant alongside the lets, will find the same measurement logic at larger scale in our hotel marketing guide.
Regulation and tax every UK holiday let owner should track
The regulatory picture has shifted meaningfully and some widely repeated advice is now out of date. Three things matter for marketing decisions specifically.
The furnished holiday lettings tax regime was abolished from April 2025, removing the separate treatment that previously allowed full mortgage interest relief, capital allowances on furnishings and certain capital gains reliefs. HMRC's guidance on the abolition sets out the detail, and it changes the arithmetic on whether marginal extra bookings are worth chasing.
Business rates rather than council tax apply to genuine self-catering properties in England, but only once thresholds for availability and actual letting are met, which makes achieving a minimum number of let nights a commercial decision and not just a marketing one. The valuation guidance explains how this is assessed. General operating requirements including fire safety, gas and electrical certification and insurance are covered in the government's guidance for self-catering holiday homes in England. Scotland and Wales operate their own licensing and threshold regimes, and London has its own 90-night limit, so check the rules for your nation rather than assuming England applies.
Frequently asked questions
How do I market my holiday let?
Start with the listings you already have, because they produce your first guests, then build a direct booking website that can take payment instantly. Add local SEO content and a brand search campaign, capture guest emails from the first booking onwards, and only then expand into paid social and dynamic pricing. The order matters more than the tools.
Where can I advertise my holiday let?
Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo cover the broadest audience, UK cottage agencies such as Sykes and Cottages.com reach a different and often older domestic market, and regional tourism sites plus niche directories add cheap incremental reach. Run three or four channels, measure each on net revenue after commission, and keep your own website as the destination for repeat and brand-aware guests.
How much does it cost to advertise a holiday let?
It depends entirely on whether the channel charges commission or a fixed fee. Commission channels cost nothing up front and 15% to 20% of every booking thereafter, so a property turning over £40,000 pays £6,000 to £8,000 a year for its distribution. Fixed-fee listing sites are typically in the low hundreds of pounds a year, and regional tourism listings are often free or under £100. Compare channels on cost per booking rather than cost per year, because that is the only figure that makes the two kinds comparable.
How can I advertise my holiday home for free?
Claim and complete a Google Business Profile, get listed on your regional tourism or national park visitor site, participate genuinely in relevant regional and interest-based Facebook groups, ask every departing guest for a review, build an email list from the first booking, and publish a local guide page covering the walks, pubs and beaches near the property. None of it costs money, all of it compounds, and together it usually outperforms a small paid budget spread thinly.
What is the best way to get more direct bookings?
Two things, in this order. Run a paid search campaign on your own property name so that guests who discovered you on a platform and are checking for a better direct deal actually find your site. Then build and email a past-guest list, because repeat guests convert directly at a far higher rate than any cold audience. Everything else is secondary to those two.
What is a good direct booking percentage for a holiday let?
A new property will typically be at or near zero and reliant on platforms. An established property with an active website, an email list and a brand campaign commonly reaches 25% to 40% of nights direct. Above 50% is achievable for well-known properties with strong repeat custom, but it usually takes several seasons rather than a single push. Judge the trajectory rather than the absolute number.
Has Airbnb changed how much commission hosts pay?
Yes. Airbnb is moving all home hosts from the old split fee, where the host paid around 3% and the guest paid the larger share, onto a single host-paid fee where most hosts pay 15.5% and the rest typically pay 14% to 16%, with nothing charged to the guest. The nightly rate a guest sees falls, but the commission now comes out of your payout. If you set your pricing under the split fee and have since been migrated, your net per night has changed.
Are holiday lets still profitable in the UK?
They can be, but the margin has tightened. The abolition of the furnished holiday lettings tax regime in April 2025 removed several reliefs, supply has grown in most popular regions, and platform commission has not fallen. Properties that compete only on price and rely entirely on a single platform are under real pressure. Properties with a distinctive offer, strong reviews and a meaningful share of direct bookings remain comfortably viable.
How much should a holiday let spend on marketing?
A useful benchmark is 3% to 6% of gross booking revenue for an established single property, excluding platform commission. That covers hosting, a booking engine, a modest brand search budget and an email tool. Spend more in the first year while you are building organic visibility from nothing, and more again if you are launching in a competitive region.
What marketing software does a single holiday let need?
Three things: a channel manager or a booking engine that syncs availability across your channels, a way to take card payment on your own website, and a free email marketing account. A property management system and a dynamic pricing tool are portfolio purchases, and dynamic pricing in particular needs booking history before it outperforms your own judgement. The usual upgrade trigger is property number three.
How long does holiday let SEO take to work?
Expect three to six months for a new property page to settle into a stable position for its target location and feature phrases, and up to twelve months in the most competitive holiday regions. Local guide content tends to rank sooner than the property page itself, which is why it is worth publishing early.
Do I still need Airbnb and the cottage agencies?
Almost certainly yes, particularly in the first two seasons. They solve the discovery problem that a new property cannot solve alone, and they generate the reviews that make direct booking credible later. The aim is not to leave them, it is to stop being wholly dependent on them.
If you would rather have this run properly than run it yourself, our digital marketing for travel and tourism work covers the same ground at portfolio scale, and you can get in touch for a straight answer on what your property actually needs.
