Turning Luxury Vacation Rentals Into a Direct Booking Business

Hotel Home Stays had run a direct booking website for years. It worked — it just didn't live up to the design and brand standards Rebekah Converti-Boley, the company's founder and CEO, held herself to. She knew direct bookings were the path to a more profitable, more sustainable business, and that the channel had to reflect the brand she was building. 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.

Rebekah approached direct bookings from the perspective of a hospitality operator, not a marketer. Her focus wasn't simply acquiring reservations — it was building stronger relationships with guests and creating a more sustainable business model.

"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 a website, marketing properties across multiple destinations, segmenting guests, and running campaigns that actually convert — feels insurmountable when you're already managing properties, guests, and a team, all while competing against the marketing budgets and brand recognition of major OTAs.

A portfolio built on experience, not volume

Hotel Home Stays averages around 30 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 too many operators focus on adding inventory without considering whether they can consistently maintain the guest experience. Sustainable growth isn't just about profit margins — it's about having enough resources to properly care for each property. When properties aren't generating healthy returns, operators often can't reinvest in maintenance, upgrades, and the details that create exceptional guest experiences. In hospitality, consistency is everything, and maintaining the same level of quality for every guest is one of the industry's greatest challenges.

Guests remember experiences long after they've forgotten what they paid for a stay.

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 hospitality brands built on relationships, loyalty, and repeat visits, owning that connection becomes increasingly important as the business grows.

The shift

The turning point came in October 2024. Within 48 hours of implementing hostAI, the off-brand site that had held Hotel Home Stays back was replaced by one that finally matched Rebekah's standards — live, and the foundation to start scaling direct bookings in earnest.

"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.