Hostfully just published what they are calling the largest study of vacation rental tech stacks ever produced. 2,248 active operators. 31,474 individual integration records. Ranking eight tool categories, I read it the way I read most industry research: looking for what the data is actually saying, and beyond what the headline focuses on.
Some of it confirmed what I have seen firsthand. Some of it should change how you think about your marketing budget. And one finding in particular explains why so many property managers stay stuck while others pull away and it has almost nothing to do with pricing tools or cleaning software.
Let me tell you what I saw.
The report tracks adoption rates across eight categories of operational software, broken down by portfolio size. Dynamic pricing leads at 77 to 85 percent adoption across every tier. Payment processing is near-universal at 91 percent. Cleaning and turnover software climbs steeply as portfolios grow. These are the headline numbers, and the industry will spend the next six months talking about them.
But the number I keep coming back to is this one: only 23 percent of operators with one to five properties use marketing or analytics tools. At 100-plus properties, that number is 67 percent.
Marketing adoption triples as operators scale. The question the report doesn’t answer — but every operator should be asking — is whether the marketing caused the growth, or just followed it.
The Hostfully team interprets this as evidence that marketing investment drives growth rather than follows it. I think they are right. And I think most small operators are sitting on the wrong side of that gap, waiting until they feel big enough to market, when marketing is exactly what makes you big enough.
I built a creator program on a $30,000 annual budget — not monthly, annual — that generated nearly $2 million in revenue, 600 leads a month, and a 34 percent conversion rate. We were not large when we started just six units. We marketed like we intended to be while scaling to twenty-three, along with an on-site spa and glass dome event space and the growth punched way above our market weight class at the time.
The report shows that 77 percent of single-property operators already use dynamic pricing software. That adoption holds steady all the way through to large portfolios. Operators understand that pricing is not a set-and-forget decision. They have accepted that a tool needs to be in the room making those calls dynamically.
Good. That is table stakes now.
What is not table stakes — and what the data makes painfully clear — is that the same operators who have automated their pricing have not automated, funded, or even structured their marketing. Dynamic pricing optimizes the revenue from demand that already exists. Marketing creates the demand in the first place.
If you are running PriceLabs or Wheelhouse and spending nothing on marketing, you are optimizing for a pool of potential guests that is smaller than it needs to be. You are pricing efficiently inside an audience problem.
This is the core misunderstanding I see constantly in vacation rental marketing. Owners and property managers treat pricing software as the growth lever. It is not. It is a revenue protection tool. Growth comes from visibility, from trust, from content that puts your property in front of someone before they are even searching for it. That is the work the 23 percent are not doing.
When I started working with creators — there have been nearly 500 of them now, mostly in travel and local lifestyle — the conversation in this industry was about control. Brands wanted approval rights over every post, usage rights over every image, scripts for every video. The instinct was to treat creators like a production vendor rather than a distribution channel.
What that instinct was really protecting against was trust. Trust that someone else’s voice would represent your property well. Trust that authenticity would convert better than polish. Trust that letting go of the message was not the same as losing it.
The Hostfully data captures something adjacent to this. The operators who invest in marketing tools are the ones who have already decided that growth requires infrastructure. Not just software that runs the property, but systems that grow the audience. They are building trust at scale. The operators who skip marketing tools are still running on hope and OTA algorithms and it’s not a long-term growth model.
Airbnb and VRBO are not your marketing strategy. They are your distribution channel. There is a difference. A distribution channel puts your listing in front of people who are already looking. A marketing strategy puts your brand in front of people who are not looking yet, and then helps secure tht you are the first place they think of when they are.
No category in the Hostfully report shows a sharper growth curve than vacation rental cleaning and turnover software. At one to five properties, 52 percent of operators use tools like Turno or Breezeway. At 100-plus properties, that number is 88 percent.
The report frames this as an operational necessity. And it is. But read it from a marketing perspective and it tells you something else.
The operators who have built the systems to reliably turn over properties at scale are the ones positioned to make and keep promises to guests. Consistent cleanliness, reliable check-ins, no-surprise experiences — these are the foundation of review volume, review quality, and repeat booking rates. They are the thing that makes your creator content credible, because the guest experience actually matches what the content showed.
You can create the most compelling content about a property and still lose on trust if the execution on the ground does not match the promise. Operations and marketing are not separate departments in vacation rental. They are the same reputation.
This is what I saw firsthand building a program from scratch at a treehouse resort as the fourth employee. The marketing worked because the product was real. We could put creators on property and trust that what they experienced would be what they shared. The cleaning software curve in this data tells me the operators running at 88 percent adoption at scale have figured out the same thing: you cannot market your way out of an operations problem.
The Hostfully report is a snapshot of what operators are doing. It is not a prescription for what works. And that distinction matters, because adoption data tells you what is popular, not what is optimal.
Here is the question I would push every operator to sit with: If you are in the 77 percent using dynamic pricing software and the 23 percent not using marketing tools, what is your plan for growing the audience you are pricing for?
OTA dependence is a real risk, and it is not getting smaller. Airbnb’s algorithm changes. Platform fees climb. Direct booking is not just a nice idea anymore, it is a margin protection strategy. But direct booking does not happen without an audience that knows you exist, trusts you enough to bypass the OTA, and has a reason to come back.
That audience is built through marketing. Through content. Through creator partnerships that reach people where they are actually discovering travel — not on Airbnb, but on Instagram, on TikTok, in group chats, in newsletters, in travel articles, in conversations with friends who stayed somewhere they loved and cannot stop talking about.
The data says two in three large operators are investing in marketing and analytics. They did not get large and then decide to market. They marketed, and that is part of how they got large.
Start with the marketing gap. Not because everything else in the report is irrelevant — the dynamic pricing data alone is worth studying — but because the marketing adoption curve is the number most likely to predict where you will be in three years.
The operators at 100-plus properties did not all stumble into scale. Most of them built toward it. They invested in systems — operational and marketing — before those systems felt necessary. They did not wait until the revenue proved the spend. They spent to generate the revenue.
A $30,000 annual marketing budget that is structured, creator-led, and built on trust infrastructure will outperform a $300,000 budget running generic paid ads with no strategy behind them. I have seen it. The budget is not the constraint. The system is.
Read the Hostfully Report. The data is worth your time. Then ask yourself which side of the marketing gap you are on — and what it would take to move.