How to improve booking performance for your vacation rental

A seamless booking experience is key to delivering a positive guest experience, boosting your acceptance rate, and keeping guests satisfied. Our Instant Booking tool simplifies the booking experience for both hosts and guests, helping to improve your property’s rank in search results and increase booking volume — all while allowing you to maintain control.

Read on to learn more about Instant Booking and how you can use it to save time, boost your property listing’s search performance, and drive bookings.

Instant Booking also helps boost your acceptance rate — or how frequently you accept bookings compared to how often you decline — which is one of the most important factors that influences your property’s visibility in the search results. With Instant Booking enabled, all booking requests are automatically accepted, thereby boosting your acceptance rate and improving your property’s search performance.

This feature also gives you more potential traffic by appearing on your listings across all our travel brands at no extra cost. Travelers can select an Instant Booking filter to narrow their search.

Additionally, with this increase to your search performance and improved visibility, guests are more likely to book your property. On average, partners who use Instant Booking see nearly 35% higher conversation rates and 25% more net revenue than those who don’t.*

Select Instant Booking for any or all of your properties, and also switch back to 24-hour review any time by simply changing your settings.

Even with Instant Booking enabled, you are always in control: before booking, all travelers must agree to the house rules, owner cancellation policy, damage policy, and rental agreement you’ve set.

If a traveler reserves through Instant Booking but doesn’t meet your stated house rules, you can cancel at the time of booking without penalty by requesting a cancellation waiver. That said, it’s important to establish your house rules and make them clear to not only confirm that guests understand what’s allowed, but also ensure you have a positive and seamless experience with Instant Booking. Visit the help center to learn more about house rules.

For owners who list across multiple platforms, calendar syncing is critical for preventing double bookings. With this tool, you can sync your calendar across multiple platforms such as Google Calendar and Apple Calendar. You can also check your booking window to update how close or far out guests can book their stay and import any blocks on your calendar when your listing will be unavailable to travelers. All of these simple steps pay off: partners who enable Instant Booking and sync calendars see 60% more bookings.*

Review this one-pager to learn how to keep your calendars synced.

Learn how to sync

If you choose not to use Instant Booking, you can opt for a 24-hour review, which gives you more time to consider booking requests but still requires you to respond to travelers within 24 hours. It’s worth noting, however, that hosts who respond to booking inquiries within three hours are 2.5 times more likely to have more inquiries convert into bookings than owners who wait 24 hours or more.**

With Instant Booking, you can deliver faster and immediate responses, as well as an overall better booking experience that benefits both you and your guests. Turn on Instant Booking today to save time for you and your guests, improve your search performance, and increase bookings.