Email marketing is the most underused channel in holiday rentals — here is how to build your list, write campaigns that get opened, and drive direct bookings with zero commission.
While holiday rental hosts obsess over Airbnb algorithms, Instagram follower counts, and OTA commission rates, most overlook the single highest-ROI marketing channel available to them: email.
Email marketing consistently delivers the best return on investment of any digital marketing channel — the Data & Marketing Association estimates an average return of £36 for every £1 spent. For holiday rental hosts specifically, email is uniquely powerful because your list is composed of people who have already stayed with you (proven intent and experience) or explicitly expressed interest in your property (warm leads). This is a fundamentally different quality of audience from a social media following or an OTA search result.
An email to 200 past guests offering a returning-guest discount will, for most properties, outperform any Instagram post you have ever made. This guide covers how to build that list and what to do with it.
The foundation of email marketing is a list — and specifically, a list of people who have genuinely consented to hear from you. Building this list takes time but compounds significantly.
Every guest who has stayed with you is a potential email subscriber. They already know your property, presumably enjoyed it (otherwise they would not be worth marketing to), and are statistically likely to return or refer others.
How to capture email addresses from OTA bookings: Most booking platforms (Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO) prevent you from accessing guest email addresses until after the stay, and sometimes not at all. The legitimate approaches:
Your direct booking website should have at minimum one prominent email capture mechanism. Options that convert well for holiday rentals:
Your social media audience can be converted to email subscribers — where you have a more durable, algorithm-independent relationship with them. Include a link to your email sign-up in your Instagram bio, and periodically post a CTA reminding followers that subscribers get early access to availability or exclusive rates.
You cannot:
Stick to consensual, opt-in list building. It is slower but produces a far more valuable and legally safe asset.
Several platforms are well-suited to holiday rental email marketing. For hosts sending to fewer than 1,000 subscribers, free tiers are typically sufficient.
Mailchimp: The most widely used, with a generous free tier (up to 500 contacts, 1,000 sends per month). Easy to use, good templates, and reasonable deliverability. A solid starting point.
MailerLite: Often preferred by small businesses for its cleaner interface and higher free tier allowances (up to 1,000 subscribers, 12,000 emails per month). Excellent automation capabilities even on the free plan.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue): Particularly strong for automation sequences. Free tier allows unlimited contacts with up to 300 emails per day.
Klaviyo: More powerful, used by e-commerce businesses, but overkill for most holiday rental hosts at early stages.
All of the above handle GDPR compliance features (consent tracking, unsubscribe management, data export) — essential for UK hosts.
Once you have a platform and a growing list, what do you actually send? Five email types do the heavy lifting for holiday rental email marketing.
Sent automatically when someone subscribes. This is your most-opened email — open rates for welcome emails average around 50%, far above typical campaign rates. Use it to:
Keep it warm and personal, not corporate. You are a host, not a brand.
The bread-and-butter email for most holiday rental hosts. Sent 6–10 weeks before a key booking period (school summer holidays, Easter, Christmas, October half-term), this email:
Timing is critical. Send too early (more than 3 months out) and people are not in booking mode. Send too late (less than 3 weeks out) and you have missed most guests' planning windows. The 6–8 week window consistently performs best.
Subject line examples that perform well:
For gaps that emerge in your calendar (cancellations, late-opening dates), a last-minute email to your list can fill them quickly. The key: create real urgency.
"We have had a cancellation for the 14th–17th February. Three-night stay at £180/night — booking link below. Reply to this email if you have any questions."
This email performs best when it is short, urgent, and easy to act on. Do not bury the availability in paragraphs of prose.
For guests who have just stayed (whether they are on your list yet or not — many booking platforms allow a post-stay message), a genuine thank-you email serves multiple purposes:
Send this within 48 hours of checkout. Sooner is better — the positive stay experience is freshest.
Not every email should ask for a booking. Sending occasional value-only emails — a guide to the best walks near your property, a local events calendar, a recipe from the local farm shop — keeps your list engaged between booking seasons and builds the kind of relationship that makes people choose to book directly with you rather than through Airbnb.
A good rule of thumb: for every three booking-focused emails, send one value email. This keeps your unsubscribe rate low and your open rates high.
Your subject line determines whether your email is opened or ignored. Principles that work:
For booking-focused emails, use this structure:
Over 60% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Test every email on a mobile preview before sending. Ensure:
Manual email campaigns are valuable, but automation — sequences that trigger automatically based on specific events — multiplies your email marketing output without multiplying your time.
When someone new joins your list, they should receive a short automated sequence:
This three-email sequence converts new subscribers at significantly higher rates than a single welcome email.
For direct booking guests, an automated post-stay sequence:
If you capture the month/year of past stays, send a "one year ago you were here" email around the anniversary. These perform exceptionally well because they trigger positive memories. A soft CTA inviting them to book the same dates next year has surprisingly high conversion rates.
Key metrics to track:
Email marketing drives direct bookings — and direct bookings are most valuable when you have a professional, frictionless booking experience to send your guests to. LetPilot gives holiday rental hosts a direct booking page, automated guest communications, and a unified calendar that works alongside your email campaigns. Convert the guests your emails warm up into confirmed bookings without any OTA commission. Try LetPilot free at letpilot.co — no credit card required.