How many visitors does a holiday rental get, and where do they come from?

The figures per property per year

Measured across all live properties and their full time online, so not over a favourably chosen month. A property gets an average of 222 views a year, twenty clicks through to the host's own site and 6.7 started bookings. From those last come 1.19 sent requests.

The gap between 6.7 started and 1.19 sent bookings is the most interesting figure in the set. Five out of six people who start a request do not finish it. That is not because the form is broken, since we measure almost no errors there; it is because a request asks more than a click.

Those twenty clicks a year are visitors going straight to your website. What comes of it is invisible to us, and that is an honest limit on all these figures. It may have become a booking or nothing, and we do not know the difference.

None of our 222 properties sits at zero views. But the median is thirty views across the whole time a property has been online, while the average is far higher. That means a small group pulls the average up.

Why the average misleads

The busiest ten per cent of our properties take 43 per cent of all page views. That is neither coincidence nor arbitrary: they are largely properties with plenty of photos, a filled-in price, a working calendar and a description that complements the photos.

For a host that means something usable. The average of 222 views is not your fate but an outcome you contribute to. A half-completed listing lands at the bottom of the spread, and that is half the difference.

The other half of the difference is the property itself. A house for twelve with a pool in the Ardennes draws more search demand than a studio in a municipality nobody searches for. A better listing changes little there, and that belongs in the picture honestly.

What we do not do is rank a property higher because it pays. All paying properties stand equal in the results; the order depends on what the visitor is looking for and how complete the listing is. A featured ribbon exists as a separate option, and it is then visible as a ribbon.

Where the search traffic arrives

Over ninety days our Dutch language domain received 43,576 impressions on Google, counted exactly without a breakdown. Looking at the per page counts, they do not arrive where most hosts assume. Region pages account for thirty per cent and theme pages for twenty-nine. Together that is close to sixty per cent of all impressions.

Property pages themselves account for six per cent. A guest therefore rarely searches directly for your property; they search for a holiday home in an area or with a particular feature, land on such an overview page, and click through from there.

That explains why the features on your listing weigh more than they appear to. Tick that dogs are welcome and you appear on the dogs theme page. Fill in your location properly and you appear on the right region page. Anyone skipping those fields misses the pages where the traffic actually arrives.

Our blog delivers eighteen per cent of impressions and, notably, the most clicks after the homepage. Those are readers exploring an area or a theme who then end up at properties. It is the slowest route and at the same time the one with the most interested visitor.

What you can do with these figures

First work out what you may expect. Take 222 views a year as the middle value and bear in mind that a half-completed listing sits well below it. Set that outcome against what a year with us costs and you have an honest picture before you start.

Then look at the step where most leaks away: from 6.7 started bookings to 1.19 sent. Anything that makes that step easier counts double. A calendar that matches helps there, and a price that is shown helps there, because both remove doubt at the moment somebody is already filling in.

Check that you appear on the right overview pages. That is one glance at your listing: location, themes and facilities. Those three decide which part of the sixty per cent you compete in, and filling them in costs nothing.

And do not draw quick conclusions from a single month. Our own requests doubled over the last thirty days against the sixty before, spread across twice as many properties. That is a good sign and it is not yet a trend, and that is how we read it ourselves.

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