Targeted marketing for short-term rentals: what data you can use and how to measure results

Most hosts already have the data they need for more precise marketing: their booking history, the statistics in Airbnb and in the Booking.com extranet, the school holiday calendar and public data on tourists. A targeted campaign uses this data to put the right offer in front of a specific group of guests at the time they are looking for accommodation, and then measures what it brought in. In short-term rentals, however, the room for manoeuvre is limited: the contact details of Airbnb guests cannot be used for marketing, commercial emails require consent, and analytics and advertising on your website only start after cookie consent. This guide shows what data you have, what you are allowed to use, which targeted offers you can set up directly on the platforms, which guest segments are worth pursuing and how to work out whether a campaign pays off.

What data you already have and where to find it

You do not need an expensive tool to get started. The first data set is your own booking history. On Airbnb, the earnings dashboard generates monthly and annual statements going back to the month you started hosting, which you can download, and lets you run custom reports for any listing and any period. Below the earnings chart you can see the total number of nights booked and the average length of stay. On Booking.com, the reservation statements in the Finance section of the extranet cover all reservations included in your commission invoices and can be downloaded every month as XLS or CSV files. Put into a single spreadsheet, this data shows you in which months most nights stay empty, how long guests stay and how far ahead they book.

The second set comes from the platforms’ statistics. On Airbnb, the Insights section is available once you turn on the professional hosting tools and covers conversion, occupancy and rates, quality and hosting progress, with comparisons against similar listings in your area, for the past 12 months. Conversion is split into three stages: impressions on the first page of search results, the step from search to the listing page and the step from the listing page to a booking. There you can also see how far in advance guests book and how often they come back. On Booking.com, demand data sits in the Analytics section of the extranet: how far ahead travellers search, what length of stay they look for, on which device, from which countries people most often search for accommodation in your area and what type of travellers they are.

The third set is public data. According to INS, Romania’s National Institute of Statistics, in the first half of 2026 most foreign tourists staying in Romania came from Germany (114,800), Italy (105,700) and the United States (78,800). Which markets matter for your area is covered in our analysis of foreign tourists. The school calendar tells you when families are searching: the winter holiday runs from 23 December 2026 to 10 January 2027, the ski holiday lasts one week between 15 February and 7 March 2027, depending on the county, and the spring holiday runs from 24 April to 4 May 2027. How to turn these periods into prices is explained in our cold-season pricing calendar.

What data you are allowed to use for marketing

Having a piece of information does not mean you can use it for anything. Article 5(1)(b) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that data collected for one purpose is not further processed in a manner incompatible with that purpose. You collect the data on the occupancy form, for example, to meet a legal obligation, not to send offers. How to handle it correctly is explained in our guide to digital check-in, the occupancy form and GDPR. The table below shows, for each type of contact, whether you can send them offers.

Two rules apply to everyone. Anyone who receives offers from you can object at any time to direct marketing, including profiling for that purpose, and after that you no longer use their data for marketing. The right must be explicitly brought to the person’s attention at the latest at the first communication (GDPR, Art. 21(2)–(4)). In addition, you may not conceal the sender’s identity or send messages without a valid address at which the recipient can ask for them to stop (Law No. 506/2004, Art. 12(3)). Why you can promote offers to Booking.com customers but not to Airbnb customers is explained in our analysis of platform dependence and direct bookings.

These rules are enforced. On 31 July 2026, the data protection authority (ANSPDCP) announced a fine of 30,000 lei for cookies that were not strictly necessary and were placed without visitors’ consent. In the same investigation, the controller also received a fine of 78,570 lei for insufficient security: the website had been attacked, its platform did not match the producer’s official version and passwords were weak. On 6 August 2026, ANSPDCP announced, among other measures, a fine of 50,000 lei for commercial communications through automated calling systems without the prior express consent of the people called. For a host with their own website, the takeaway is practical: the cookie banner must block analytics and advertising pixels until consent is given, and the website platform must be kept up to date.

Targeted offers directly on the platforms

The simplest targeted campaign uses no personal data: you set it up directly on the platform, and the offer only reaches the group you choose. The platforms target different things, though. Booking.com lets you choose the country and the device, while Airbnb lets you choose the timing of the booking and the length of stay.

The limit of country rates. For a property in Romania, the EEA rule matters a great deal. Booking.com treats the European Economic Area as a single market: if you want to target travellers from any EEA country, you have to select the whole region, that is, the EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. So you cannot make an offer only for Germans, only for Italians or only for Romanians. Countries outside the EEA can be chosen separately, where the option is available and permitted, and Booking.com notes that the feature may not be available in some countries. Your Analytics data tells you whether it is worth it: if a market outside the EEA appears among the top five countries, you can test a discount just for that market.

What does not stack. Country rates stack with Genius discounts and with basic, last-minute and early booker deals, but never combine with mobile rates or with Getaway, Early Year, Late Escape, Black Friday or limited-time deals. Mobile rates follow the same rules. Booking.com says that, when activated in the app and on the mobile website, they reach 30% more potential guests than in the app alone. For the same nights, treat the country offer and the mobile offer as alternatives, and compare them with the seasonal deals before you activate them. This winter’s seasonal deals are described in our guide to off-season offers.

Airbnb promotions. Airbnb’s pricing tools do not include a country discount. Instead, you can target the timing of the booking and the length of stay. Weekly and monthly discounts of at least 10% get a special callout in search and on the listing page, with the old price struck through. A new listing can offer 20% off its first 3 bookings. A custom promotion lets you choose the dates and the discount and gets the special callout from 15%, but it comes with conditions: at least 3 bookings, at least one of them in the past 365 days, dates open in the calendar for at least 28 days, no more than 50% of the nights in a month and no active weekly or monthly discount. Airbnb recommends promotions of at least 7 consecutive nights and requires the discount to be genuine.

The guest segments worth pursuing

A segment is a group of guests with the same need and the same search period. For a small property, five or six segments are enough. The signals in the table come from the sources above; the offers and channels are our recommendations.

Booking.com notes that families often book further in advance and stay longer, which means fewer check-ins. For business travellers, INS data shows that non-resident tourists who came to Romania on business spent 800.7 million lei in the first quarter of 2026. Do not send the same offer to everyone, though: a family discount means nothing to a consultant coming for three nights to visit a factory, and a blanket discount also cuts your revenue on nights that would have sold anyway.

Campaigns on your own channels

Email. Build your list only from direct guests and from subscribers who have agreed. For direct guests, you can rely on the customer exception if your booking form clearly gives them the option to refuse offers. For other visitors you need consent, and a pre-ticked box is not valid consent (GDPR, Recital 32). Keep proof of consent: the date, the form and the text the person saw. Every message needs an unsubscribe link that works. Our recommendation is to send few messages, tied to specific moments, for example the opening of the calendar for the winter holiday, rather than a monthly newsletter with no real subject. How to build the form and the website is covered in our guide to having your own website.

Social media ads. According to DataReportal, in October 2025 ads could reach 10.3 million users on Facebook, 8.71 million adults on TikTok and 6 million users on Instagram in Romania. These are advertising audiences, not monthly active users. In Meta Ads Manager, location targeting includes people who live in a place, have recently been there or often go there, and Meta states that accuracy is not guaranteed. Interests and behaviours, for example “Frequent travelers”, are layered on top of location targeting, but Meta treats them as audience suggestions, and for conversion objectives it automatically applies Advantage+ detailed targeting, with no option to turn it off. Your ads may therefore also reach people outside your selection, one more reason to measure bookings and not just clicks. Do not upload your guests’ email list to an advertising platform if the information you gave them does not cover that purpose: it is a new processing operation that needs its own legal basis.

Local partnerships. Event organisers, conference centres, ski schools, clinics or local companies can recommend your accommodation to their guests. Give each partner their own link or code, so you know which bookings they brought, and agree in writing what they get in return. How to build the local reputation that makes these recommendations possible is covered in our guide to personal branding.

How to measure: UTM parameters and cost per booking

UTM parameters are tags added to the end of a link, which Google Analytics reads to show you where a visitor came from. Google recommends always using three of them: utm_source (the source, for example newsletter), utm_medium (the channel, for example email or cpc) and utm_campaign (the campaign name). A link in a winter newsletter might look like this: example.com/booking?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=winter-holiday. With utm_content you can tell apart two versions of the same ad. Google also recommends one source per platform, one medium per channel and consistent names written in lower case.

Measurement has its limits. Website analytics only start after cookie consent, so some visitors do not show up in your reports, and Meta warns that Google Analytics reports may not match its own. UTM parameters only work on your website: on Airbnb and Booking.com you cannot see where each visitor came from, so there you compare indicators before and after the campaign, that is, conversion in Airbnb Insights and bookings in your Booking.com statements. The most reliable indicator remains a simple one: how many new bookings the campaign brought in and what each one cost.

Work out the threshold in advance. We start from the same hypothetical average booking of 1,000 lei used in our guide to having your own website. On Airbnb, the single fee paid by the host is 15.5%, and a host who is not VAT-registered also pays 21% VAT on the fee, which comes to about 188 lei per booking. For direct payment we assumed a processing cost of 2%, or 20 lei. A direct booking that replaces an Airbnb booking therefore brings you at most 168 lei extra. Above this cost per booking, the campaign costs you more than the platform. For Booking.com, run the same calculation with the percentage in your contract.

The comparison with the commission only holds if the direct booking replaces one you would have received through the platform anyway. If a campaign fills nights that would otherwise have stayed empty, for example Sunday to Thursday in November, compare the cost per booking with what is left after cleaning, utilities, commission and taxes, not with the commission. In that case, even the first campaign in the table can be profitable. How to calculate what is left is shown in our analysis of costs and margins.

Common mistakes

• Sending offers to Airbnb guests. The platform’s policy prohibits using their contact details for marketing, including after the stay.
• Using occupancy form data for offers. You collected it for a legal obligation, and the GDPR prohibits using it for an incompatible purpose.
• Pre-ticking the newsletter box. A pre-ticked box is not valid consent.
• Starting advertising pixels before consent. Cookies that are not strictly necessary only start after the visitor accepts, and ANSPDCP fines breaches.
• Giving everyone the same discount. You lose revenue on nights that would have sold anyway. Target the weak periods and segments instead.
• Measuring likes, not bookings. Views and likes do not cover costs. Track bookings and the cost of each one.
• Activating offers that do not stack. On Booking.com, country rates do not combine with mobile rates or seasonal deals, so check the price the guest actually sees.

Frequently asked questions

Can I send offers to guests who booked through Airbnb?

No. Airbnb’s off-platform policy prohibits using guests’ contact details for marketing or for contact lists, as well as asking for other contact details through messages. Guests can still find you on their own, though, if your property’s name is easy to search for and the same everywhere. If they then book directly and do not opt out of offers, they become direct contacts.

Do I need consent to send offers to guests who booked directly?

Not necessarily. Law No. 506/2004 allows email offers to your own customers, for similar services, if you clearly gave them a simple, no-cost way to opt out, both when you collected the address and in every message. For people who have not booked with you, for example website subscribers, you need prior express consent. In both cases, anyone can object at any time, and after that you stop sending them offers.

Can I make an offer on Booking.com for German tourists only?

No. With country rates, the European Economic Area counts as a single market: if you choose an EEA country, the discount applies in all EEA countries. You can target countries outside the EEA separately, where the option is available. For German tourists you can use other channels, for example ads with location targeting set to Germany, pointing to your listing or your website, at the same price for everyone.

How much do I need to spend on ads?

There is no amount that suits everyone. Start from the cost-per-booking threshold: in our hypothetical example, 168 lei, if the direct booking replaces an Airbnb booking. Test a small budget, for example what three or four bookings at the threshold would cost, measure with UTM parameters and increase the budget only for campaigns that stay below the threshold. For nights that would otherwise stay empty, the threshold can be higher, because you compare it with your margin, not with the commission.