The owner booking fee that we charge serves to cover the costs associated with maintaining and optimizing your property listings and generating bookings. It’s important to clarify these reasons to our property owners so they understand the rationale behind the fee. Here’s a breakdown of the key reasons why we charge an owner booking fee.

1. Software Costs: We use specialized software to manage your property listings across multiple channels and to optimize rates and occupancy. This software incurs a cost, which we absorb rather than passing it on to the property owners. This software enables us to effectively manage rates, availability, and other factors to maximize bookings and revenue.
2. Review Aggregators: We invest in review aggregator tools to collect and showcase reviews from various channels on our website. When property owners make bookings, we miss out on the opportunity to gather reviews from these guests, which can affect our ability to attract more bookings through positive feedback and higher rankings.
3. Marketing Tools: We also use paid tools for email, social media and user-generated content collection to enhance our marketing efforts. When owners book their own dates, we are unable to use these tools to the fullest extent, which can then require additional effort to generate bookings compared to when guests book.
4. Additional Work: Even when property owners make bookings, we still need to coordinate with cleaners and manage other operational aspects. This work includes advising cleaners, processing linen invoices, and other related tasks. This means we are not just losing potential guest revenue but also still have tasks to manage.
5. Revenue Loss: When property owners book their own dates, we miss out on potential revenue that we would earn from guest bookings. The owner booking fee is designed to compensate for this lost revenue to some extent.
6. Expertise and Services: Our expertise and the services we provide, including managing listings, coordinating with cleaners, and optimizing rates, contribute to the overall value we offer to property owners. The owner booking fee represents a way to compensate for the work and expertise we provide.
7. Software Connections: The fee also contributes to covering the costs of maintaining connections to various software solutions that enable our operations to run smoothly and efficiently.

By explaining these reasons we hope that property owners can understand that the owner booking fee is not just an additional charge, but a way to support the comprehensive services we offer to maximize their bookings and revenue while covering the costs associated with those efforts.