Your own booking site or a marketplace listing

How a marketplace works

Marketplaces such as Peerspace and Tagvenue list spaces from many owners and sell them to people searching for a place to hold a shoot, a meeting or an event. Listing is free on both, according to their own pages. They earn a commission on every booking that comes through them; the current figures from their own pages are in the table below.

On Peerspace the host's service fee is charged on the booking amount and on extra fees such as cleaning and add-ons, and guests pay a processing fee on top. Tagvenue's rate depends on the category; categories with mandatory online payments, such as meetings, production and dry hire, are in the higher group. Both take online payments through Stripe and pay you out, and Tagvenue deducts its commission automatically.

What a marketplace does well

Being found is the real reason to list. A marketplace already has people searching it for a space to book, people who would never have typed your studio's name into a search engine. For a new studio, or one in a city where nobody knows it yet, that reach can be worth the commission, and you pay nothing until a booking arrives.

Who owns the client

A client who found you on a marketplace books, pays and talks to you through it. Peerspace's help center says all bookings and payments must take place on its platform and that hosts keep communications and bookings there; failing that affects your eligibility to host. That's a fair rule for the marketplace's business, but it means the relationship with that client runs through someone else, and so does the commission on every repeat booking they make there.

On your own site the client is yours from the first booking: their account, their e-mails from your studio's name, their history in your admin, and an export of your studio's data whenever you want it.

What your own site lets you do

With Ruumio the website is yours: home page, content pages and the booking calendar in your colours and languages, on your own domain if you like. You set the rules per room (hours, buffers, cancellation deadline and refund policy) and the prices, including peak and day rates and extras.

Regulars are where your own site pays off. Member plans with hours each month, hour packs, gift cards and discount codes keep people coming back, and none of their bookings carries a marketplace commission. Ruumio is a monthly plan plus a small fee on payments made through it; the money goes to your own Stripe account.

Using both

Keep marketplace bookings on the marketplace, as its rules ask, and use your own site for the clients who find you through search, word of mouth or your social media. To avoid double bookings, block marketplace bookings in Ruumio: if the marketplace gives you a calendar link (iCal), Ruumio reads it for the room; otherwise add the time yourself. Each room's own iCal feed can go the other way wherever a calendar link is accepted.

Questions