Behind the scenes of Booking.com’s vacation rental strategy

The demand for vacation rentals continues to rise, but for property owners the path to securing more bookings—and growing and managing your hosting portfolio—has its challenges. 

That’s why we’re committed to guiding our partners every step of the way. From investing in product innovation to driving traveler demand, Eric Bergaglia, Booking.com’s Senior Director of Accommodation Segments, shares the steps we’re taking to ensure our partners’ continued success.  

2023 is proving to be a big year for vacation rentals. How are we helping our partners capitalize on this growth?

Vacation rentals continue to be a priority focus area for us. We’re investing heavily in demand and other conversion improvements to bring more bookings to our partners, providing customer reach and overall exposure that wouldn’t be attainable otherwise.

And it seems to be working. To date, we’ve delivered over 1.1 billion vacation rental guest arrivals through our platform. Additionally, on average 45% of new vacation rental listings get their first booking within a week of signing up to Booking.com. 

We’re continuing to prioritize and invest in new products and strategies that reflect customer and partner preferences, so we can help our vacation rental partners attract a larger share of demand on our platform. 

You mentioned investing in new products. How are we making it easier for hosts to work with us?

First and foremost, we’ve always been listening to our partners to clearly identify and tackle any barriers to growth. By tackling these pain points, we’re helping to make our partners’ experience even more seamless. For example, we developed a product to handle damage payment requests on behalf of our partners. This removes collection from guests upfront, which helps reduce operational hassle for partners and friction for guests – increasing conversion as a result.

We’re also working on ways to further support partners when unexpected incidents occur at their property. We partnered with a third party to launch Liability Insurance that protects partners against claims from third parties of up to €/£/$1,000,000 for every reservation. 

We also recently released Request to Book, which enables partners to choose how they prefer to receive bookings. This is currently a beta version available in a limited number of countries including Australia, the US, Italy, Germany, the UK, France, and Spain. 

Along with these improvements, some key foundations for success remain. New partners can still list their properties—for free—in just 15 minutes. Our automated guest messages and free templates reduce the time needed to communicate with guests, while access to 24/7 support in 45 languages is also available to address any concerns. 

What about hosts working with a connectivity provider? How are we improving their experience on our platform?

We work with over 600 trusted connectivity providers, and we’re continuing to invest in our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make sure new products and features are also available to our connected partners. For example, we’re currently working on payments onboarding via API. This will help reduce workload while improving the payments experience for our professional vacation rental partners. 

This is just one of the many improvements on our roadmap as we strive to make it easier for partners to improve operational efficiency and manage at portfolio level rather than property level.

Once a property owner lists their accommodation with us, how do we make sure they find success on our platform?

We always work in collaboration with partners to ensure they’re set up for success from the start. This begins with making sure our registration and onboarding processes are as simple as possible, so new properties can open for bookings faster. For example, partners are already able to import their listings from other platforms and sync their calendars. 

Ask any partner and they’ll say visibility is a hot topic for them. To help new property listings succeed on our platform along with more established ones, we tag them as “New to Booking.com” to increase visibility, and also convert and display external review scores from other trusted travel sites to boost customer confidence. We also provide actionable and tailored advice on the most impactful settings to improve partners' pricing, availability, rate plans, and content – helping new partners get their first booking faster.  

We’re also investing in features designed to improve the discoverability of alternative accommodations, including an entire home or apartment filter. 

Ultimately, we’re constantly working on providing the right tools, support, and guidance to help hosts get the most value from our platform.