28. June 2026

Don't Put All Your Bookings in One Basket: Our 2026 Mid-Year STR Review

It's hard to believe that we're already halfway through 2026. Wow - time flies when you're running a short-term vacation rental business. It's also time to look at how we're doing in our business. We run a data-driven business, when it comes to the nuts and bolts, or the tracks that our business runs on. On the guest side of things, we focus on hospitality and always use our guests' experiences to make decisions that impact their guest journey, but today I want to take a moment to look back.

The only constant in your STR business is that things change. Quickly. And if you're not constantly finetuning your business process, those changes will catch you off guard; so it's important to see how the business is doing compared to last quarter, but that's more of a tactical exercise since Q1 includes a good chunk of our high season, and Q2 goes into the summer, where things slow down. So it's just as important to look at the first half of the year and compare it with the same period last year.

The big picture

First of all, let's look at the big picture: gross revenue is up almost 40% compared to H1 of 2025, so we're on track for a good year.

But there are some interesting trends when we look at this year: Q1 of '26 was up over half, and Q2 was up almost one quarter. Although we keep track of global events and trends, we don't let them define us. We would rather adapt our business strategy to them, so that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter to us why demand went up or down; we adjust our approach to capture it.

The big difference

One major difference we've noticed is that the source of our bookings has changed. In 2024, revenue from Airbnb guests accounted for 90% of our total. In 2026, it's barely half. This year, VRBO guests make up about a third, and Booking.com contributed over 20% of all nights booked.

The secret to our growth

You can see the change in the channels our guests find our listings on, as well as the growth of our business, by the circle's height.

Action Items

How are we using this data? We continue to build out our channel mix, and although we've removed direct bookings from the graphs for clarity, we're focusing on email, social media, and ad campaigns to drive more guests to our direct-booking website.

When we decided to run a short-term rental business in 2024 and shift from being an Airbnb host with 100% of our bookings in H1 of 2024 coming from that one, single channel, we planned to reduce our dependence on any one channel. And although this year's Airbnb revenue is up 50% from 2024, our other channels are on track to bring in more than double what our business earned in that first year.

What changes are you making to your short-term vacation rental business, and what data are you studying?