Turning a Repeat Channel Guest Into a Direct Booking, Without Breaking the Rules
You’re paying commission on loyalty you earned
A family has stayed at Cottage 2 three summers in a row. They know the house, they know you, and they’ll almost certainly be back next year. Each time, they’ve booked through the channel, and each time the channel has taken its cut. It found them once. It has been paid for them three times.
The obvious fix is to tell them to book direct next time: a note in the welcome pack, a line in your last message, maybe a discount code. That’s also the quickest way to get your listing suspended. Channels watch for exactly this, and their terms are written to stop it.
This guide covers what the rules say, what’s still allowed, and how to set things up so a returning guest finds the direct route on their own.
What the channels don’t allow
Every channel words its terms differently, and the wording changes. Most of them rule out some version of the following:
- Asking a guest to book or pay outside the platform for a stay that came through it.
- Using the channel’s messaging to move a guest elsewhere. That includes links, phone numbers or email addresses meant for that purpose. Many channels filter messages for them.
- Using the contact details the channel gives you for anything except that stay. Adding a channel guest’s email to your mailing list, or writing to them after checkout with an offer, usually counts.
Penalties range from a warning to losing the listing. Read the current terms for each channel you use before relying on anything here. This post isn’t legal advice, and your channel’s wording is what counts.
Where the line sits in practice
| Situation | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| Channel message during the stay: “book direct next time and save” | Don’t. This is exactly what the terms target. |
| A “book direct” card or QR code in the welcome pack for a channel guest | Don’t. Treat it as solicitation, because a channel will. |
| After checkout, emailing a channel guest an offer at the address the channel gave you | Don’t. That address was for the stay. |
| Your own website with a booking page, easy to find when anyone searches your property’s name | Fine. You’re allowed to exist outside the channel. |
| Your channel reviews shown on your own site, in line with each channel’s display terms | Fine, with care. See How to Show Your Airbnb and Google Reviews on Your Own Website. |
| A guest who booked direct and ticked the marketing box | Fine. They’re your guest. |
| A past channel guest who finds you and gets in touch on their own | Grey area. Many hosts treat this as a new enquiry from the public. Some channel terms are broad enough to cover it. Check yours. |
The pattern: you can’t reach into a channel’s guest list, but you can make sure a guest who goes looking can find you.
Be findable when they look
A guest who loved Cottage 2 and wants to come back will do what everyone does: search the property’s name. What they find decides where they book.
If the only result is your channel listing, that’s where they’ll book. If they also find your own site, with the same photos, live availability, the reviews they’d have read on the channel, and a checkout that works on a phone, many will book there. You didn’t ask them. They found it themselves.
What that takes:
- A booking page. Direct Booking + Payments is included on every paid Airflow plan. Airflow takes 6% of each direct booking, charged as the money arrives, and your payment processor charges its own fee on top.
- The booking page on a website. If you have a site, open the property’s Go Live tab and use Copy embed code under 4 · Sell from your website. If you don’t, the Website + Hosting add-on builds one on your own domain. You can see an example at /websites/.
- Reviews on that website. The Reviews Management add-on reads the review notification emails the channels send you and shows those reviews in a Reviews tab beside your booking widget, or as a reviews-only strip. Your Reviews, On Every Surface You Own explains how it works and where it falls short.
- The same name everywhere you’re allowed to use it. If your property is called one thing on the channel and another on your site, a search for one won’t find the other.
None of this involves contacting a channel guest. That’s what keeps it on the right side of the line.
Once they book direct, keep them
The first direct booking is the hard one. After that, the relationship is yours, and Airflow gives you three tools for it.
Consent at checkout. The direct booking form includes a box: Send me offers, travel tips and news from this property. If the guest ticks it, the booking detail page in your portal shows them as Subscribed. That’s your record that you may contact them again, and it’s the thing a channel booking never gives you.
The guest portal. Each direct booking confirmation includes a Manage your trip link to the guest’s own portal. It has the booking summary, payment schedule, balance payment, documents and itinerary. The standard portal is included with every plan. It makes a direct booking feel as organised as a channel booking, and that matters to a guest deciding whether to book with you again.
Lifecycle emails. The Automations add-on sends pre-arrival, check-in day, post-checkout and review-request emails. If your Gmail or Outlook is connected, they go from your own address. They’re off until you switch them on, and each email sent uses one action from your plan.
Two things to know before you switch automations on
Automations don’t separate channel bookings from direct ones. An automation runs for every booking of that property that has a guest email address, including channel bookings. So:
- Keep offers and “come back” wording out of automated messages. Save anything promotional for messages you send yourself, to direct guests who ticked the consent box.
- The standard pre-arrival email lists any optional extras you’ve set up for the property, and the guest can pay for them online. If you don’t want to sell paid extras to channel guests outside the channel, check your channel’s terms before you switch on Pre-Arrival for a property that takes channel bookings.
In practice, many channel bookings arrive without the guest’s own email address, because channels often withhold it, so automations never reach those guests. Don’t count on that, though. Write every automated message so a channel guest could safely receive it.
What to expect
You won’t move most of your channel guests, and you shouldn’t try. The ones who come back were going to come back anyway. Your job is to make sure the direct route is the easy one when they go looking. Over a few seasons, that shifts some of your repeat business off the channel, and each of those bookings is worth more to you. Is a Direct Booking Actually Worth More? shows by how much, and why a big “book direct” discount can cancel the gain.
For the full plan, including building a booking page, getting found and earning trust, read How to Get Direct Bookings Instead of Relying on Airbnb.
Choose a plan at /get-started/. Every plan includes a 7-day trial. Your card is taken at signup but not charged before day 7. Then publish one property with Direct bookings switched on and put its embed code on your site. Add-on prices are on /pricing/.