Holiday rental · Direct booking · Costa Blanca
Direct bookings instead of platform dependency
Your property sells on a feeling: the terrace in the evening, the sea a few minutes away on foot, the place guests come back to. Your own booking website shows exactly that and lets guests book directly with you. Airbnb and Booking.com take 15 to 20 % of every reservation. Your own site pays for itself after a handful of direct bookings and makes you independent of rules that can change at any time.
Get a free website reviewA direct-booking website for holiday rentals on the Costa Blanca lets guests book with you without Airbnb or Booking.com and saves the 15 to 20 % platform commission on every reservation. The province of Alicante recorded 17.3 million platform-booked nights in 2025, the third highest of any EU region, with almost 70 % of them from guests travelling from abroad. I build it for a fixed price from 490 €, multilingual for international guests, with an enquiry or booking function, legal pages and fast loading on mobile. Based in Dénia, delivery from a few days.
Alicante is the EU's third-largest platform market
In 2025, guests booked 17.3 million nights in the province of Alicante through Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia. That puts Alicante third across the entire EU, behind Málaga and Rome and ahead of Paris and Barcelona. 11.9 million of those nights came from guests travelling from abroad, close to 70 percent. Compared with 2019 the volume has almost doubled.
Two things follow from that for your rental. The demand is there, and most of it comes from international guests who know nothing about you before they book except what a platform shows them. And most of those nights run through channels that take a commission on every booking and keep the guest relationship afterwards. Direct booking on this coast is not a side note, it is a margin question.
Source: Eurostat, experimental statistics on short-stay accommodation booked via online platforms (dataset tour_ce_oan3), as of July 2026. No data is available for the United Kingdom.
What Airbnb does not tell you
The platform fees are one thing. The rules are another. Since 2024 the Costa Blanca has had some of the strictest short-term rental restrictions in Spain. Airbnb and Booking can freeze accounts, enforce rule changes or reduce your visibility through their algorithm. Anyone relying exclusively on platforms is exposed to that.
Your own website is not only cheaper per booking, it is also a stable asset. Your guests can contact you directly, book directly and recommend you directly. The algorithm gets no say.
What is the commission really costing you?
At 18 % commission you pay 216 € per month to the platform.
Your own booking site costs 490 € once. At this rate you would have paid that in about 2 months of commission alone.
18 % is a realistic midpoint between Airbnb (around 15 %) and Booking.com (up to 20 %). Your own booking, no commission, ever.
Leave Airbnb? That is not the point.
Platforms bring reach. Thousands of people search there every day for a place to stay on the Costa Blanca, and giving up that visibility would be a mistake in most cases. The question is not whether you use Airbnb and Booking. The question is whether you exist only there.
Your own website does what platforms cannot: it makes your property recognisable, builds trust, and gives returning guests and personal recommendations a way to book directly with you, without commission. Independence comes from that combination, not from abandoning platforms.
What a good direct-booking website needs
- Several languages, English, German and Spanish depending on your guests
- A direct booking form or calendar link, no detours through third parties
- Real photos and clear prices, seasonal rates, minimum stay, cancellation terms
- Location and surroundings, what makes your spot interesting for guests?
- Schema markup for rental listings, machine-readable for Google and AI search
- Aviso Legal, privacy and cookies, the mandatory Spanish pages, correct and in Spanish
A digital guest guide turns a direct booking into a returning guest:
Digital guest guide →Are you losing direct bookings?
I look at your current website and tell you what guests see, and what stops them booking directly with you. Free, with no sales call afterwards.