What is a good occupancy rate for a holiday home?

It depends heavily on the region. On the Belgian coast a self-managed property often sits around thirty percent, while a well-run one can reach fifty to sixty. On the Spanish coast the numbers are higher because the season runs longer.

Should I raise or lower my price?

Usually neither, but you should vary it. One fixed price all year is almost always too expensive in low season and too cheap in the peak weeks. Fixing that single point normally earns more than any price change.

Returns · 4 min read

How to maximise your holiday home income.

Ask an owner how they plan to earn more from their holiday home and nine times out of ten the answer is about the nightly rate. That makes sense, because it is the only number they can see. But your yearly income is not your rate. It is your rate times the nights you actually let, minus what running the place costs you. Of those three, the rate is by far the least interesting.

1. Your empty weeks cost more than your rate earns

A coastal property that fills in July and August and sits half empty the rest of the year typically runs at twenty five to thirty five percent occupancy. Every week you add on top counts in full, because your fixed costs run anyway.

Do the sum for your own place: ten extra let nights a year at a hundred and fifty euro is fifteen hundred euro, without raising your rate by a cent. To earn that through price alone you would have to become almost ten percent more expensive, which costs you bookings, which costs you nights.

2. You do not fill the shoulder season with discounts

The reflex for an empty week in October is to drop the price. That rarely works, because the problem is usually not the price but the reason to come. Nobody travels to the coast in October to swim.

What does work is letting your listing tell a different story in those months. Walking, weather, an empty high street, a home that is warm. The same flat sells to a different audience in October than in July, and that audience searches on different words.

3. Your minimum stay drives your costs harder than you think

Letting two nights costs almost the same work as seven: the same clean, the same linen, the same check-in. A calendar full of weekends looks busy but keeps less than a calendar with four long stays.

In peak season you can ask five or seven nights without losing bookings. In low season do the opposite and drop it to two, because that is where the short-stay demand sits. It is a thirty second setting that is worth hundreds of euro over a year.

4. Your first three photos decide whether you are in the race

A guest scrolls through dozens of results and decides in about a second whether to click. That happens entirely on your first photo. Only then do they read your title, and much later your description.

Professional photography is therefore not a cosmetic expense. It is the one investment that affects every booking you will ever get. An owner who shoots on a phone and does everything else right will structurally lose bookings to a worse property that is better photographed.

5. Response speed is a revenue factor, not a courtesy

Guests who ask a question usually ask three properties at once. Whoever answers first often simply wins. Reply the next morning and the booking is already gone.

On top of that, the platforms weigh your response time into where you rank. Answering slowly costs you twice: the booking itself, and the visibility for the next one.

6. Half a star is a lot of money

The gap between 4.6 and 4.9 looks small, but it is the difference between scrolling on and clicking. Guests filter on it explicitly, and the platforms show higher-rated properties more often.

The good news is that a score almost always fails on the same three things: cleaning, arrival, and expectations that did not match. All three are fixable without spending anything on the property itself.

7. Look at what is left, not at what came in

A property turning over thirty thousand euro with a manager handling everything can net more than one turning over twenty four thousand that you run yourself, certainly once you count your own hours.

So always work net, and include the things you currently do for free: the phone call on Sunday evening, the changeover on Friday, finding a plumber in August.

In short