"Google? Instagram? Repeat guests? Curious what actually drives consistent traffic."
— Host with direct booking site, Reddit
I see some version of this question every week. Someone with a direct booking site, decent photos, fair pricing, and zero clarity on where their guests actually come from.
The answers are always the same. "Build an email list." "Post on social media." "Get listed on Google Vacation Rentals." All reasonable advice. None of it answers the real question.
The real question isn't which channel. It's which channel brings guests who spend.
Clicks are not guests
Consider an operator running ads on Instagram and Google simultaneously. Same property. Same dates. Same offer. Instagram drove three times the traffic. Google drove three times the revenue.
The Instagram clicks browsed. They looked at photos. Some of them saved the listing. Almost none of them booked. The Google clicks came in with intent. They already knew the dates, already knew the area, already had a budget in mind. They converted at a completely different rate.
If you only measured traffic, Instagram won. If you measured what matters, Google won by a landslide.
Most operators are measuring traffic.
The channel isn't the strategy
The channel matters less than the quality of the person it delivers. A visitor from a Google search for "family villa Tuscany sleeps 12" is a fundamentally different person than someone who clicked a pretty photo on Instagram explore.
One of them has a trip in mind. The other is daydreaming.
Both show up as "one session" in your analytics. Both count as "one visitor." But they are not the same visitor. Treating them the same is how operators end up confused about why their traffic is up and their bookings are flat.
"I built a website and it's Googlable, first hit when you search in my area, but you still don't get a lot of traffic."
— Direct booking operator, Reddit
He had visibility. He had ranking. What he didn't have was any way to tell whether the traffic he was getting was worth anything.
The question behind the question
When someone asks "what drives consistent traffic," they're really asking something deeper. They're asking: why am I getting views but not bookings? Why did last month work and this month doesn't? Why does my neighbor seem fully booked while I'm sitting at 60%?
The answer to all of those is the same. It's not about volume. It's about who.
Consistent traffic that doesn't convert is worse than inconsistent traffic that does. I'd rather have 200 visitors a month where 15 of them book than 2,000 visitors where 15 of them book. The first scenario means my audience is dialed. The second means I'm paying to attract people who were never going to become guests.
"Looking at behavior by traffic source is something only the top 1% of managers do. Everyone else just sees a number."
— Conrad, revenue management consultant
What would change if you could see it
Imagine knowing that your Google organic visitors spend 40% more per booking than your social media visitors. Imagine knowing that repeat visitors actually convert at a lower rate than first-timers. Imagine knowing that the traffic from a specific referral source spend double what your average guest pays.
You'd stop spreading your budget evenly. You'd stop posting on platforms that generate likes but not bookings. You'd stop treating every visitor like they have the same value, because they don't.
The question was never "what drives consistent traffic." The question is "what drives consistent revenue."
And the only way to answer that is to stop looking at channels and start looking at the people those channels deliver.
Most operators can't do that today. Not because the data doesn't exist. Because nobody packaged it in a way that makes sense to someone running properties, not running a data team.
That's the gap. And it's massive.