Vrbo Alternatives for Listing Your Property

With more than 2 million active listings worldwide, Vrbo is a great platform to list your vacation rental home. However, numerous other OTA websites connect property owners with travelers seeking an alternative to a hotel.

On what other sites should you list to increase your chances of reaching a wider audience and securing more bookings? Read on to learn more about Vrbo alternatives so you can decide which channels make the most sense for your short-term rental business.

Top Vrbo Alternatives: What Sets Them Apart?

If you have just purchased your first short-term rental property, remember that a well-planned online distribution strategy is crucial to making your rental a profitable investment. Offering your property only on Vrbo, you could leave money on the table. To maximize your earnings and build a successful short-term rental business, you should offer your home on several sites like Vrbo.

Managing your listings on many channels won’t be time-consuming if you use short-term rental software like Hospitable. Using our channel manager feature, you’ll instantly sync all calendars with bookings and prices in one centralized dashboard. Our tool will protect you from double bookings, giving you greater peace of mind.

Now, let’s take a look at the top listing sites that are popular among hosts and guests and have millions of active users.

Airbnb

Airbnb is the largest vacation rental listing site, boasting over 7.7 million listings from more than 5 million property owners in over 220 countries worldwide. The platform provides an excellent opportunity for property owners to start a short-term rental business and earn additional income.

Unlike Vrbo, which focuses on entire homes and apartments, Airbnb also allows hosts to list shared spaces, such as private bedrooms within homes or even shared rooms. Hosts can also earn money from listing their Experiences and earn from sharing their skills, expertise, and hobbies. In summer 2025, Airbnb introduced a new feature, Airbnb Services.

Airbnb doesn’t charge property owners for listing their rental spaces. But they take a percentage of the subtotal value of each booking (which is the sum of the nightly fee, cleaning fee, and additional guest fees) as service fees.

Airbnb handles all bookings and payments, and offers top-to-bottom protection for property owners, which is called AirCover for Hosts. It automatically applies to all vacation rentals listed on the platform and includes guest identity verification, reservation screening, $1 million liability insurance, and $3 million damage protection.

Booking.com

With over 500 million monthly visitors, Booking.com is one of the top travel websites for travelers worldwide. The platform is hugely global—it’s available in more than 224 countries and has over 28 million accommodation listings, including vacation homes, hotels, luxury resorts, hostels, and more. It also offers flight bookings, car rentals, attractions, and flight and hotel combination deals.

Booking.com is free to list your property, but charges a 15% commission for each booking, which hosts must pay at the end of each month. The commission for hosts is on par with Airbnb or Vrbo. When a guest makes a reservation, their bookings are instantly confirmed.

If you list your property on Booking.com, it will appear in search results alongside hotels in your local area, allowing you to compete with them for bookings effectively. And since the platform is available in 43 languages, it’s much easier for international guests to book accommodation.

If you already have a Hospitable account but haven’t listed your property on Booking.com yet, you can do it with just a few clicks. Check our help article for more details.

Agoda

Agoda is a global online travel agency operating across over 200 countries and regions, with a strong presence in the Asia-Pacific markets. As part of Booking Holdings, Agoda operates independently and has more than two million accommodation listings, including hotels and private vacation rental properties.

Hosts can list entire properties for free through the Agoda Homes platform and reach over 9 million travelers looking for alternative accommodations beyond traditional hotels to immerse themselves in local culture during their stays. You can list various property types, including apartments, villas, bungalows, chalets, farm stays, boats, and more.

Agoda charges hosts a commission for each successful booking. Commission rates vary depending on the property location (city and country)

Airbnb and Booking.com are excellent distribution channels for vacation rental property owners to expand their market reach and increase bookings. You should definitely use both of them, as well as Vrbo and Agoda, to list your rental, because you’ll be able to capture the maximum amount of attention.

However, it's essential to note that listing on multiple platforms requires considerable effort—updating your calendar and prices, communicating with guests, assigning tasks to your team, and more. It’s essential to approach it like a pro and utilize short-term rental software, such as Hospitable, to automate routine operations. With Hospitable, you’ll be able to ensure that everything runs smoothly and save tons of time.

Sites like Vrbo: What Other Options Are There?

Regarding vacation rental platforms, Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com are the most well-known brands and places where most people go to book a short-term rental. However, they’re not the only options, as there are many similar sites available today.

Here are some other sites like Vrbo you can look into:

Expedia is one of the largest online travel agencies. It is owned by Expedia Group, which also owns and operates such popular websites as Hotels.com, Vrbo, and Wotif. If you market your property on Vrbo and enable Instant Booking on your listing, your vacation rental will also appear in searches on Expedia.com. You won’t need to create a separate new account.

Hopper is a travel booking app that helps users find the best deals on flights, hotels, car rentals, and vacation rentals. The Hopper app is available in over 70 countries and is particularly popular among younger travelers.

Hipcamp is an online platform designed to help travelers discover and book unique outdoor stays, including RV parks, treehouses, yurts, cabins, glamping, and private land camping experiences in the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK. Hipcamp is often referred to as the “Airbnb of camping” and can be a good option to consider if your vacation rental property has access to nature. You may check out our blog article to learn about the Hipcamp requirements for hosts.

Glamping Hub is a luxury camping booking website renowned for its diverse range of nature-based accommodations, making it easy for travelers to find the perfect getaway. The platform currently offers more than 20,000 unique outdoor accommodations in over 100 countries. You can list your vacation rental property for free, and Glamping Hub only charges a 4% host service fee on confirmed bookings.

9flats is a popular vacation rental site that serves hosts and guests in 104 countries. It allows hosts to list accommodations such as igloos, castles, treehouses, and boats.

Plum Guide is a relatively new vacation rental website that lists meticulously vetted luxury properties. It has only 30,000 listings across over 30 countries, but this small number of listings may be intentional, adding a sense of exclusivity to the website.

There are also numerous other niche booking platforms, so your options for listing your vacation rental home to expand your reach to more prospective guests are virtually endless. And Hospitable can help you manage bookings on Expedia, Hopper, Hipcamp, and many other niche channels with iCal imports. This functionality allows you to seamlessly sync calendars on various booking platforms and prevent double bookings. You can watch this explainer video to learn how iCal imports work and find additional guidance in our help article.

However, it's essential to remember that not all OTA platforms are created equal. Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com are the most prominent players in the vacation rental market. They are internationally recognized companies that operate in over 220 countries worldwide and receive hundreds of millions of monthly visitors. Other websites receive significantly less web traffic, so it’s unrealistic to expect your property to receive more bookings via them than Vrbo, Booking.com, or Airbnb.

So, is there anything else you can do to increase your revenue after listing your vacation rental property on top OTAs? Launch your own channel with a direct booking website. It’s just the next logical step in building a successful STR business.

The good news is that you don’t need to have coding skills or hire a developer to build a functional direct booking website that is appealing to guests. Hospitable Direct is our dedicated service that helps you create your website quickly and easily, so you won’t have to spend hours on setup.

Your Hospitable Direct booking website will be tailored to short-term rental bookings and sync automatically with all your other OTAs. Hospitable will handle automated communication with your guests to ensure they have a great experience, saving you hours on guest chats.

Moreover, since Hospitable is the official Google partner, your website will get listed on Google Vacation Rentals, adding another channel to your repertoire. The site will appear on Google Travel and give you the most profitable revenue stream, as Google doesn’t take any commissions from bookings.

A direct booking website will give you more control over your business. You’ll be able to accept direct bookings from travelers and save on OTA fees, build great relationships with guests to encourage repeat bookings, and generate new leads.

Final Thought

When you list your rental space only on Vrbo, you limit your pool of potential guests to those using this platform. You should consider Vrbo alternatives such as Airbnb, Booking.com, and Agoda, niche channels, and create your own direct booking website. This is the surest way to reach more travelers, get more bookings, and maximize profit.