Do you need your own website if you're on Booking.com or Airbnb?

If your property is already on Booking.com, Airbnb, or Vrbo, do you still need your own website? For most hotels, B&Bs, agriturismi (farm stays), and villas, yes. Not to replace the platforms, but so that they stop being the only way guests can reach you.

The platforms are good at one thing: putting you in front of travelers who have never heard of you. They charge for it on every booking, and the guest stays theirs. Your website does a different job. It’s where people who already know your name, or who search for your area on Google, can book with you without anyone taking a cut.

This article covers what being listed really costs, what a website does that a listing can’t, and how to check whether one would pay for itself at your property.

What Booking.com and Airbnb really cost you

Start with a round example. A guest books a €100 night through a platform that charges 18%. The platform keeps €18 and you keep €82. Over a year, it adds up:

It isn’t a hidden cost. It’s the price you agreed to pay for being found, and you pay it again every time a returning guest books through the platform instead of with you.

The real percentage depends on the platform and on your contract:

• Booking.com sets your commission in your contract, according to your country and type of property. It’s charged on the whole booking, cleaning fees and extras included, but not on the tourist tax. It goes up if you join visibility programs such as Preferred Partner or Visibility Booster.
• Airbnb is moving all home hosts to a single fee taken from the payout, and most hosts pay 15.5%.
• Vrbo charges a 5% commission, plus 3% for payment processing.

For a wider view, a European Commission study found that most independent hotels paid between 10% and 20% of each booking, and more when they paid for extra visibility.

To see your own number, add up last year’s commission invoices and platform fees. That total is what you pay each year to be found, and it’s the figure a website has to beat.

On Booking.com, you’re a tenant, not the owner

Think of a shop in a shopping mall. The mall brings the crowds, and that’s worth paying for. But you pay rent on every sale, you follow the mall’s rules, and the mall decides where your shop sits next to your competitors. You’re not even allowed to tell customers about your other shop down the street.

A listing on Booking.com, Airbnb, or Vrbo works the same way:

• Your page looks like everyone else’s. Same layout, same boxes, same filters. You compete on photos, reviews, and price, and there’s little room for anything else.
• The ranking is theirs. The platform decides where you appear and next to whom, and part of that position is for sale: Booking.com’s Preferred Partner program gives you more exposure in the search results in exchange for a higher commission. When the ranking rules change, your bookings can drop, and there’s little you can do about it.
• The rules are theirs. Booking.com’s terms don’t allow links to your website or social media in your property details. Airbnb’s off-platform policy forbids asking guests to move current, future, or repeat bookings off Airbnb, or offering them a discount to do it.
• The guest is theirs. Booking.com never shares a guest’s private email address, only an alias ending in @guest.booking.com, and its terms forbid using the contact details it gives you for unsolicited messages.

None of this makes the platforms bad. It makes them rented space. Your website is the one place online that belongs to you, and the only one where a guest who books pays you and nobody else.

What your own website does that a listing can’t

A good website doesn’t copy your Booking.com page. It does four jobs a listing can’t do.

It catches the people who look you up. Some travelers find you on Booking.com or Airbnb, then search your name on Google to see more photos, check the location, or look for a better price. Without a website, that search leads back to a booking site. With one, it ends with you.

It sells on your terms. Longer stays, packages with a cooking class or a wine tasting, a rate for returning guests, a more flexible cancellation policy: you can offer any of it without asking a platform first.

It’s found by people who never open a booking site. Someone planning a week in Tuscany searches Google for “villa with pool near Lucca” or “B&B in Chianti with a view,” or asks ChatGPT where to stay in the Val d’Orcia. If the answer is a booking site, the platform chooses which properties they see. A website with clear pages in English can show up in both places on its own. How AI assistants pick what to recommend is explained in my AI search guide.

It tells your story, in your words. A listing is a form to fill in. A website can show what your guests will actually remember: the view from the room, the walk to the village, the olive harvest in November, what’s within half an hour by car. For a guest about to pay a deposit to a property in another country, it’s also proof that you’re real.

I tested this on my own business. In January 2026 I launched a website for my private guided hikes in Tuscany (I’m also a licensed hiking guide): a new domain, no reviews, and no advertising budget. By August 2026 it was getting about 1,000 clicks a month from Google, and inquiries were arriving directly from Norway, Japan, the United States, Germany, and Australia. A hike isn’t a hotel room, but the mechanism is the same: people search, look at the photos, and decide in a few seconds. The numbers and screenshots are in the case study.

Own website vs Airbnb and Booking.com: how to use both

You don’t have to choose. The two do different jobs:

• The platforms bring discovery. They put you in front of travelers from abroad who don’t know you exist, which matters most when you’re new or have empty dates to fill.
• Your website keeps the bookings you shouldn’t pay commission on: returning guests, their friends, people who search your name, and people who find you on Google.

Two things to know before you plan the mix:

• You can charge less on your own website. In Italy, contract clauses that stop you from offering better prices on your own channels have been void since 2017, and EU rules now require Booking.com to allow it too. That isn’t true everywhere: if you also run a property outside the EU, check that contract.
• You can’t use the platforms to send guests to your website. No links in the listing, and no asking Airbnb guests to rebook with you. Your website has to be found on its own: by name, and through the searches guests make.

How to win those bookings, from the perk you offer direct guests to bringing them back next year, is a guide of its own: how to increase direct bookings.

Is a holiday rental website worth it for one villa?

If you rent out a single villa or apartment (a vacation rental, or a holiday let, as British owners say), the answer depends on the property. A website is more likely to pay for itself when:

• the property has a name that guests remember and search for;
• guests come back, or send their friends;
• stays are long and the nightly price is high, so every commission is a large amount;
• you want to sell what a listing can’t: long stays in the low season, a transfer from the airport, a cooking class at the villa.

It can wait if you have a small apartment that fills itself on Airbnb at the price you want, and you’d rather not answer direct inquiries.

If you do build one, keep it small. A few pages are enough: honest photos of every room, the facts guests check first (how many people it sleeps, beds and bathrooms, what’s included, distances to the village and the airport), prices and availability, and a quick way to book or ask. Connect its calendar to your listings so you never sell the same night twice, and write it in English and Italian. If you already have a site that brings in almost nothing, look for these four signs it’s time for a redesign.

When a website pays for itself, and when it can wait

A direct booking isn’t free either. You pay for the website, perhaps a booking engine, card fees, and the time you spend answering messages. The difference is that most of those costs stay the same whether you sell 10 nights or 100, while commission grows with every booking.

So the check is simple. Take what the website will cost you in a year and divide it by what you save on each direct night: about €18 in the example above. The result is the number of direct nights it needs to pay for itself. Then ask yourself honestly whether returning guests, word of mouth, and Google can bring you that many. For typical prices, see what a hotel website costs in Italy.

A website can also wait. If your photos are dark or old, fix them first: they sell on every channel, your listings included, and a new website with the same photos won’t change much. That’s the order I suggest in my marketing plan for small hotels. And if nobody will answer inquiries the same day, sort that out before you invite guests to write to you.

If you’re already on Booking.com and Airbnb, you’ve done half the work: guests have seen your name. A direct-booking website is where they can find you again and book with you.