The vacation rental industry talks a lot about platform dependency. What it talks about less is the data behind it – the actual scale of how many operators are leaving money on the table by listing on a single channel, and why the gap between knowing you should diversify and actually doing it remains so wide.
I had a conversation recently on The Check-In with Jamie Lane, Chief Economist at AirDNA, and Pierre-Camille Hamana, founder and CEO of Hospitable, that put some hard numbers behind this. Jamie studies short-term rental data across 12 million unique properties. He also runs his own rental in the Georgia mountains.
PC brings the operator’s view — he’s built one of the leading property management platforms in the industry and has spent years watching hosts make this decision. That combination of industry-wide data and ground-level product experience makes what they shared difficult to argue with.
The numbers most hosts haven’t seen
The data came out of an unexpected natural experiment. When Airbnb moved PMS-connected listings to a host-only fee structure, AirDNA could suddenly identify, for the first time at scale, which listings were and weren’t connected to a property management system.
The results were striking. In the US, 64% of listings were not connected to a PMS. And 48% were listed on a single channel only.
“It was honestly super surprising to me to see such a high percentage… the vast majority of listings in the US – and this held when we pulled the data for the UK and the rest of Europe – there are a large number of hosts leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.”
Jamie’s own property makes the point concretely. He’d assumed the secondary channels in his North Georgia market would deliver minimal incremental revenue. The reality was different. “Over half my revenue has been generated by Vrbo sitting here at the beginning of 2026… I’d be out probably half my revenue if I wasn’t on multiple channels.”
The Germany data point is worth noting too. Over 30% of listings in Germany aren’t on Airbnb at all – Booking.com dominates there. It’s a reminder that channel performance is market-specific, and assumptions about which platforms matter in your area may not hold up when you actually test them.
Why hosts stay single-channel – and why that’s understandable
Before getting to the solution, it’s worth taking the hesitation seriously. There are legitimate reasons why hosts don’t diversify.
In some urban markets, particularly in the US, the secondary channels genuinely haven’t penetrated booking behaviour enough to make a material difference. Jamie acknowledged this directly. And for operators managing one or two properties without a tech stack, adding channels without the right infrastructure doesn’t just create opportunity – it creates operational complexity that can quickly become unmanageable.
PC put his finger on something important here. The fear around connecting to a PMS isn’t irrational – it comes from a history of real friction. Lost reviews, forced instant booking, features that stopped working during migration. For hosts who’ve been in the industry long enough to remember those experiences, the anxiety makes sense even if the current reality is different.
“There is an insane amount of anxiety over the change that is perceived a PMS will bring,” he said. “I think there is a lot of fear and distrust of the software industry because it takes one person to have one bad experience with one software and it gets amplified to oblivion.”
The other barrier is subtler. When you’re already paying OTA commissions and your operation is running, the cost of a PMS feels like money leaving your account rather than money being invested. PC’s framing of this is useful: the real comparison isn’t the monthly PMS fee versus nothing – it’s the PMS fee versus the commissions you continue paying as your only cost of doing business. “When you generate €3,000 a month in bookings, you have €500 going to booking platforms, not €30. You have to be honest about the real numbers.”
What a PMS actually gives you
This is where the conversation got most interesting, because the multi-channel distribution argument, while compelling, actually undersells the case for a PMS.
Jamie made a point I think a lot of operators miss. The platforms are built to make booking easy for guests. They are not built to make hosting easy for operators. Those are different problems, and the gap between them is where a good PMS earns its place.
“I do not think Airbnb is ever going to try to do dynamic AI messaging for guests. They’re never going to try to do integrations with my cleaners to make sure they get the notification as soon as I get a booking. There’s all this functionality around making hosting easy that just the platforms are never going to solve.”
PC frames it as two sequential missions. The first is operational: use a PMS to run your existing business better – automate messaging, manage your cleaning team, handle payments, build repeatable processes. The second, once that foundation is in place, is distribution: expand to new channels without adding proportional operational complexity.
“The core reason why hosts are using a property management software is not in the first instance distribution,” he said. “You need to optimise the operation that you have on the one channel that’s leading the way, and then you get a technological dividend that allows you to invest into the next booking platform.”
This sequencing matters. Operators who jump straight to multi-channel without the operational foundation tend to find that adding channels creates chaos rather than revenue. The PMS is what makes expansion feel manageable rather than overwhelming.
Jamie added a point about correlation that’s easy to overlook. Having a PMS doesn’t directly make your pricing better – but it makes it significantly more likely that you’ll connect a dynamic pricing tool, because the integration is already there. The compounding effect of a well-connected tech stack is where a lot of the real revenue gain comes from.
“Using a revenue management dynamic pricing software is going to increase your revenue anywhere from 10 to 20% depending on your market. Using operational software is going to decrease your expense by a certain amount… all those benefits accumulate, and you’re more likely to do all those things if you’ve got a PMS that integrates it all together.”
The distribution case, made properly
None of this diminishes the multi-channel argument. It just puts it in the right order.
Once your operation is running smoothly on one channel, the case for expanding is straightforward. You’re already paying 15–20% commission on every booking. A second or third channel – managed through a PMS that eliminates double-booking risk and syncs rates automatically – costs you relatively little operationally while opening up demand you’re currently not reaching.
PC puts Booking.com’s global volume at around 80% of Airbnb’s – and actively growing in the US market. Operators who’ve assumed the secondary channels don’t matter in their market may be working from assumptions that are a year or two out of date.
The direct booking channel sits alongside this. Not as a replacement for OTAs – they provide distribution reach that no individual operator can replicate with ad spend – but as the channel you build toward as your guest relationships and brand recognition develop. OTAs are a source of visibility and first-time guests. Your direct channel is where you bring those guests back.
What this means in practice
The operators winning in 2026 aren’t necessarily the ones who figured out a smarter Airbnb strategy. They’re the ones who built infrastructure: a PMS that makes their operation consistent and scalable, a multi-channel presence that captures demand wherever it exists, and the right integrations – pricing tools, communication tools, guest screening and protection – that compound the value of having everything connected.
The operators who’ve diversified can absorb a platform change that would derail a single-channel business entirely. The 48% still on one channel are one policy update, one algorithm change, or one unexpected account suspension away from finding out how much of their business they’d actually built on someone else’s foundation.
Jamie’s closing observation from our conversation is the one I keep coming back to. Even at the professional property manager level – businesses whose primary job is to distribute and market properties – a meaningful percentage are still on one channel or not connected to a PMS. The gap between knowing what good looks like and actually building it is where a lot of value in this industry is still waiting to be captured.
Want to hear the full conversation?
This article is based on an episode of The Check-In podcast, where Leo Walton and Sarah Nan DuPre talk with the people shaping the short-term rental industry.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
