Airbnb or Booking? Where to List Your Rental in Spain

After years managing tourist accommodation in Spain, the question still reaches me at the same moment every time: the apartment is ready, the photos are done, and the owner is waiting for me to say where it goes live. Clients and even colleagues put it the same way: which platform do you list on, Airbnb or Booking? Which one generates more bookings? And, above all, which one is more profitable?

That last question is the one that really matters, and the one almost nobody measures properly. A holiday rental is a business, and in a business the winning platform is not the one that brings the most bookings, it is the one that leaves the most margin once commissions are taken out. So before deciding, it helps to understand how each one works underneath.

The holiday rental market in Spain

In the short-stay rental market there are many platforms aimed at different types of accommodation: holiday rentals, rural tourism, home exchanges and plenty of other models.

But we all know the two big players in the sector: Airbnb and Booking.com, which together account for roughly 90% of the bookings made in Spain. Platforms like Vrbo and Expedia represent around another 8%, while the rest barely add up to 2% of the market.

There are no exact official figures, partly because many properties are listed on several platforms at once, but these numbers reflect the reality of the sector fairly well.

Do more platforms mean more bookings?

It’s easy to assume that listing your property on several platforms will bring more bookings because you’ll have more visibility.

In my experience, though, that isn’t always the case. It comes down to how each platform decides which listings get seen.

How listing visibility works

I like to explain it with a very simple picture. Imagine each platform is a big wheel that never stops spinning. Your property is only visible when it passes over the top of that wheel.

The better your listing ranks, the smaller that wheel becomes and the more often you appear in the zone travellers actually see. The worse your ranking, the bigger the wheel and the fewer chances your property has of being seen and booked.

How do you get a listing to rank?

Airbnb

On Airbnb, ranking is mainly organic: you cannot buy visibility directly. The algorithm weighs factors such as:

• Guest reviews.
• Quality of service.
• Response speed.
• Price.
• Listing quality.
• How long the property has been on the platform.

The properties that perform best on Airbnb tend to be the ones that take care of the decoration, the small details and the guest experience.

If you have an apartment with personality and you enjoy delivering excellent service, Airbnb is probably the platform that suits your property best. If, on the other hand, you manage an aparthotel or a very standard property, it may not be where you get your best results.

Booking.com

Booking also takes many of the factors above into account. But it adds one very important difference: it lets you buy visibility through commercial programmes, campaigns and promotions.

In other words, it combines organic ranking with ranking driven by advertising spend.

Where would I list a property?

My answer is almost always the same: I would start with Airbnb. But you need patience.

Airbnb needs time to rank a listing: it needs bookings, it needs reviews and it needs to build trust. During the first months, slow growth is normal. Little by little, the algorithm starts rewarding good work and the listing picks up momentum.

It’s like a snowball: at first it takes real effort to get it moving, but every new booking helps you land the next one.

When would I add Booking?

I would add it in two cases:

• When, after a reasonable amount of time, Airbnb isn’t performing as expected.
• From day one, for very simple properties, with few services, or aimed mainly at domestic Spanish tourism. In those cases Booking usually delivers better results.

My experience with nearly identical apartments

I have managed practically identical apartments: same location, same layout, same furniture and same services. One listed mainly on Airbnb and the other on Booking.

In most cases, month after month, the Airbnb-focused property ended up being more profitable. That doesn’t mean it always happens, but it has been a constant throughout the years I’ve been managing rentals.

Why do many owners only get bookings through Booking?

You hear it all the time:

All my bookings come through Booking. Nothing ever comes in from Airbnb.

In my experience, one of the reasons is that many owners try to be on every possible platform from day one. I have noticed that Airbnb seems to favour listings that are worked specifically within its own platform.

When a property is synced across many platforms via iCal calendars or channel managers, its performance on Airbnb often seems to drop. Airbnb has never officially confirmed this behaviour, but it’s a pattern I have seen repeatedly over the last few years.

Airbnb demands more

Airbnb is a much more demanding platform. Bad reviews hurt your ranking quickly. And if a property accumulates serious incidents or fails to meet its quality standards, Airbnb can suspend or even remove the listing.

In return, it offers tools like AirCover, which protects hosts against certain damage caused by guests, and it attracts a generally more international audience willing to pay more for quality accommodation.

Booking and hotels

Where Booking works especially well is with hotels, guesthouses and aparthotels. For that kind of establishment, Booking remains the undisputed leader.

Commissions matter too

Another thing we often forget is commissions.

• Airbnb is changing its model in 2026: from the split fee (3% charged to the host and between 14.1% and 16.5% paid by the guest) to a single host fee, 15.5% for most hosts and typically between 14% and 16% for the rest¹. And it isn’t optional for everyone: Airbnb imposes it on traditional hospitality listings, with hotels and serviced apartments as its own examples, and on anyone running property management software, so almost any agency lands there without choosing.
• For anyone living in the European Economic Area, Spain included, 13 October is the deadline to adjust prices to the new model. Airbnb puts a number on leaving them alone: a nightly price left at 100 pays the host 84.50 once the 15.5% comes out, and the guest still pays 100².
• Booking publishes no base commission: yours sits in the accommodation agreement you signed and depends on the country and the property type. What Booking does say is that if the percentage on your reservation statement is higher than the one in your contract, it is because you are enrolled in one of its marketing programmes, such as the Preferred Partner Program or the Visibility Booster³.

How much those programmes add is not public. The most detailed description on record sits in the resolution with which Spain’s competition authority, the CNMC, fined Booking in 2024, and it covers hotels located in Spain:

“In exchange for offering BOOKING.COM a supplementary commission of [CONFIDENTIAL] points on top of BOOKING.COM’s basic commission per booking made, the hotel taking part in the programme obtains: improved visibility in the default ranking BOOKING.COM offers when a user searches for a hotel in Spain on its website; and a special ‘thumbs up’ icon that acts as BOOKING.COM’s seal of approval when the hotel appears in the results.”

The exact points are redacted as confidential. The rest of what the file describes already changes the arithmetic:

• The Preferred programme is paid in points on top of the basic commission, and it is charged per booking made, not only on the extra bookings the programme brings in.
• Preferred Plus adds further points on top of the Preferred commission and raises the entry bar: a performance score of 80, meaning the top 20% of providers by profitability for Booking in your area, and 8 out of 10 on reviews, against the 70 and the 7 that Preferred asks for.
• The Visibility Booster sets no quality requirements. The property picks how much extra commission it pays per intermediated booking, and that amount is added on top of the standard one.

In the properties I run, that add-on is exactly what separates a commission you can live with from one that eats the margin. That makes the commission the first discount to apply before pricing your property.

Airbnb or Booking: quick comparison

Booking does have insurance covering guest damage to your property, but only for properties in the United States, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands⁵. In Spain the automatic cover is liability insurance, up to 1,000,000 euros across the European Economic Area and at no extra cost⁶. Damage runs through a separate programme you have to switch on yourself, in which Booking chases the guest for payment but does not guarantee it⁷.

My conclusion

After many years managing holiday rentals, I keep recommending the same strategy. First, work Airbnb properly and give the algorithm time to rank the listing. Then, only when necessary, add Booking as a complement or as the main platform, depending on the type of property.

Because, in my experience, a property that ranks very well on one platform usually generates far more profit than the same property ranking poorly on five different ones.

In the end, the winner isn’t whoever is present in the most places. The winner is whoever manages to stand out where their customers actually are.

One last thing: whichever platform you choose, Spain’s guest registration is the same legal obligation on all of them. Royal Decree 933/2021 does not split the duty by sales channel:

“The provisions of this royal decree shall apply throughout the national territory to lodging activities and to the rental of motor vehicles without a driver, whatever the form, the legal status of the operator or the model of organisation.”

So there is no Airbnb version of the obligation and no separate Booking one: the guest report is filed the same way, with the same data and within the same deadline, wherever the booking came from. At my agency we automated it with RegistroViajero so the legal side doesn’t depend on where the booking comes from.