Renting out a holiday home

A holiday home only earns money when it is booked — and it is only booked when it is found and trusted. Between those two points lies everything that decides your season: how your listing looks, where it appears, and how quickly a stranger feels they can picture themselves in your rooms. This guide walks through it in the order that actually matters.

1. Be found: the platforms, honestly assessed

Airbnb, Booking.com and the regional portals bring you reach you could never buy on your own. That reach has a price: commission on every booking, plus the fact that the guest belongs to the platform, not to you. The sensible approach is not to reject them — it is to use them as a shop window while quietly building something of your own alongside.

Practically: keep your calendar accurate, answer quickly, and keep the listing complete. Platforms reward responsiveness with visibility, and an incomplete listing loses ranking before a single guest has seen it.

2. Be believed: the first three seconds

Guests scroll. Your cover image gets a glance, the next two images decide whether they keep looking. So the first three pictures should not be your three prettiest details — they should answer the three silent questions: What is this place? Where am I? Would I feel comfortable here? Living area with light, the view or the exterior, then one bedroom.

Everything after that works best in the order of an actual visit: arriving, living, cooking, sleeping, bathroom, outdoors. A guest who can follow a route through your images forms a mental picture — and a mental picture is what gets booked.

3. Keep the margin: direct bookings

Every returning guest who books through a platform costs you commission for a relationship you already built yourself. A single simple page with your own booking enquiry form, linked in your guest communication and after check-out, changes that. You do not need a shop system — you need one page that looks as good as your listing and a reason for guests to remember it.

This is also where a film pays for itself fastest: on your own site it is the difference between a page that lists rooms and a page that shows a home.

4. Stand out: what almost nobody is doing yet

Photos are the standard — every listing has them. That is exactly why they no longer differentiate. What still does, in the summer of 2026, is moving image: a short cinematic tour that carries a guest through the property in thirty seconds. Hotels have done this for years. For a private holiday home it was always disproportionate — a shooting day with a camera crew costs several times a week's booking.

EstateMotion closes that gap: from 5–20 photos you already have we create a cinematic tour through your property — produced with AI, hand-curated in Switzerland, delivered within 48 hours, from CHF 299. No shooting date, no crew, no strangers in your home. You use the result wherever guests meet you: in your guest communication, on your own website, as a reel on Instagram.

Every order includes one free revision, and a money-back guarantee if you are not happy — details under Service & guarantee.

Frequently asked questions

What matters most when renting out a holiday home?
Visibility and trust. Your listing has to be found, and within seconds it has to feel credible — that is decided by the cover image, the first three photos and clear, honest information about location and equipment.

Should I rely only on Airbnb and Booking.com?
The platforms bring reach, but they charge commission on every booking and own the guest relationship. A simple website of your own with the same material lets returning guests book directly — that is where your margin is.

How do I make my listing stand out from similar properties?
Show what a photo cannot: how the rooms connect and how the stay feels. A short cinematic tour does that in 30 seconds — and almost no private host in Europe is doing it yet.