Marie looked up from her coffee and said something I couldn’t shake.
“Last year, Airbnb charged me €3,200. Just for the right to host my own guests.”
She ran a beautiful villa in the Belgian Ardennes. For twenty years she’d welcomed families, couples and hikers. She knew her guests by name, had breakfast with them, sent them handwritten notes about the best trails nearby.
But Airbnb knew those guests too. Better than she did.
I’d love my own website, but hiring a designer costs thousands. And I can’t code.
€3,200. Gone. Paid to someone else’s platform.
Those words stayed with me.
The problem nobody is solving
Vacation rental hosts are stuck between two bad options.
Stay on Airbnb or Booking.com — easy, high-visibility, bookings come in automatically. But you surrender 15–18% of every booking to commission. You don’t own the customer relationship. The platform can change the rules tomorrow, suspend your account, or raise its fees — and you have no say in any of it.
Build your own website — you keep 100% of your revenue and own the relationship entirely. But it costs €2,000–5,000, takes months, and requires ongoing technical work that most hosts simply don’t have time for.
For most rental owners, neither option works. So they stay on Airbnb. And keep paying.
The question I kept asking myself
I write code. I’ve been building digital products for years. And after every conversation with a rental host, the same thought kept nagging at me:
Why doesn’t this exist yet?
It’s not a technical problem. The tools exist. The data exists. Only the right combination — simple, fast, for people without technical knowledge — was missing.
What if you could have a professional booking website in ten minutes, built specifically around your property? With a calendar, payments, everything. No templates. Just your story, online.
That thought wouldn’t let me go. So I built the answer.
How Lodgaro works
You upload a few photos of your property. Lodgaro analyses the atmosphere, the style and the character of your home — then generates a complete, personalised booking website tailored around it. With a calendar, payments and everything you need to start taking direct bookings right away.
No templates. No technical knowledge required. The whole process takes less than 15 minutes.
Two plans, one goal:
- FLEX — €0/month + 3% commission. You only pay when you earn.
- PRO — €29.99/month + 0% commission. Everything is yours.
What hosts actually want
I assumed rental owners mainly wanted to save money. That’s true — but it goes deeper than that.
One of our beta testers put it this way:
“My guests now book directly through my own site. No platform standing between us, no commission disappearing. This feels like running my own business again.”
Ownership. That’s what they want. Not just paying less commission, but the feeling that the business truly belongs to them.
This is just the beginning
I’m building Lodgaro for owners like Marie — people who do exceptional work and deserve to be rewarded fairly for it.
If you have a vacation rental and want to see what your own site could look like: try it for free at lodgaro.com.
No credit card. No obligations.
— Dylan, founder of Lodgaro
Written by
Dylan
Dylan is the founder of Lodgaro, a platform that generates AI-powered booking websites for vacation rental owners. He's on a mission to help hosts take back control of their business and keep more of their hard-earned money.