Booking.com commission: what actually stays in your pocket

"15% commission" sounds bearable until you sit down with the annual statement. Then it turns out Booking.com takes considerably more than the first number suggests. Let me take the bill apart and show what really stays in your pocket.

The headline commission is only the start

Standard Booking.com commission in Poland starts at 15% of the booking value. On its own that is no disaster. The problem is that you rarely pay only that.

On top of the commission comes VAT. Booking.com issues an invoice for its service and adds 23% tax to the commission. If you do not reclaim that VAT (and most small owners are not active VAT payers, or do not recover it effectively), the real cost of the commission rises from 15% to around 18.45%.

Visibility programmes push the rate up

Booking.com regularly offers tools meant to "increase the visibility" of your listing. Each of them costs another percentage point or several:

• The Preferred Partner Programme. A few extra percentage points of commission in exchange for a better position in results.
• Visibility Booster. You bid a higher commission for a better placement on particular dates or in particular markets.
• Promotions and Genius offers. Discounts of 10% to 20% for regular guests, which you fund out of your own pocket.

Switch on two of these at once and the effective commission can reach 22% to 25%. And they are hard to give up, because without them the listing slips down the results and fewer people see it.

A concrete bill

Take an apartment let at PLN 350 a night, averaging 15 nights a month through the portal. That is PLN 5,250 of turnover a month.

You are handing over PLN 1,097 a month, more than PLN 13,000 a year from one apartment. With two apartments you are in the region of PLN 26,000 a year in commission alone.

A look at the full year

The monthly figure does not land the way the annual one does. Take the same apartment across 12 months, simplifying by assuming portal occupancy stays at a similar level:

PLN 15,700 a year buys a great deal of advertising for your own apartment, or new furnishings. And that is one property. With two you are around PLN 30,000.

What about Airbnb?

Airbnb works differently, but not always more cheaply. The most common model in Poland is a split commission: the host pays around 3% of the booking value, and the guest pays a service fee of around 14% added to the price. Less leaves your pocket, but the guest sees a higher final price, so the intermediary still gets paid, just with their money.

Whatever the model, the principle is the same: between you and the guest stands an intermediary who takes a cut and controls the relationship. Your own channel cuts that intermediary out on both sides.

When you actually get the money

Commission is not the only cost. There is also time. In the model where Booking.com collects the payment itself, it pays you after the guest's stay, sometimes with a delay of weeks and always on the portal's settlement cycle. Your cash is working for the intermediary, not for you.

With direct payment through your own page, the guest pays at the moment of booking and the money lands in your account with no intermediary holding it for weeks.

What the number does not show

Money is not all you lose on a portal:

• No contact details for the guest. Booking.com mediates communication and hides email addresses and phone numbers. You cannot build a base of regular customers who come back directly to you.
• Your reviews belong to the portal. Every review you worked years for stays on Booking.com. You cannot take them anywhere else.
• The portal sets the rules. Cancellation policy, penalties, how payouts work: all of it sits with Booking.com, and the terms change without anyone asking your opinion.

What to do about it

I am not urging you to delete your Booking.com account overnight. The portal has real reach and attracts guests who would never have found you otherwise. The sensible plan is shifting part of the traffic to a commission-free channel.

A guest who has stayed with you once does not have to go through Booking.com a second time. If you hand them a card with the address of your own reservation page when they leave, next time they will book directly and the whole PLN 350 a night stays with you.

For that you need your own page, one that looks professional and takes bookings and payments. That is what erphome.pl is: a commission-free reservation page with Przelewy24 payments (BLIK, card, transfer), where 100% of the amount goes to you. You link the calendar to Booking.com over iCal so dates do not clash, and the fixed fee starts at PLN 34.99 net a month, less than a single commission on a single booking.

Do the sum directly: one booking at PLN 350 a night for three nights means well over PLN 100 in commission and VAT handed to the portal. That is what a whole month of erphome.pl costs for two apartments. Every further direct booking that month is pure profit compared with the portal.

A sensible plan for the switch

Do not jump in at the deep end. A sensible order looks like this:

• Put up your own page and link its calendar to Booking.com over iCal, so dates do not clash.
• Leave the portals switched on. They still catch new guests who do not know you.
• Give every guest your page details when they leave, so next time they come back directly.
• Shift more traffic to your own channel over time, as your base of regular guests grows.

After a year, part of your bookings comes in commission-free and the portals are an addition rather than the only source.

How much of it stays with you

Real Booking.com commission is not 15% but 18% to 25% once VAT and visibility programmes are added. With two apartments you hand the portal tens of thousands of zloty a year and lose contact with your own guests.

Keep at least part of that money. Open a free erphome.pl account and spend 14 days testing a channel where you hand nobody a commission. No credit card, two apartments included.