The OTAs

Three marketplaces that find you guests and take a cut. They think differently, rank differently and charge differently, and treating them as interchangeable is how owners misread their own numbers.

You are not really renting a house on these platforms. You are renting demand, and the rent goes up whenever they change the algorithm.

Airbnb

Airbnb optimises for the guest, every time. That one sentence explains most of its policies, including the ones that will annoy you.

Typically around 3% from you, with the rest charged to the guest — which is why your payout looks better than VRBO’s at the same nightly rate, and why the guest’s total looks worse.

VRBO

Guests book earlier, stay longer, and skew older and more affluent. For a large Florida pool home it is frequently 25–40% of revenue, not a rounding error. Roughly 5% commission plus ~3% processing.

Booking.com

Brings international and last-minute demand you will not get elsewhere, at 15%. Worth it for nights that would otherwise sit empty; painful as a primary channel.

Capiche? Then the number that decides everything on all three.

Rank is the whole game

A listing on page four is invisible no matter how good the house is. Most of what owners call “a slow market” is a ranking problem.