Holiday Let Website Design — How to Stop Losing Money to Airbnb and Booking.com Commission
Holiday Let Website Design — How to Stop Losing Money to Airbnb and Booking.com Commission
If you run a holiday let in Scotland, you're almost certainly listing on Airbnb, Booking.com, or Vrbo. These platforms are valuable — they bring reach and visibility that's hard to replicate on your own. But every booking they generate costs you. Airbnb charges hosts up to 3% per booking. Booking.com typically charges between 15% and 25%. Over a full season, that's a significant sum leaving your pocket before you've covered a single running cost. There's a better way to manage it.
What is a channel manager and why does it matter?
A channel manager is a piece of software that connects all your booking platforms — Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and others — into one centralised dashboard. When a booking comes in on any platform, availability updates automatically across all of them. No manual updates, no double bookings, no logging into three separate systems every morning.
For a holiday let owner managing even one property across multiple platforms, a channel manager removes what would otherwise be a daily administrative burden — the equivalent of a part-time job done automatically in the background.
Why you also need your own website
A channel manager solves the operational problem. A website solves the commercial one. With your own website you can accept direct bookings — cutting out the OTA middleman entirely on those reservations — and offer guests a best price guarantee that incentivises them to book with you directly rather than through a platform.
Even if you only shift 20% of your bookings from OTA platforms to direct, the commission saving over a season adds up to considerably more than the cost of a professional website build.
Real example — Eagleside Apartments, Auchterarder
Eagleside Luxury Apartments came to us with no website and no central system for managing bookings across multiple platforms. We built them a professional website and installed Supercontrol — a channel manager purpose-built for self-catering and holiday let businesses — connecting their Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo listings into one dashboard.
Since launching in January 2026, Eagleside has recorded 41 bookings managed through the centralised system — with live availability syncing automatically across every platform the moment a reservation is confirmed. The owners manage everything from one dashboard without the daily administrative overhead that previously came with running listings across multiple platforms independently.
What does a holiday let website cost in Scotland?
A professionally built holiday let website with channel manager integration in Scotland typically costs between £1,500 and £3,500 depending on the property, the platforms being connected, and the complexity of the booking setup. Weighed against the commission savings over a single season, most holiday let owners find it pays for itself within the first year.
At Hutcheson Design Studio we build holiday let websites across Perthshire and Scotland with Supercontrol integration as standard — built to look professional, perform on Google, and reduce the administrative overhead of managing multiple booking platforms.