It was 10pm on a Friday when I got the message. A guest who’d booked through Booking.com was standing outside our guesthouse, keybox code in hand. The problem: someone else was already inside, checked in through Airbnb three hours earlier. Same room. Different platform. Two very unhappy guests.
That was our first double booking. It was also our last — because the following week I completely overhauled how we manage calendar sync across platforms.
The question comes up constantly in small operator circles: should I build a direct booking site and stop paying Airbnb, Booking.com, and the rest their cut?
It sounds obvious at first — of course you’d rather not hand 15–18% of your revenue to a platform. But after running a guesthouse in Tokyo and managing properties across multiple OTAs, I’ve landed somewhere more nuanced. OTA commission and direct booking costs are different shapes of the same expense — and for many small Japan operators, OTAs are genuinely the better deal, at least at first.
If you run a short-term rental in Japan and you’re only listed on Airbnb and Booking.com, you’re missing a significant portion of the market. Japan’s two dominant domestic booking platforms — Jalan (じゃらん) and Rakuten Travel (楽天トラベル) — together process tens of millions of room nights a year from Japanese travelers. And most foreign operators don’t appear on either of them.
The reasons are predictable: Airbnb is where most of us start, it’s English-friendly, and it delivers strong inbound results. But inbound and domestic demand follow very different seasonal patterns, and ignoring domestic OTAs means leaving real occupancy on the table — particularly around Obon and Silver Week, when Japanese domestic travel peaks.