The commission you pay was designed for a different business

Percentage-of-booking pricing is not a scam. It is a reasonable instrument that got attached to the wrong business, and understanding why makes it much easier to negotiate, or to leave.

Short-let software charges a slice of each reservation because, in that market, the slice tracks the work. A unit turning over ninety times a year generates ninety guest-messaging threads, ninety cleans, ninety payment captures and ninety chances for something to go wrong at midnight. The vendor's costs scale with bookings, so their price scales with bookings. Both sides can defend it.

Then the same instrument meets a mid-term portfolio

Take twenty furnished apartments let by the month. Average tenancy: five months. That is roughly forty-eight tenancies a year across the portfolio, call it two and a half per unit, against the eighteen hundred a short-let operator with the same twenty units would process.

Now apply a booking fee. At a monthly rent of €2,400, a five-month tenancy is €12,000 of gross rent. A 2% fee on that is €240. For one reservation. The vendor's marginal cost for that booking is a row in a database and four automated emails.

Run it across the portfolio and the percentage becomes an eleven-thousand-euro annual line for software you are also paying a subscription for. The per-unit subscription at €19 a month for twenty units is €4,560 a year. The commission is more than twice the software.

Why the arithmetic never gets done

Because the fee is quoted against the thing that makes it look small. "1.9% of a booking" reads like nothing when the mental image of a booking is a weekend in Lisbon. Nobody prices it against a five-month tenancy, and no vendor is going to be the one who points that out.

It is also invisible in the place you would notice it. A subscription arrives as an invoice you see. A commission is netted, or billed against volume, and shows up in a report nobody reads monthly. Operators routinely discover the annual figure only when they build a spreadsheet to compare vendors. Which is to say, at the exact moment they were already leaving.

What to do about it, including if you stay

The obvious move is to work out your own number. Take last year's tenancies, multiply each by its gross rent, apply your rate, and put the total next to your subscription. It takes twenty minutes and it is the only number that matters in any vendor conversation you have afterwards.

The second move is to ask for a cap. Vendors with percentage pricing will often cap the fee per reservation for exactly this case, because they would rather keep an account than defend the instrument. It is not usually on the rate card and it is frequently available. Nobody gets it without asking.

The third is to check what the fee is buying. In short-let software the commission funds channel distribution, payment processing and a support burden that scales with bookings. If you use none of the channels, take rent by bank transfer, and open two support tickets a year, you are subsidising a cost structure you do not generate.

The disclosure

We charge a flat per-unit fee and no commission, so this is not a neutral essay and you should read it accordingly. But the arithmetic above works whoever you buy from, and an operator who does it and then negotiates a cap with their existing vendor has still had a good afternoon.

The reason we do not charge one is not generosity. It is that a commission on a business with eight turnovers a year is a bill for volume that does not exist, and we would have to defend that in every renewal conversation for as long as the company lasts. Easier not to have it.