What Booking.com and Airbnb take from a host in a year

Until this autumn, a lot of European hosts thought of Airbnb as the cheap platform. You paid about 3%, the guest paid the rest. That arrangement is over. Hosts in Germany and the UK moved to a single host fee of 15.5% in June 2026, and 13 October 2026 was the deadline for the rest of the EEA and Switzerland. The fee is charged on the nightly price plus the cleaning and other fees you set, and according to Smoobu there is no way back to the old split.

So Airbnb now costs a host roughly what Booking.com does. We wanted to see what that means over a year for an ordinary flat, and then do the less comfortable sum as well: how much a direct booking website really saves, once you count its own costs.

Booking.com, with the extras

Guesty puts Booking's average commission at around 15%, with a real range of 10% to 25% depending on market and property type. Most hosts then switch on things that push it up. Preferred Partner status adds a couple of points. Genius means giving members a discount of 10 to 20%, which comes out of your price. Payments by Booking.com adds a processing fee, which Booking says is generally 2% to 3%. Commission is charged on everything the guest pays, cleaning fee included. HolidayFox, which sells a direct booking tool and so has a horse in this race, estimates the all-in figure at 17% to 22% for most owners.

One flat, one year

Our example: a one-bedroom at an average of €110 a night, booked 180 nights a year, guests staying four nights on average. That is €19,800 in bookings from about 45 stays.

The Stripe line uses its standard rate for European cards, 1.5% plus 25 cents per payment. UK cards cost 2.5% and other international cards 3.15%, plus a conversion fee when the currency changes, so add a little if your guests come from far away. It is still a different order of magnitude.

Nobody books 100% direct

That chart is the one you will see on every direct-booking sales page, and on its own it is misleading. Your first-time guests find you on Booking and Airbnb. That is what the commission pays for, and it is a real service. A website catches a share: returning guests, people who liked your listing and googled the name, friends of people who stayed last year, people who saw your Instagram.

So the question that matters is what you save at a realistic direct share, after card fees and after any software you pay for. Put your own numbers in:

Two things the calculator makes obvious. With one flat and only a small share of direct bookings, a paid channel manager eats most of the saving, so the free iCal sync is the better setup; here is how it works, including the one gap you should know about. And the saving grows with the share, so a fixed software cost hurts at ten percent direct and barely registers at forty.

Getting guests to book direct

The hosts who do well at this make sure their site is the first result when someone googles the property's name, because that is exactly what people do after finding you on a platform. More and more, people also skip the search results and ask an AI: ChatGPT, Perplexity or the AI answers at the top of Google, with a question like "a quiet flat near the beach with parking and good Wi-Fi". Those tools can only recommend what they can read. A site that says in plain text where the place is, what it has, who it suits and what it costs, rather than hiding all of it in photos, gives them something to quote, and that quote leads to you instead of to a platform. We wrote a whole post on how that works. They give a small reason to book direct, a lower price or a late checkout, which is easy when you are not paying 15%, and legal in the EU since Booking had to drop its parity clauses in 2024. They let guests check dates and pay on the spot, because "send us a message and we'll get back to you" loses against one tap on Airbnb; we wrote about those last thirty seconds here. And they keep in touch with past guests where the platform's rules and the GDPR allow, because repeat guests are where the saving really adds up. If those guests come from three countries, the site needs to speak their languages too, and that is cheaper than it used to be.