My vacation rentals are listed on Airbnb and VRBO/Homeaway exclusively. My places are very busy and my monthly income is greater than 3x what I'd get if they were traditional long-term rentals. In the winter months it does slow down a bit but I've rented a couple of them long-term through those two sites and it still works out great.
@James Carlson, I actually got 1 traveling nurse through AirBnB and the other through VRBO. I've been leery of Craigslist because of concerns about fraud, but I could dip my toe in by linking to AirBnB from the Craigslist posting.
I know this thread is old but I found it very interesting and would like to add to it.
A lot of people mentions AirBnB which I have been using for around 5 years now and it works OK, I still get quite few bookings from it, sometimes even long term bookings like 3 - 8 months in length at short term prices.
Recently I have discovered booking.com which works very well for me. Their commission is higher than AirBnB and the landlord pays full commission (AirBnB charges both host and guest) but they mostly list hotels and motels so your rental looks very cheap comparing to the competition even though you are charging 3 or 4 times long term rent. Right now I am getting more bookings from booking.com then from AirBnB.
Obviously every location is different, I am within 5 minutes walk to University so I get a lot of people coming for research and conferences as well as some students (I used to do student rentals before).
If you want to try booking.com use this link https://join.booking.com/r/d/83ca3038?lang=en-us If you use the link I would get few commission free rentals and you will get 5 commission free rentals as well.
I am looking at Booking.com and notice that this site does the “instant” booking option, and so does VRBO, where my first listing is posted. How do you de-conflict the calendars?
The best thing to do, if you are looking to advertise your own property to move away from Airbnb/VRBO type 3rd party platforms and more heavily rely on Direct Bookings, I would recommend utilizing Airbnb + Botbnb.io + FB Ads + Lodgify together.
Airbnb will bring you leads -----> Botbnb will collect the Guest Data for you -----> You can input that data to run targeted FB Ads and run an email newsletter that goes out to all of the emails Botbnb collects for you -----> This advertising all directs your customers to your Lodgify page for them to book with you directly. Instead of going through Airbnb.
Social media is so powerful right now. I would use Instagram and Facebook where I'll upload a mixture of pics of my place and videos about all the local attractions.