When a $104-a-night vacation rental more than doubles with an $89 cleaning fee and a $42 service fee, it’s time to ask: Is there a better way?
The answer is: partially.
You’re unlikely to get around that pesky cleaning fee — so ubiquitous as to make rental periods of a night or two discouragingly inflationary — but you can save the service fee, which is paid to the booking platform, by making a reservation directly with a host.
Along with the rewards, direct bookings come with some risk. Here’s how to find and vet short-term rental listings that avoid service fees.
The appeal of direct bookings
Booking platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo make money by charging users service fees. Terms can be complex and vary, but experts say they generally run 12 to 16 percent of the total.
“By booking direct, you’re avoiding opaque service fees that platforms overlay on the price,” wrote Tommy Ciaccio, the head of business development for North America at Avantio, which makes software for vacation rental managers, in an email.
Hosts also pay smaller fees to the platforms — Airbnb charges hosts 3 percent — which they can avoid with direct bookings. Many hosts that take direct bookings also mimic the same cancellation policies they maintain with third-party bookings.
In the Marches region of northeastern Italy, Bob Garner rents six apartments on his property named Casal Dei Fichi, where weekly rates start at 950 euros (roughly $1,029), with no cleaning fees. Nearly 90 percent of his bookings are direct, saving thousands of euros annually on third-party fees.
Hosts who do it themselves often worry about destructive guests and verifying their identities, though Mr. Garner said most of his guests are repeat travelers or referrals.
“As we live on site and the guests know that we do, it means that we only get bona fide guests,” Mr. Garner said.
Vetting the host
There are plenty of stories of hosting scams perpetrated on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com. While those online travel agencies actively try to root out false listings, sending money to a one-off website deserves a degree of skepticism, which requires carefully vetting the host.
Mark Simpson, the founder of England-based Boostly, which designs websites and trains vacation rental owners to drive direct bookings, said that one way to ensure a direct booking website is legit is to look for sites certified by I-Prac, an international certification agency that verifies the legitimacy of rental properties.
Renters must register their reservation with I-Prac and the organization will reimburse the traveler in the event that the property listing is fraudulent.
Renters should also look for transparency when it comes to the host or management company.
“I counsel clients to be more personal,” Mr. Simpson said. “People buy from people and we’re in the hospitality business, so showcase you and your team and show that you’re real and have reviews.”
If a property seems suspicious, take a few screen shots of its photos and conduct a reverse image search on Google, which will turn up the same image wherever it is on the internet.
“Use your communication with the host as your radar,” said Andrew Schorr, the director of product at Hospitable, a global property management software company. “If they’re unresponsive, they might just be unprofessional and not a scam, but that’s not a good sign.”
Renters should also be wary of any host that has a fully nonrefundable booking policy. Even restrictive policies on major platforms usually offer a refund within 48 hours of booking. (In California, a new law mandates a minimum 24-hour grace period for penalty-free cancellations on hotel and short-term rental bookings as long as they were made 72 hours or more before check-in.) When possible, always pay with a credit card, which provides greater protection in the event of fraud, versus a debit card or money order.
Finding direct bookings
Apart from avoiding scammers, one of the main problems in renting directly from an owner is finding the rental in the first place. Major platforms like Airbnb win on search convenience.
But hosts and property managers, many of whom felt burned during the pandemic when they were forced to issue refunds by booking platforms, are increasingly investing in direct booking tools that allow them to maintain greater control.
Property managers often use search engine optimization to get their website to show up as high as possible in the search results, “so that when guests are searching for rentals in a certain place, their website will be in the top options,” said Mr. Ciaccio of Avantio.
Google encourages vacation rental managers to list properties and prices on its site. Searching for accommodations on Google Travel or Google Maps increasingly turns up vacation rentals as well as hotels and other lodgings. The listings usually link to booking sites, some of which may be direct.
Users can also search for rentals on a traditional platform, find a listing they like and conduct a search for that property to see if it has a dedicated website.
Hosts and managers often drop clues in their listings that users can search for the property directly, said Mr. Simpson of Boostly, including giving the house a name in the description.
He counsels clients to have things like pillowcases personalized with a logo that can appear in listing photos and not break the rules for direct solicitation that third-party platforms enforce. Photos of a kitchen might include a plaque that says, “Best rates for direct bookings.”
“We’re trying to train guests to Google-search the brand,” Mr. Simpson said.
Alternatively, if you’ve stayed at a short-term rental once and would like to return, reach out to the owner, host or manager to see if they will deal with you directly on that or other properties they have, saving everyone third-party fees.
Hosts are happy to pay an online travel agency once, “but not again with the same customer,” said Mr. Schorr of Hospitable.
The same could be said for guests.
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024.