Hosts’ corner · Visibility
The billboard effect: why being on booking platforms also brings you direct bookings
A listing on a booking platform prompts travellers to look you up directly. What the Cornell study found, and how to make the most of it when you rent out a house, an apartment, a cottage or a B&B.
The billboard effect is a phenomenon measured by Cornell University in 2009: when a hotel appears on an online travel agency, bookings on its own website go up. Across the four hotels studied, the increase ranged from 7.5% to 26%, not counting bookings made on the platform. For a host, a listing on a booking platform (Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo…) therefore also works as a shop window. Provided that the traveller who then searches for you by name can actually find you.
You pay a commission on every booking, often around 15%, and it can feel as if you are working for the platform. That is partly true. But the platform also works for you, in a way that is less visible: it shows your house to thousands of travellers, not all of whom will book through it.
Where the term comes from
In 2009, Chris Anderson, a researcher at Cornell’s hotel school, compared bookings at four hotels depending on whether or not they were displayed on Expedia. When they were, bookings made outside Expedia, on the hotel’s website or by phone, rose by 7.5% to 26%. He called this the billboard effect: the listing acts like a billboard by the roadside. Travellers see it, remember the name, then look elsewhere.
Does the effect still exist?
An industry study later claimed the effect had disappeared. Chris Anderson and Saram Han revisited the question with new data and reached the opposite conclusion: being on online travel agencies is still associated with more bookings on the property’s own website, and travellers keep visiting that website before they book. The title of their study sums up the debate: “The Billboard Effect: Still Alive and Well”.
What about a holiday rental?
The studies cover hotels, not holiday rentals. It is reasonable to assume the mechanism is the same, with one caveat: many listings on the platforms have no proper name (“Charming house with pool”). Travellers cannot search for what they cannot name. That is the first lever.
How to make the most of it
- Give your property a name and use it everywhere: in the listing title when the platform allows it, and on photos of the façade.
- Type that name into Google: what does a traveller find? Ideally, a Google Business Profile, your website or a page that presents you and points to you.
- Build a presence independent of the platforms, where travellers can contact you freely.
- Follow the platforms’ rules: the billboard effect works because travellers look you up of their own accord, not because you divert them (see our article on direct bookings).
What Gemlidays does about it
A Gemlidays listing is precisely a page in your name, findable on Google and readable by AI, that sends travellers to your own channels, with no commission on your bookings.