Tom Goodwin opens this episode fresh off a mastermind retreat in Islamorada, Florida, with eight other vacation rental management company owners from around the country — an experience that reinforced his belief that staying curious, no matter how many years you've been in this business, is non-negotiable. That curiosity led him to an episode of The Check-In podcast featuring Jamie Lane, chief economist at AirDNA, whose team tracks data across 12 million short-term rental properties globally. What Jamie shared, Tom says, stopped him in his tracks — and forms the spine of this episode.
The headline data point: 48% of vacation rental listings in the U.S. are on a single platform only, a pattern that holds true across the UK and Europe as well — and it's not just individual hosts. A meaningful percentage of professional management companies, whose entire job is distribution, are single-channel dependent too. Jamie's own cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia illustrates the risk personally: despite having the deepest data access in the industry, he assumed secondary channels wouldn't matter much for his market — until he discovered over half of his cabin's revenue was coming through VRBO.
Tom brings the conversation home to the Smokies with his own company's history: Mountain Laurel Chalets was a late Airbnb adopter, staying on VRBO and SmokyMountains.com for years over concerns about merchant-of-record structure, before the market shifted decisively toward Airbnb in Gatlinburg around 2018. Today, OTAs make up roughly 20–25% of the company's bookings — but the real focus of the episode is direct bookings, which Tom frames as the more important, and more overlooked, asset most owners don't realize they have. Mountain Laurel Chalets books 70–80% of its reservations directly, with 57% of guests being repeat visitors and 25% having stayed five or more times — a track record Tom traces back to Dot and Ralph Ogle picking up the phone in 1972, decades before any platform existed.
The episode closes with concrete questions every owner should ask — starting with a simple audit of where your last 10 bookings actually came from — and a pointed challenge to owners working with management companies: if, after several years, a manager still shows 100% OTA dependency with no direct booking strategy, no repeat guest relationships, and no property identity beyond its Airbnb listing, that's a business built on borrowed ground.
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- Nearly half of all U.S. listings are single-channel dependent. AirDNA data shared by chief economist Jamie Lane on The Check-In podcast shows 48% of vacation rental listings in the U.S. rely on just one platform — a pattern that holds across the UK and Europe, and applies to professional management companies, not just individual hosts.
- Even data experts get surprised by their own assumptions. Jamie Lane, who has access to data on 12 million global short-term rental properties, discovered over half of the revenue from his own Blue Ridge Mountains cabin came through VRBO — a channel he'd assumed wouldn't move the needle.
- Market-specific channel behavior varies widely. In Germany, more than 30% of listings aren't on Airbnb at all, with Booking.com dominant instead — a reminder that assumptions about which platforms matter should be tested locally, not inherited from other markets.
- Mountain Laurel Chalets was a deliberately late Airbnb adopter. The company held off due to concerns over merchant-of-record structure before the Smokies market shifted decisively toward Airbnb around 2018; today OTAs represent roughly 20–25% of the company's bookings.
- Direct bookings make up 70–80% of Mountain Laurel Chalets' reservations. That track record traces back to founders Ralph and Dot Ogle building genuine, phone-based guest relationships starting in 1972 — long before any booking platform existed.
- Repeat guests are a defining metric. About 57% of Mountain Laurel Chalets' guests are repeat visitors, and 25% of all reservations come from guests who've stayed five or more times — some more than 10, 20, or 30 times.
- OTA commissions typically run 15–20% per booking. That cost either disappears entirely on a direct booking or gets reinvested into the guest experience — money Tom argues compounds meaningfully over a guest relationship that spans multiple stays.
- A simple audit anyone can run today. Tom's practical challenge: pull up your last 10 bookings and see where they actually came from — not as a crisis diagnosis, but as an honest data point to start from.
- Questions worth asking any management company. What percentage of bookings are direct versus OTA? Which channels are you listed on, and why? Is there a strategy to build beyond the platforms, or is the property simply being fed to them?
