Why direct
Every booking through a marketplace costs you the commission and the guest.
Booking.com and Airbnb take a commission on every stay and keep the relationship. Booked direct on your own site, the guest is yours, and their second stay costs you no commission at all.
Direct booking, defined
Direct booking means guests book and pay on the estate's own website instead of through Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo. For a country house or estate it avoids a marketplace commission of roughly 12% to 15.5% per booking, keeps the guest's details for the next stay, and sells what marketplaces cannot: weddings, retreats and the whole house.
Keep the listings, own the guest
Stay on Booking.com. Stop being owned by it.
Steward connects to the channels you already use, keeps one calendar honest, and turns every marketplace guest into a record you can email next year.
The OTA tax
Drag the slider. Watch the bars.
Assumes a 15% marketplace commission, which is typical for Booking.com and Airbnb host fees combined with payment processing. Steward is 8% on bookings from your own traffic and 15% on bookings its ads bring you, with the ad spend paid by Steward. No setup fee, no monthly fee.
Four reasons
What a marketplace can’t do for an estate.
Marketplaces sell rooms. You sell the house.
An exclusive-use estate is a wedding, a retreat, a weekend for thirty. Booking.com has no field for that. Its listing turns the estate into a set of rooms with a price per night and strips out everything that makes it worth €27k rather than €270.
The commission is the smaller cost.
Fifteen percent hurts. Losing the guest hurts more. The marketplace owns the email address, the review, the repeat booking and the referral. On your own site, the second stay pays no marketplace commission.
You can't market what you don't own.
Google Ads, SEO, a press release, a partnership with a DMC: every one of them needs a page you control and a system that records who came from where. Marketplace traffic is untraceable and un-nurturable.
But keep the listings.
Airbnb and Booking.com still fill quiet weeks. Steward keeps them connected, keeps the calendar honest and turns every marketplace guest into a record you can email next year.
The short version
Booking.com sells rooms and keeps the guest. Your estate sells the house. Sell it yourself.
Questions
Direct booking, answered.
The current fees, with sources: Airbnb and Booking.com fees for venues.
- What is direct booking?
- Direct booking means the guest books and pays on the venue's own website rather than through a marketplace such as Airbnb or Booking.com. The venue avoids the marketplace commission and keeps the guest's details and relationship.
- How much do Airbnb and Booking.com charge?
- As of October 2026, Airbnb's host-only fee is 15.5% for most hosts, and Booking.com's commission is set per contract, commonly around 15%. Our guide to Airbnb and Booking.com fees for venues has the detail and sources.
- Should I leave the marketplaces?
- Usually not. Keep the listings for quiet weeks and sync the calendars, and move weddings, retreats and whole-house bookings to your own site, where the guest stays yours.
- What does a direct booking website need?
- Pages that rank for the searches your guests make, a live price or quote they can act on, secure payment of a deposit, a calendar that blocks dates everywhere, and follow-up that does not rely on memory.
See what direct is worth on your estate.
Bring last year's marketplace statement. We'll show you the same year on Steward.