Short answer: yes. If you're not offering a mobile rate yet, it's one of the easiest wins available to you - a small, targeted discount that channels reward with outsized visibility and bookings.
An increasing number of vacation rental channels now let hosts offer discounted rates to guests booking on a mobile device. Mobile discounts have been around in some form for close to a decade, but more channels are getting in on the act, and the data on what mobile rates actually do for a listing has gotten a lot clearer. This article covers what mobile rates are, why they work, what the numbers say, and how to turn them on across your channels.
What are mobile rates for vacation rentals?
Mobile rates, mobile-exclusive rates or mobile discounts all mean the same thing: guests who book using a mobile device - a smartphone or tablet - pay less than guests booking from a desktop.
Generally, the discount applies whenever a guest uses any mobile device. Some channels let you narrow this further, for example showing the rate only to guests using a dedicated app rather than a mobile browser. Limiting your discount to app users only is technically possible on some channels, but it's not usually recommended - you'd be cutting out the much larger pool of mobile browser bookings for little benefit.
Why offer mobile rates?
For a long time, the argument for mobile rates was mostly intuitive: mobile search is growing, so meet guests where they are. That's still true, but it's no longer the whole story. Your.Rentals' 2025 booking data, drawn from hundreds of thousands of bookings across Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Vrbo, Agoda and Trivago, shows just how much a mobile rate moves the needle:
- Listings with a mobile rate get ~4.4x more visibility than listings without one.
- Those same listings get ~4.3x more bookings.
- Separately, Booking.com reports that mobile rates give partners 30% more bookings from mobile traffic - on top of the fact that 50% of accommodation searches and bookings already happen on mobile, and 80% of travellers use a mobile app to research a trip.
Channels actively push mobile deals with badges and boosted placement in mobile search results, so a mobile rate isn't just a discount guests notice - it's a signal the algorithm rewards. In a competitive market, that's a meaningful edge: if a competing listing offers a mobile rate and yours doesn't, theirs is more likely to be the one that shows up first.
Do all channels support mobile rates?
Not yet - plenty of channels still have no way for hosts to set a mobile discount. But the ones that matter most already do: Agoda, Booking.com and Expedia all support mobile rates today, and that list is only likely to grow.
What discount should you set?
Our own 2025 data points to a modest 5-10% mobile-only discount as the sweet spot.
Note that Booking.com specifically recommends a minimum of 10% to activate the mobile rate badge, so check the minimum on each channel before you set it. From there, monitor total bookings and revenue, not just mobile bookings in isolation - the goal is incremental demand, not guests who would have booked at full price simply shifting to the discounted rate.
How do I offer mobile discounts to guests?
Every channel handles this slightly differently, which is normally the annoying part - setting a mobile rate on Booking.com, then doing it again on Expedia, then again on Agoda.
With Your.Rentals', you set it once and it syncs to every connected channel that supports the feature, so you're not maintaining separate settings per platform.
Turn it on in a few clicks with Your.Rentals
If you're managing a portfolio of listings, checking each one for whether a mobile rate is switched on isn't a great use of your time - and it's exactly the kind of easy-to-miss setting that quietly costs bookings.
That's what Opportunities in Your.Rentals is for. It scans your listings and tells you exactly what to enable to get more bookings - whether that's a program you qualify for, like Booking.com's Genius or Preferred Partner, or a setting working against you, like a strict cancellation policy, on-request bookings, or a missing mobile rate.
Opportunities is tailored to each listing's individual eligibility, lets you enable a fix without leaving the page, and supports bulk-applying across multiple listings at once - so if a chunk of your portfolio is missing a mobile rate, you can fix all of them in one pass instead of one at a time. You can then track the impact in Reports as bookings grow.
Already a Your.Rentals customer? Head straight to Opportunities to enable the mobile discount across all your selected listings and channels at once.
