In short and in plain language
Many people let their holiday flat only through portals. A portal is a big site where guests book. You pay a share for each booking there.
Your own website can be another way to get bookings. Guests who already know you can then book with you directly.
Good photos matter a lot. If the pictures are missing, many guests give up. Keep the form short.
If guests can book for real on your site, extra rules apply. They cover things like prices and the booking button.
We build the website for your holiday flat at a fixed price.
A holiday flat fills up quickly once it is listed on the big portals. The price for that convenience is not on display: a share of every booking goes to the intermediary, including bookings from guests who would have chosen your place anyway because they stayed twice before or heard about it from friends. In 2025, 68.3 million (Federal Statistical Office) overnight stays in German holiday homes and flats were booked through the large online platforms, and 81 percent (Bitkom e. V.) of people in Germany have booked holiday accommodation online at least once. So the question is not whether guests book online, but where. This article shows what your own website has to deliver to become a second booking channel, and what has to appear on it once a binding booking is made there.
Key takeaways
- The portal brings reach, your own site protects the margin: every booking that could have come to you directly costs you a share of the revenue when it runs through an intermediary.
- The market of small hosts is bigger than official statistics suggest - 94 percent (Federal Statistical Office) of platform-booked overnight stays go to providers with fewer than ten beds.
- Without convincing photos there is no booking: 92 percent (Bitkom e. V.) of online bookers drop out when the pictures are missing.
- Every extra form field costs completed bookings - the booking flow needs the details required for the contract and nothing beyond that.
- As soon as guests book bindingly on your site, the German Price Indication Ordinance and the rules of the German Civil Code on the order button apply.
Why so many bookings run through a portal
For many travellers, portals have become the search engine for accommodation. They answer three questions in one go that would otherwise take real effort to settle: is anything free for my dates, what does it cost all in, and did other people have a good stay. Add a payment route the guest already knows and a cancellation rule they do not have to read because it looks the same on every listing. Those three conveniences are the real reason for the market share, not brand recognition. Rebuild them on your own site and you win part of the bookings back - exactly as with online booking on your website, where the same mechanism turns enquiries into fixed appointments.
Availability at a glance
Guests do not want to ask whether that week in August is free, they want to see it. A visible occupancy calendar answers the first question before it is asked.
What other guests experienced
Reviews sit centrally on the portals. On your own site you have to do that trust work deliberately, otherwise the final nudge is missing.
A payment route without questions
Deposit, balance, security payment: naming these up front takes away the worry of committing to something unclear.
Hosts feel the downside only over time. The visibility does not belong to you but to the portal ranking, and that changes without notice. Guest data sits with the intermediary rather than with you, which is why the returning guest comes back through the intermediary once again. And the share deducted per booking also applies to guests who would have found you without any intermediary at all. It is the same dependency pattern that your own website rather than social media alone resolves: a rented channel works well as a feeder and badly as a foundation.
What the figures on holiday accommodation show
Official tourism statistics record 97.0 million (Federal Statistical Office) overnight stays in holiday homes and flats for 2025. However, they only cover establishments with ten beds or more, which leaves out precisely the size range in which most private hosts operate. In parallel, statisticians evaluate data from the large online platforms: 68.3 million (Federal Statistical Office) overnight stays in holiday homes and flats were booked there in 2025, 13.0 percent (Federal Statistical Office) more than the year before. And 94 percent (Federal Statistical Office) of those stays were offered by accommodation providers with fewer than ten beds in total. That is the size of a single holiday flat, a holiday house or an annexe - in other words, exactly the businesses that depend most on the portal and carry the least negotiating weight there.
The market is bigger than official statistics show
The overall market provides a tailwind: German tourism counted 497.5 million (Federal Statistical Office) guest overnight stays in 2025, a record. Domestic guests alone booked 48.5 million (Federal Statistical Office) overnight stays in holiday homes and flats through the platforms, an increase of 15.3 percent (Federal Statistical Office) on the previous year. A good share of demand therefore comes from nearby, and regional visibility pays off accordingly. It is the same task facing a farm shop website: being found in your own region before the route runs through an intermediary.
What your own site has to deliver to win direct bookings
A holiday rental website is not a brochure, it is a decision aid. Within a few minutes the guest works out whether the property fits their dates, their budget and their travel party. The order of that check is remarkably stable, and the surveys confirm it: 92 percent (Bitkom e. V.) of those who book holiday accommodation online say they will not book an offer without convincing photos of the property. For roughly two thirds, 68 percent (Bitkom e. V.) to be precise, reviews from other travellers are decisive when booking. Leave those two building blocks off your own site and you send the guest back to the portal, where both are in place.
Photos that explain the property
Every room once in full, plus bathroom, kitchen, outdoor space and the view from the window. Tidy, in daylight, without the wide-angle distortion that leads to disappointment on arrival.
An occupancy calendar instead of an enquiry
A visible calendar saves you half your emails. It does not have to accept bookings, but it has to be right - an outdated calendar costs more trust than it saves work.
Total price with every item
Final cleaning, tourist tax, bed linen, pets: everything that ends up on the invoice belongs next to the nightly rate. On the starter website that is one well-built table.
Location, arrival, parking
Distance to the beach, to the village, to the station, in minutes rather than in superlatives. Plus the parking situation and directions for guests arriving for the first time.
House rules before the booking
Arrival times, key handover, smoking, pets, parties: what you say up front sets the expectation. What you leave out you will settle later in a dispute.
Availability with a stated response time
A line such as 'we usually answer enquiries the same day' replaces the reassurance the guest otherwise draws from the portal process.
Reviews belong on your own site
From the enquiry form to a binding booking
Between 'write to us' and 'book now, payment required' there are several stages of build-out, and the smallest one already works. What matters is keeping the flow short. Research into checkout flows in online retail shows how strongly the number of fields matters: the average checkout contained 11.3 form fields (Baymard Institute) in 2024, while most providers would manage with 8 form fields (Baymard Institute). Those figures come from online retail rather than from holiday lettings, but the mechanism is the same: any field not needed for the contract is an extra hurdle. How to shorten forms without losing the details you need is shown in the article on the contact form with fewer fields.
- Dates: arrival and departure as date fields, pre-filled from the calendar entry the guest clicked
- Travel party: number of adults and children, because price and bed allocation depend on it
- Name and email address: the minimum for a reliable confirmation
- Phone number: mark it optional, because many guests hand it over only after you have said yes
- Postal address: ask for it once an invoice or a rental agreement is actually being drawn up
- Request or remark: one free field catches the special cases no form can anticipate
- Consent to house rules and cancellation terms: a checkbox with a link to the full text
- Total price in the summary: visible before the guest presses the button
A long flow costs bookings
Credibility of presentation matters just as much. 78 percent (Bitkom e. V.) of online bookers read reviews with caution because they suspect fakes. That scepticism extends to overly perfect images as well. So show the property as a guest will find it, mention the building site next door if there is one, and work with your own photographs rather than bought-in mood shots. Which rights attach to which image, and how to recognise a clean licence, is covered in using website images legally.
The real gain of a direct booking comes after the stay. You hold the guest's email address, their travel period and the information about who they travelled with. That lets you write a short, personal message the following year to bring the returning guest back without paying an intermediary again. Keep that guest list yourself, obtain written consent for marketing contact, and separate booking data cleanly from promotional contact.
Legal side: what a booking page must state
As soon as a guest books bindingly on your site, you are concluding a contract in electronic commerce. Three requirements are immediately visible. First the price: under Section 3 (1) (German Price Indication Ordinance) the total price has to be stated, and where a price is broken down, the total price has to be highlighted. Final cleaning and tourist tax may not appear only in the last step. Second the button: under Section 312j (3) (German Civil Code) it has to be labelled legibly with nothing other than the words 'order with obligation to pay' or a correspondingly unambiguous formulation. Third the provider: a legal notice and a privacy notice have to be reachable from every subpage, as set out in the article on imprint requirements.
| Common on host websites | Better on your own booking page | Why it makes the difference |
|---|---|---|
| 'Price on request' | Nightly rate, final cleaning, tourist tax and the total for the chosen dates | The guest can do the maths without writing - and the Price Indication Ordinance requires the total price anyway |
| A button labelled 'Send' | A button labelled 'book with obligation to pay' | The German Civil Code prescribes an unambiguous label, otherwise the contract does not come about |
| 'Cancellation by arrangement' | Fixed deadlines with percentages and a worked example | Clear rules prevent disputes and spare you negotiating each case individually |
| A calendar as an image file | A maintained calendar showing the date it was last updated | A visibly current status is credible, a frozen calendar costs trust |
| A contact form without confirmation | An automatic acknowledgement with a summary | The guest knows the enquiry arrived, and you have the transaction on record |
One special case concerns the right of withdrawal. For contracts on accommodation for purposes other than residential use, Section 312g (2) no. 9 (German Civil Code) provides that there is no right of withdrawal where the contract specifies a particular date or period. That is precisely the situation with a holiday flat. So you do not need withdrawal instructions, but you do need comprehensible cancellation terms, because without a right of withdrawal the contractual arrangement is the only thing both sides can rely on. And on price you are freer than many assume: under Article 5 (3) (Digital Markets Act) designated gatekeepers may not prevent business users from offering the same services through their own direct sales channels at different prices or conditions. The German Federal Cartel Office had already prohibited best-price clauses (German Federal Cartel Office) that secured portals the lowest price and the highest availability. How to present prices so that they convince rather than deter is covered in showing prices on your website.
Your own booking page does not have to beat the portal. It only has to be the more convenient route for the guests who have already found you.
Running the portal and your own site side by side
In practice hardly any host drops the portal overnight, and that does not have to be the goal. A division of labour makes sense: the portal brings the guests you do not know yet, your own site keeps the guests who have stayed before and catches everyone who types your name into a search. If you host international guests, settle the language question - foreign guests accounted for 16.8 percent (Federal Statistical Office) of all guests in 2025. Whether a second language version is worth it can be decided from your own occupancy figures; the trade-off is set out under multilingual website.
- Declare one calendar the leading source and align all others with it so that no double booking occurs.
- Offer the same total price or a better one on your own site, so the direct route is visibly worthwhile for the guest.
- Name your own address in the booking confirmation and in the welcome folder, so the guest finds it next time.
- Ask for feedback after departure and show it on your own site with the guest's consent.
- Evaluate occupancy by channel: how many nights came in directly, how many through the intermediary, how the ratio shifted.
- Only consider reducing your portal presence once the direct channel has carried a full season.
Registration numbers from May 2026
How we build your holiday rental website
A single holiday flat does not need a large booking platform. Five well-built pages, a maintained calendar and a short enquiry flow cover the requirement. That matches the PLUS package (up to 5 pages) at a fixed price of 490 euros, or a website subscription for 119 euros a month with a 24-month minimum term plus a 90-euro setup fee. What is included at which level is set out under packages. And since the flat is being let, the cost of the website is usually a business expense - how that works in the books is explained in writing off website costs. Prices as of September 2026.
- First conversation: we clarify location, fittings, season, price structure and whether the goal is an enquiry or a binding booking.
- Structure: home, the property, prices and availability, the area, enquiry - a single property rarely needs more pages than that.
- Copy and images: we write the description from your details and sort your photographs; the price structure is set out cleanly along the lines of the pricing overview.
- Booking flow: calendar, summary with the total price, a correctly labelled button, automatic acknowledgement.
- Legal texts: legal notice, privacy notice, cancellation terms and house rules as separate, linkable pages.
- Handover: you receive an account that lets you change prices, occupancy and copy yourself within minutes.
An honest assessment
Sources and Studies
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