About promotions

Overview

Promotions are special deals that increase the visibility of your property, which can attract more guests.

Setting up promotions can help you to secure bookings in advance, increase bookings during low season, or fill last-minute gaps in your calendar.

Promotions are different from weekly or monthly discounts. Both offer a percentage off your base rate to help increase bookings, but promotions have the following added advantages:

• Highlight your listing in search results: Boost your visibility with a special badge on the Vrbo traveler site by offering a discount of 5% or more:

  • Travelers love a great deal, and this badge helps your property stand out.

  • If you're offering a member-only deal, a 10% discount unlocks this added exposure.

• Targeted access: Promotions can be aimed at specific guests or offered for a limited time, creating a sense of urgency and driving more bookings from guests who are searching for properties in real time.

• More flexibility: Promotions allow you to build demand through multi-season strategies that you can adapt at any time.

Promotion types

Once you have promotions created in your Vrbo owner account, they will be listed under Calendar > Settings > Promotions.

How promotions work

• Mobile and member-only deal offers apply to every night of the booking.

• Early booking and last minute discounts will only apply to the specific dates that fall within the parameters of the set up. This means that, sometimes, the discount will only apply to specific nights, not to the entire booking.

Here are some examples to help you understand how promotions work:

• For Early booking: Imagine you set an early booking promotion for stays booked 75 days in advance of the check-in date. If a guest books a stay that spans from 73 to 77 days from check-in date, the discount will only apply to the last three nights (the portion at/over the 75-day purchase window), not the entire booking.

• For Last minute: Imagine you set a last minute promotion for stays booked within 14 days of the check-in date. If a guest books a stay that spans from 12 to 20 days from check-in date, the discount will only apply to the first three nights (the portion within the 14-day purchase window), not to the entire booking.

Promotion stacking

To maximize savings for guests, promotions will be combined (stacked) with existing and future weekly and monthly discounts in a single booking.

You can create multiple promotions for your listing(s), but only one promotion can be stacked on top of a weekly or monthly discount. When you create multiple promotions, the guest will receive the highest promotional discount when booking.

This table shows an example of how we calculate the final booking price for a property with a nightly base rate of 100 USD:

*The promotion is applied to the discounted base rate, not to the original base rate.

Ensuring promotions comply with consumer and advertising laws

If you include a discount or savings message or other promotional marketing message in the “free text entry” of your listing, it is your responsibility to ensure that these messages comply with all applicable laws, including consumer protection and advertising laws. Please consider the following general guidance:

• Any discount or other savings message you include in the “free text entry” must not be misleading and must always be accurate, easy to understand, unambiguous and refer to a genuine discount;

• Any discount or saving communicated to guests in your listing must be made available to guests booking that property;

• If a discounted rate is advertised but is only available on certain specified booking dates or any other conditions, such as length of stay, the message must make that very clear;

• Any discount or savings messages should be based on a non-discounted reference rate which is a standard rate at which the listing would otherwise be genuinely bookable. This means that the reference rate must be in compliance with local laws. For example, in some countries, the standard rate should be the lowest bookable rate in the last 30 days. Also, for example, you should not advertise an off-season rate (e.g. for a booking in February) for a beach property as a discount compared with the high season summer rate for that property (e.g. for August). This is because the August rate is never likely to apply to any off-season bookings of that property in February;

• Details about what the standard rate refers to need to be provided to travelers (e.g. “the standard rate is the generally applicable rate for this property for this time of year”). The explanation needs to be provided in a prominent way in the “free text entry”; and 

• If you advertise a time-limited discount (e.g. a “72 hour sale” or a "New Listings Discount"), the discount for your listing must only be available for the duration of that time window, after which the price should return to the standard rate you have set for the property for a reasonable period of time following the end of the promotional offer.

Learn how to create your first promotion.