If you manage vacation rentals, you already know every booking channel there is. Except one.
Travel advisors book billions of dollars in travel every year. Hotels, cruises, tours, resorts. Their clients tell them where they want to go, and the advisor handles the rest. And more and more of those clients are asking for vacation rentals.
Here’s the problem: advisors have never had a good way to book them. The big listing sites don’t pay advisors a commission, and they don’t let advisors talk to the person behind the listing. So a whole channel of travel professionals, each with their own book of clients, has been locked out of vacation rentals.
That’s the channel Travina opens up. Here’s how it actually works, start to finish.
What a travel advisor booking looks like
An advisor finds your property on Travina. If you’ve added your direct booking link to your listing, they can book right then and there, through your own direct booking site, the same way any direct booking works today. If they have questions first, they contact you directly, a real person reaching a real person, no platform inbox in between. Either way, the booking lands in your direct channel.
Travina isn’t in the middle of any of it. We’re not a booking site. We don’t process the payment, we don’t hold funds, and we don’t touch the reservation. We connect you with the advisor, and the two of you take it from there.
The guest who shows up is the advisor’s client. The advisor knows them, matched them to your property, and briefed them before arrival.
What you need to have in place
One thing: a way to take a direct booking
That means being able to accept payment and optionally send your rental agreement. If you use Hospitable Direct or any other direct booking site, you already have this, and adding that link to your Travina listing means advisors can book without waiting on a reply. If you don’t have a booking site, a payment link and a standard rental agreement is enough to start. Nothing about your existing channels changes.
Worth adding either way: your calendar
Hospitable users get this automatically with the sync. Everyone else can add an iCal link to their Travina listing, the same calendar feed your other channels already use, so advisors see your real availability before they book or reach out. It saves you the emails about dates that were never open.
How your listings get on Travina
If you use Hospitable, connect your account from your Travina dashboard and your listings sync automatically. Photos, descriptions, details, availability, all of it. The only manual part is a handful of Travina-specific fields that don’t exist on other platforms, the details advisors search by when matching properties to clients. Complete listings show up in more advisor searches, so those fields are worth the few minutes they take.
How the money works
There are three pieces, and it’s worth being clear about each one because this is where most of the confusion lives.
- The Travina platform fee. 3% of the rental rate, charged only on completed stays. There’s no subscription, no listing fee, and no cost to having your properties on the platform. If a booking cancels you owe nothing, and if nobody books at all you owe nothing. Rental rate means the nightly rate for the dates booked, and nothing else. Cleaning fees, pet fees, extra guest fees, taxes, and security deposits are all excluded. You keep a card on file and we charge it automatically seven days after checkout. Nothing to invoice, nothing to remember.
- The advisor’s commission. You set the rate yourself, and it’s displayed on your listing so advisors know it before they ever reach out. The commission applies to base price only. Cleaning fees and taxes are excluded. And it’s only owed on completed stays: if the reservation cancels, no commission is due. After checkout, you pay the advisor directly, by bank transfer, PayPal, or whatever method they prefer, any time within 45 days.
- Your direct booking costs. Whatever your direct booking platform already charges per booking, that stays exactly as it is. Nothing changes from today.
Both rates run on the same number, so there’s only one figure to keep track of. The fees you charge guests are yours to keep in full.
Run your own numbers
The easiest way to take the mystery out of a commission is to see it in dollars. Enter your average nightly rate and cleaning fee, set a commission rate, and add whatever your direct booking platform charges. The calculator shows what a 7-night advisor booking costs you and what you keep.
What would an advisor booking actually cost?
Based on a 7-night stay at your average nightly rate.
The Travina platform fee and the advisor commission both apply to the rental rate, which is the nightly rate for the dates booked. Cleaning fees, other guest fees, taxes, and security deposits are excluded. Both are owed only on completed stays, and a canceled reservation costs you nothing. Travina bills the platform fee seven days after checkout. Commission is paid by you directly to the advisor or their agency within 45 days of checkout.
Two things worth noticing as you move the slider.
- The first is that nothing here is paid up front. There’s no subscription, no ad spend, and no cost to being visible to advisors. The 3% and the commission both start at zero and stay there until a guest actually checks out. If the channel doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t cost you.
- The second is that the number you’re looking at is the cost of a week you may not have filled otherwise. And if the advisor rebooks that client next year, the same relationship fills another one.
There’s no single right commission rate. Most of our property managers start around 10%, and you can change yours at any time. Pick a number that feels sustainable, put it on your listing, and let the bookings tell you if it’s working.
One note for anyone comparing this to a listing site booking:
the advisor commission takes the place of the fee you’d pay to the listing site, whether they call it a booking fee, service fee, or host fee. It isn’t both.
The opportunity, in numbers
Both sides of this channel are growing, and the gap between them is the opportunity.
Vacation rentals are booming
The global market reached roughly $102 billion in 2025 and is projected to keep climbing into the 2030s, with the US market at around $21 billion in 2025. And nearly all of that demand flows through a handful of consumer platforms: the big three alone held about 71% of the global short-term rental market in 2024, which means almost none of it has ever flowed through travel advisors.
Meanwhile, the advisor channel is surging
US travel agency gross bookings jumped 28% to $109.7 billion in 2023, with leisure travel making up 65% of agency sales, and Phocuswright projects agencies will represent about a quarter of the entire US travel market by 2027. At the high end it’s even sharper: Virtuoso, the luxury advisor network, reported hotel sales up more than 25% in the first half of 2025, at an average daily rate of $1,540 in 2024.
Put those together: travelers are spending more on vacation rentals than ever, advisors are booking more travel than ever, and the pipe connecting the two has never existed. That’s the channel you’d be early to.
Why property managers use the channel
The real answer: it’s an entire market you’ve never had access to
Travel advisors book vacations for clients every day, and until now, none of that demand could reach your properties. There was no way for an advisor to find you, no commission when they booked you, and no path for their clients to become your guests. This channel opens that up. And it’s a market moving in the right direction: more travelers are turning to advisors to plan their trips, which means the pool of clients advisors could send your way keeps growing.
There’s a quality difference too
An advisor booking arrives with a professional relationship attached. Someone vouched for the guest, matched them to your home, and set their expectations before they arrived. And because advisors build their business on repeat clients, one good stay tends to come back to you through the same advisor, year after year.
It’s also a channel where you own the relationship
The booking runs through your direct setup, the guest data is yours, and the advisor connection persists after checkout. You’re not renting access to your own guests.
The Travina Pledge
And every property manager and advisor on Travina is individually vetted and signs the Travina Pledge, our member code of conduct. Advisors commit to professional communication and accurate expectations. You commit to accurate listings and paying commissions on time. It keeps the channel worth being in for everyone.
Getting started
There’s nothing to pay to get started. Apply, get approved, and either connect Hospitable or send us your listing links and we’ll set them up for you. Applying takes about two minutes.
Want the broader picture first? See how Travina works for property managers, browse the FAQ, or read our feature in Travel Weekly.
Questions? Email support@travina.co. It comes straight to the founders.
Frequently Asked Questions
Whatever you decide. You set your own rate on your own listings, and you can set different rates on different properties. Standard commission rate is around 10%.
No. If you have Hospitable, you can connect your account and your listings sync automatically, including availability. If you don’t use Hospitable then you can add your property information to Travina and add an iCal link to show availability.
If you are on Hospitable, connecting your account and adding the Travina-specific information to your listings is a short sitting. If you don’t use Hospitable, you should dedicate about 15-20 minutes to manually add each property.
