Leaving Hostaway because of the 2% booking fee?

What about all the other OTAs and channels?

Our Channel Management feature is extremely powerful and can greatly simplify your channel advertising. Learn how it works by reading our Channel Management Overview article.

The most powerful part of our Channel Management is the API Integrations we have with certain channel partners.

From time to time, we are asked about being on Priceline, Travelocity, Hotwire and many other travel channels and OTAs. We do not currently support those. There are several reasons.

First, the promise of being on "hundreds" of channels rings hollow. The key is to be on the big 5 or 10 channels in your area and the rest are a distraction. More channels means more work and more things that can go wrong - even with a channel manager you still end up running around doing little one-off fixes... and you end up being limited in pricing and policy decisions to what is supported by the lowest common denominator channel.

Then, some of the major OTAs (like Priceline) are not set up to advertise vacation rentals thoroughly or correctly. When vacation rentals are displayed, the finer points of deposits due upfront, when the second payment is paid, cancellation policies and so on are not shown. It is common for guests and owners to both be annoyed when the guest expects to cancel and the owner does not let them or when other renter agreements or security deposits are required down the line. Many users who spend a lot of time trying to "be everywhere" end up turning that off quickly after they realize how the end result looks.

As a vacation rental owner or PM, your focus should be to advertise on channels that specifically cater to vacation rentals well (eg. Vrbo, Airbnb, regional listing sites in your area) and do as well on those channels as you can. Then, build a nice personal vacation rental website and build your own brand and following.

Lastly, if there are channels that do send you great vacation rental traffic, let us know. We are constantly improving and working on our Channel Management feature, and there are other channels we are working on integrating all the time.