Short-Term Letting Register: Airbnb vs Your Website

On 1 December, Fáilte Ireland is due to open a national register that every short-term let in the country must join by 31 December. If you rent out a cottage, an apartment or a room for stays of up to 21 nights, that includes you. Most coverage so far has been about planning and housing policy, not the practical question owners keep putting to me: once the register is live, does it matter whether my bookings come through Airbnb or through my own website?

It matters a great deal. The register applies to every channel equally, but the channels do not handle it equally. Platforms are being turned into enforcement points, with legal duties to display your number, run random checks and take listings down when instructed. Your own website has none of that machinery. You put the number there yourself, nobody verifies it for you, and no third party can switch it off on a Tuesday morning. That is both its weakness and its strength.

One caveat. The Short Term Letting and Tourism Bill has been published but has not yet completed its passage through the Oireachtas, and Fáilte Ireland says registration opens once it has. Verify the final text before acting on anything that hangs on precise wording.

What the Register Requires From You

When the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment published the Bill on 6 October, it set out the core obligations. Its guidance page fills in the rest:

Every unit let for up to 21 nights at a time must be registered with Fáilte Ireland through an online portal. Each unit, not each owner.
Each unit gets its own registration number, which must appear on all listings and advertisements.
A nominal annual fee applies. The amount had not been announced at the time of writing.
You declare that the unit complies with statutory requirements, planning included. Owners in towns of 20,000 people or fewer get two years from 23 October 2026 to regularise planning; in larger towns and cities, compliance is confirmed at the point of registration.
Enforcement against hosts runs through fixed payment notices and summary offences. For serious breaches, platforms face sanctions of up to 2% of worldwide annual turnover.

The date has already moved once. The register was meant to launch on 20 May 2026, the day EU Regulation 2024/1028 began applying, and the Irish Times reported that month that it had slipped to December after internal government debate about rural tourism. The European Commission noted at the time that short-term rentals make up roughly a quarter of tourist accommodation on offer across the EU. That explains why Brussels wanted the data, and why the platforms carry most of the compliance load.

Airbnb vs Your Own Website at a Glance

Once the register is live, the two channels behave very differently. The short version:

Question	Airbnb or another platform	Your own website
Where the number appears	A field the platform must provide on every listing	Wherever you put it, and nowhere if you forget
Who checks it	Platform random checks, plus monthly data sent to the authorities	Nobody, until someone inspects or complains
When something is flagged	The listing can be removed or disabled on request	No third party takes the page down; correcting it is your job
What each booking costs	About 15.5% for most hosts on Airbnb's single fee	Your website cost plus card processing
Who keeps the guest	The platform holds the relationship	You hold the contact details and the repeat booking

Where the Registration Number Has to Appear

On a platform, this is largely handled for you. The EU regulation obliges platforms to build listing forms where hosts declare whether a registration scheme applies and enter the number, which is then shown clearly on the listing. Type it in once, verify it, move on.

Your own website is a different animal. Neither the Department nor Fáilte Ireland names "your own website" in their guidance; both say the number must be shown on all listings and advertisements. A page with photographs of your cottage, a nightly rate and a booking button is hard to describe as anything other than an advertisement, so my advice is plain: put the number on it. Then check the wording of the Act once it passes, or ask your solicitor, because the final obligation may be narrower or wider than the guidance suggests.

In practice that means:

the number on each property page, in plain text near the price or the booking button, not buried in a footer
a separate number for each unit, if you let more than one
the number in your booking confirmation email, because the EU regulation also expects hosts to give guests the registration number of the unit they have booked
the same number on any directory or social profile you control

Plain text matters. A number baked into a photograph or a PDF cannot be copied by a guest or found by anyone verifying it.

The failure here is rarely dramatic. It is a website built years ago by someone who has since moved on, where the owner has no login and every edit means an email and an invoice. From 1 January, that site is an advertisement running without a number, and its owner cannot fix it in an afternoon. I have spent twenty years watching business owners locked out of their own content by the people they paid to build it. A legal deadline is the worst possible moment to discover you are one of them.

Who Checks the Number, and How

Platforms carry the checking burden. Under the EU regulation they must randomly check hosts' declarations and send monthly data to the authorities through a national single digital entry point: nights rented, guest counts, the listing URL and the registration number.

So what does that mean for you? Every platform booking from January is reported and matched against your number. No threat if you are compliant. But a typo or a unit registered against the wrong address will surface quickly, and the first you hear of it may be a disabled listing rather than a polite email.

Your own website reports nothing to anyone. Do not mistake that for a loophole. The duty to register, display the number and declare your income does not change with the channel. Only the person verifying the details changes, and on your own site, that person is you.

When a Listing Gets Flagged

This is the row that should concern anyone who takes most of their bookings through a single platform.

The Bill gives Fáilte Ireland the power to require platforms to remove or disable access to listings with missing or invalid registration details. That is a sensible power, aimed at operators who were never going to register. It will also catch honest mistakes, because every new register does in its first year.

Consider a composite case, built from the way these things tend to unfold. A couple in Leitrim let two converted stone cottages near the Shannon-Erne Waterway, with most bookings arriving through Airbnb. They register both units in December, but the number entered on one listing belongs to the other cottage, a simple transposition made late on a busy evening. In February a random check could flag the mismatch, and the listing goes dark. February is when people book Easter and early-summer breaks. How long a correction takes to work through the platform and the register, nobody yet knows, because the process has never run.

If their own website is current, last year's guests can book directly in the meantime. If it is a three-page brochure nobody has opened since 2021, they have nothing. Lost leads, in the weeks that fill the summer.

The lesson is not that platforms are dangerous. Concentration is. A single channel that can be switched off by a process you do not control is a dependency, and every dependency needs a fallback.

A register check that flags one listing switches off that channel until the details are corrected.

What Each Booking Costs

Airbnb is partway through changing how it charges. Its help centre describes two structures. Under the older split fee, most hosts pay around 3% and the guest pays a separate service fee of roughly 14% to 16.5%. Under the single host-only fee, which Airbnb says is now mandatory for most hosts and which replaces the split fee as hosts are migrated, most hosts pay about 15.5%, with others typically between 14% and 16%.

Put that against a hypothetical week at €1,000. At 15.5%, roughly €155 of it goes to the platform. Web60's €60 a year, with hosting, SSL and backups included, is less than half the fee on that single booking, and it pays for the whole website. A direct booking still costs you something: a card processor takes its small percentage, and you have to earn the visit. But the gap is wide, and it widens with every repeat guest.

Other platforms have their own fee structures, and the clauses that once stopped owners offering a lower price direct are gone too. We covered that when rate parity clauses ended across the EU, so I will not repeat it here.

Who Keeps the Guest

This is the row I would weigh most heavily, and it has nothing to do with the register.

When a guest books through a platform, the platform owns the relationship. You get a first name, a message thread and, after checkout, a review. The guest who loved your cottage in October and wants to come back next summer will usually go back through the app, and you pay the fee a second time for a guest you already won.

On your own website, the booking gives you a name and an email address. Collect consent properly and you can tell past guests when next year's calendar opens. Repeat guests are the cheapest bookings any accommodation business ever takes. The same pattern sits behind every rented channel, and it is the central argument in our piece on renting a shop front on someone else's marketplace.

Where the Platforms Genuinely Earn Their Place

I would be doing you a disservice if I told you to delete your Airbnb listing. For a first season, with no past guests to email and no reputation to speak of, a platform is the right tool. It puts your cottage in front of visitors from Germany or the US who would never search Google for a townland they have not heard of. Payment, identity checks and cancellations are handled for you, with a review system no brand-new website can replicate. If you let a spare room a handful of weekends a year, the fee is a fair price for not thinking about any of that.

The case for your own website grows with every season you trade. Platforms are where new guests find you. Your website is where returning guests should book you. The register simply raises the cost of having only one of the two.

New guests often arrive through a platform. Returning guests can come straight to you.

What Your Own Website Cannot Do

Some honest limitations, because they are real.

Your website will not find you new guests on its own. Google, your Business Profile and word of mouth do that, and it takes seasons rather than weeks.

Calendar sync is the bigger operational trap. Owners running a website alongside a platform usually align calendars with iCal feeds, which Airbnb and the main WordPress booking plugins support. Those feeds sync on a schedule, not instantly, so the same night can be sold twice inside that window. A double booking in July is the call no owner wants to take. The fix is procedural: verify the sync after any change, keep a buffer on peak dates where you can, and decide in advance which booking you will honour if it ever happens.

You also become the data controller for every guest who books directly, which brings GDPR obligations the platform used to carry. Manageable, but your privacy policy needs to say what you collect and why, and your solicitor can tell you what else applies.

What a Register-Ready Website Needs

Strip it back and a website for a short-term let needs to do a few specific things before 31 December:

Show each unit's registration number in plain text where a guest will actually see it.
Let the owner change that number, or anything else, in minutes, without ringing anyone.
Take a booking, or at least an enquiry, without a platform sitting in the middle.
Store guest details securely, over HTTPS, with the data kept in the EU and backed up.

Agency brochures where every edit becomes a change request at €75 to €150 an hour fail the second test. So do free site builders that lock booking tools behind an upgrade. Nor does it take a €3,000 to €5,000 agency build, which is the old model, and a slow one.

This is the job Web60 was built for. Describe your cottages to the AI website builder and you get a professional WordPress site in under a minute, with full access to edit every page from day one. WordPress runs roughly four in ten of all websites according to W3Techs, which is why serious booking plugins, calendar sync included, come in WordPress versions. One-click staging lets you test a new booking plugin before you deploy it to production, so a broken booking form gets caught in staging rather than by a guest. Nightly backups and automatic pre-update snapshots mean a bad update is a rollback, not a rebuild. SSL is automatic, and everything runs on SmartHost's sovereign Irish cloud, so guest data stays in Ireland. Already have a site elsewhere? Migration is free.

Four Steps Before 31 December

Register. When Fáilte Ireland's portal opens, register every unit separately and keep a written note of which number belongs to which property.

Deploy the numbers. Add each number in plain text to its own property page and to your booking confirmation email.

Verify every channel. Check that each platform listing, your website and every profile you control shows the same, correct number for the same unit.

Test the fallback. Ask someone who stayed last year to try booking or enquiring directly, so you know the route works before you ever need it.

Conclusion

The register does not make platforms worse or your own website better. It makes the difference between them visible. A platform listing becomes compliant by design and, for the same reason, something that can be switched off by a check you never see. Your own website becomes entirely your responsibility, and entirely yours.

For most holiday-let owners the sensible setup in 2027 is both: platforms to find new guests, your own site for the people who already know where the kettle is. Register when the portal opens, put each number everywhere you advertise, and make sure that if one channel goes quiet for a fortnight, the guests who already love the place still have a way to book.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does the short-term letting register open in Ireland?

The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment says the register opens on 1 December 2026 and that all hosts must register by 31 December 2026. Fáilte Ireland, which runs the register, says registration opens once the Short Term Letting and Tourism Bill has been passed, so verify the date on Fáilte Ireland's site before you plan around it.

Do I need to show my registration number on my own website?

Official guidance says the number must appear on all listings and advertisements. It does not mention owners' own websites by name, but a page that describes your property, shows a price and takes bookings is very likely to be treated as an advertisement. The safe course is to display each unit's number in plain text on its page and in booking confirmations, and to check the wording of the final Act or ask your solicitor.

What happens if my Airbnb listing shows the wrong registration number?

Platforms must run random checks on the numbers hosts declare, and the Bill allows Fáilte Ireland to require platforms to remove or disable listings with missing or invalid details. A mistake could therefore take a listing offline until it is corrected. Record which number belongs to which unit and verify every listing once you have registered.

How much does Airbnb charge hosts?

According to Airbnb's help centre, most hosts on its single host-only fee pay about 15.5% of the booking, with others typically between 14% and 16%. The older split fee, usually around 3% for the host plus a guest service fee of roughly 14% to 16.5%, is being phased out as hosts are migrated.

Can I take direct bookings on a WordPress website?

Yes. WordPress has a wide choice of booking plugins, and many of them can sync availability with Airbnb and other platforms through iCal calendar feeds. That sync runs on a schedule rather than instantly, so verify your calendars after any change and watch peak dates closely to avoid double bookings.

Short-Term Letting Register: What Changes on Airbnb and on Your Own Website