Turning Luxury Vacation Rentals Into a Direct Booking Business
For six months, the website sat unfinished. Rebekah Converti-Boley, founder and CEO of Hotel Home Stays, knew that direct bookings were the path to a more profitable, more sustainable business. She'd spent years building and managing luxury vacation properties — including developing Long Cove Resort, a glamping property with a marina and event spaces in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. She understood hospitality operations. She understood the economics. But the direct channel kept stalling.
"I knew how to do it in a traditional hotel model, where demand is more homogeneous," Rebekah explains. "But in vacation rentals it's different. Every property is in a different location, which complicates everything — from where to invest marketing budgets to how to maintain visibility without losing control of the system."
That complexity is the quiet reason so many vacation rental operators stay dependent on OTAs. It's not that they don't want direct bookings. It's that the operational lift — building the website, segmenting guests across multiple destinations, running campaigns that actually convert — feels insurmountable when you're already managing properties, guests, and a team.
A portfolio built on experience, not volume
Hotel Home Stays manages around 21 properties across the luxury vacation rental segment. Rebekah's thesis is deliberately contrarian for an industry that often equates growth with unit count: she believes most of the short-term rental housing stock isn't truly profitable, and that operators are better served by a smaller portfolio of high-performing assets than a sprawling one generating marginal returns.
Guests spend more money on experiences than on anything else.
Her properties are designed around that insight — shared enjoyment, emotional travel, the kind of stays people remember and come back for. It's a hospitality-first philosophy applied to vacation rentals, and it shapes everything from property selection to how she thinks about guest relationships.
That philosophy is also why direct bookings matter so much to her model. OTAs are effective demand generators, but they sit between the operator and the guest. For a business built on repeat stays and personal connection, that intermediation has a real cost beyond the commission.
The shift
The turning point came in October 2024. Hotel Home Stays implemented a direct booking infrastructure that finally matched the urgency Rebekah had felt for months. The website that had been an unfinished project for half a year was live within 48 hours.
"That had been a major unfinished task preventing us from really scaling direct bookings," she says. "Once it was live, everything accelerated."
What followed wasn't a single breakthrough — it was a compounding effect. Email marketing, campaign automation, and guest segmentation went from isolated experiments to an integrated system. Messaging could be personalised by seasonality, guest behaviour, and property type. Repeat guests who had previously rebooked through OTAs — paying commissions on every stay — started coming back through the direct channel instead.
The results over 17 months tell the story clearly. Direct bookings grew from roughly 9% of Hotel Home Stays' total revenue to over 17%, with peaks above 30% in the strongest months. Monthly direct revenue increased from around $52,000 to $68,000 on average — a 31% lift. In total, the direct channel has generated over $1.1 million in revenue across 166 bookings since the shift began.
What's notable is the consistency. This wasn't a launch spike that faded. Month after month, through full seasonal cycles, the direct channel has held and grown. For operators weighing whether direct is a short-term win or a durable strategy, Hotel Home Stays' 17-month track record is among the strongest proof points in the industry.
The hard part no one talks about
Rebekah is candid about a challenge that most direct booking success stories gloss over: operational risk. When guests book through an OTA, the platform handles payment validation, fraud screening, and dispute resolution. When they book direct, that's on you.
The real differentiator is how you integrate the technology into your own operational processes — control, verification, internal discipline.
Building a direct channel isn't just a marketing exercise. It requires operational maturity that many operators underestimate.
That honesty is characteristic of how Rebekah thinks about the business. She's not naive about what direct requires. She's made the bet because the returns — financial and relational — justify the investment.
What comes next
For Hotel Home Stays, the direct channel is now a core pillar, not an experiment. The goal is to continue migrating repeat guests away from OTAs, deepen the direct relationship, and use the data from those interactions to refine the guest experience further.
Build relationships with your guests and use technology to make it possible. That's it.