Making money from short-term rental: how to raise your income

The apartment is being let, the money is coming in, but somewhere at the back of your mind sits a question: could you get more out of it without buying a second property? You can. Short-term rental income depends on several levers, and most owners pull only one of them. Let me go through them all.

What your income is made of

Simplify the picture to a single formula:

Income = occupancy × nightly rate − costs − commission

Each element is a separate lever. You can raise occupancy, raise the price, cut costs or reduce commission. Pulling several at once gives the best results.

Most owners focus on occupancy alone, on letting as many nights as possible. That matters, but it is only one of four levers, and not the one with the fastest effect. It is often easier to earn more from the same nights than to prise loose more free dates.

Lever 1: occupancy

Empty nights are income that evaporated and will not return. Several things help:

• A presence on several channels. Booking.com, Airbnb, your own page, local portals: each catches a different guest. The more shop windows, the fewer empty nights.
• Last-minute discounts. Dates three days away still free? Better to sell them cheaper than not at all. An automatic discount on near dates rescues nights that would otherwise be lost.
• A long-stay discount. A guest staying a week means less cleaning, fewer changeovers and guaranteed revenue. It is worth encouraging with a lower nightly rate.

Lever 2: the nightly rate

A fixed price all year leaves money on the table in season and puts guests off out of season. Prices should breathe with demand:

• High season: holidays, long weekends, local events. That is when you raise prices, because the demand is there anyway.
• Weekends. Friday and Saturday support a higher rate than midweek almost everywhere.
• Low season. A lower price keeps occupancy up instead of standing the apartment empty out of pride.

Simply introducing weekend and seasonal prices can raise annual revenue by well over ten percent without a single extra booking.

Lever 3: commission

This is the lever most owners forget, even though it has the fastest effect. Every booking through Booking.com hands 15% to 25% to the portal. If you shift even part of your bookings to a commission-free channel, that money stays with you without touching price or occupancy.

The difference is PLN 630 across ten nights. At 150 portal nights a year we are talking about well over ten thousand zloty that you hand over purely because the guest clicked on Booking.com rather than on you.

Lever 4: returning guests

The cheapest booking is one from someone who has already stayed with you. You pay no commission and no advertising for it. A guest who felt at home will gladly come back, if they know how to find you outside the portal.

Leave a card in the apartment with the address of your reservation page and a short note that booking directly means no intermediaries. Some guests will use it, and you will build a base of regular customers that the portal was hiding from you.

Lever 5: operating costs

There is money on the cost side too. This is not about cutting quality, but about sensibly limiting what eats the margin:

• Cleaning. Longer stays mean fewer cleaning cycles per night sold. A long-stay discount lowers your handling cost as well as raising occupancy.
• Utilities. A thermostat with simple controls and a sensor for vacant periods can cut the heating bill out of season.
• Your own time. Your hour has a value. Every minute spent watching calendars by hand and retyping bookings is a hidden cost that appears in no statement.

Costs rarely jump spectacularly in one go. They eat the margin quietly, a zloty at a time, until at the end of the year you wonder where the profit went. Review the bills for utilities, cleaning and small services once a quarter, and you will often find a few hundred zloty leaking away for no reason.

Standard and reviews raise the price for you

An apartment with good reviews and a few well judged details defends a higher price without resistance from the guest. Fast internet, a comfortable bed, a coffee machine, a clean beach towel: small things that cost once and raise willingness to pay for years. A satisfied guest leaves a better review, a better review attracts more guests, and you can comfortably hold your rate above the neighbour with bare walls.

How to pull every lever at once

See how it adds up in numbers. An apartment does 150 nights a year at an average of PLN 350, all through Booking.com at 18% commission. That is around PLN 43,000 in hand. Now you pull four levers at once: seasonal prices raise the average rate by 10%, last-minute discounts add a dozen or so nights, half the bookings move to your own commission-free channel, and returning guests close part of the dead season. Each change on its own looks modest. Together they can add well over ten thousand zloty a year from the same flat, with no second property to buy.

Combining these four produces an effect greater than their sum. For that you need a tool that keeps you on the portals, gives you a commission-free channel and lets you steer the price. erphome.pl does all of it: your own commission-free reservation page with Przelewy24 payments, hourly iCal sync with Booking.com and Airbnb (so you can be on the portals and have your own channel without double bookings), seasonal and weekend prices, last-minute and long-stay discounts, promo codes. A guest who has once booked with you directly gets a page they can easily come back to.

Which lever to start with

Apartment income grows in four ways: higher occupancy, a moving price, less commission and returning guests. It is easy to turn only the occupancy dial through the portals and wonder why more does not stay with you. The fastest gain lies in commission, so shift part of your traffic to your own channel.

Want to recover the commission and steer prices in one place? Try erphome.pl free for 14 days. No credit card, two apartments included, your own reservation page from day one.