Booking vacation rentals directly with owners to save on additional fees

In my last post, I talked about the merits of booking vacation rentals directly versus via a third party website such as Airbnb or VRBO. I concluded that the listing sites are useful for being able to research what properties are available but pointed out that, once you’ve found a property you like, it can be beneficial to book directly with the owner, assuming you are dealing with a reputable owner, of course. And you can, to some extent, get a good idea on this from the reviews on listing sites. Listings that have a significant number of reviews and consistently score highly are more likely to have reputable owners (or managers/agencies) behind them than those that have very few reviews or inconsistent scores.

Booking directly can save you significant sums. People might not realise this but on a booking totalling a little over £1,000, it’ is very possible that around £200 of this could be made up of additional fees. That’s quite a significant sum that could be put towards other treats whilst you’re on holiday.

But how do you go about contacting an owner directly if all you have is a listing? Read on to learn more…

First, let’s start with what you don’t do. Don’t simply message the owner via the listing site, asking to take the conversation off-site so that you book directly. Third party sites can monitor the messages you send via them and usually restrict the sharing of email addresses, telephone numbers and/or websites, at least until a booking has been made via their platform. They’ll no doubt claim this is to protect guests’ and hosts’ privacy and security, but it’s also because – if you book with them directly – they don’t get their commission. Attempting to flout their rules will likely earn you a slap on the wrist or you could even risk being banned from the site in question.

So how do you go about contacting an owner directly, if that’s what you want to do?

Let’s say you find a property that you really like the look of in the village of “XYZ”. Go to a search engine (or social media) and just do some searches for “XYZ accommodation” or “XYZ apartment” (if it’s an apartment) or “XYZ country house accommodation”, “XYZ riverside holiday home”, etc. etc. You get the idea. Look through the search results and you might just find the direct contact details for the property in question.

Not all listing sites restrict access to the owner’s own contact details. Some sites instead charge owners a listing fee (rather than taking a commission) and don’t restrict the ability to see the owner’s own contact details. Other sites – such as local tourism boards or chambers of commerce websites – might also just provide owner contact details.

Look at the listing for the property a little more closely. There are all sorts of other clues that might help you locate the owner independently. Maybe it’s the owner’s name (often you are only given the first name, but this can still happen in some instances, especially if it’s quite a distinctive name), maybe it’s a photo that allows you to work out what street the property is on, maybe it’s something that’s mentioned in the text. Listings can be full of a surprising number of clues!

As humans, we are inherently lazy. If a listing site asks an owner for copy for their property, the likelihood is that the owner will just use text that they already have, rather than create something new just for that one site. Chances are, they will just copy and paste text from their own website – if they have one – for use on other sites.

This means that you can find a phrase on a listing, copy and paste it into Google search, and put quotation marks around it, to search for that exact phrase. It doesn’t have to be many words, but ideally a short piece of text that’s unique and specific to the property you want to contact directly. You might be surprised how often that exact same text recurs on different websites and you might just find the owner’s own website or a social media page.

When you’re on a listing that you like, you can download an image (or get the URL of an image) by right clicking on it. You can then use this to find where that same image is used on other websites – what is known as reverse image searching. Sites such as TinEye, Google Images/Google Lens and Yandex Images are all worth looking at when it comes to performing reverse image searches.

In the spirit of balance, it is important that I include this final note. When booking directly, you can usually make a saving, and often a significant one, but it is important that you’re aware of the implications. First and foremost, you will not have whatever protections that the third party platform provides. This might include anything from secure payments to dispute resolution in the event of there being a problem with your booking. You’ll also be subject to the owner’s individual cancellation policy rather than that of the platform, which might be different. It’s critical that you conduct due diligence and that any agreements you have are clear. And we strongly recommend that you take out suitable travel and cancellation insurance. However you choose to book, we wish you a wonderful holiday!