Why direct
Every booking through a marketplace costs you the commission and the guest.
Booking.com and Airbnb take around 15% and keep the relationship. Steward is a flat fee, the guest books on your own site, and their second stay is free forever.
Keep the listings, own the guest
Stay on Booking.com. Stop being owned by it.
Steward connects to the channels you already use, keeps one calendar honest, and turns every marketplace guest into a record you can email next year.
The OTA tax
Drag the slider. Watch the bars.
Assumes a 15% marketplace commission, which is typical for Booking.com and Airbnb host fees combined with payment processing. Steward’s Fixed plan shown; ad spend and the website build are separate on both sides of the comparison.
Four reasons
What a marketplace can’t do for an estate.
Marketplaces sell rooms. You sell the house.
An exclusive-use estate is a wedding, a retreat, a weekend for thirty. Booking.com has no field for that. Its listing turns the estate into a set of rooms with a price per night and strips out everything that makes it worth €27k rather than €270.
The commission is the smaller cost.
Fifteen percent hurts. Losing the guest hurts more. The marketplace owns the email address, the review, the repeat booking and the referral. On your own site, the second stay costs you nothing.
You can't market what you don't own.
Google Ads, SEO, a press release, a partnership with a DMC: every one of them needs a page you control and a system that records who came from where. Marketplace traffic is untraceable and un-nurturable.
But keep the listings.
Airbnb and Booking.com still fill quiet weeks. Steward keeps them connected, keeps the calendar honest and turns every marketplace guest into a record you can email next year.
The short version
Booking.com sells rooms and keeps the guest. Your estate sells the house. Sell it yourself.
See what direct is worth on your estate.
Bring last year's marketplace statement. We'll show you the same year on Steward.