Guests will tell you it is cheaper to take the family to Spain than to book your house. They have usually looked at a sale week with flights and food already in the price, then at your August rate, which is the house only. Add the pub and a wet Tuesday and you look expensive. You are not being compared with the same week.
What they are holding up
The Spain number is a deal. Which? in May 2026 found packages for two, first week of August, starting at about £700 with flights. The cheapest all-inclusive week for two was about £1,610. Free child places can put four people on a plane, in a hotel and at the buffet for a figure that still looks like one cottage week.
Your number is peak, and it is only the house. A small UK let averaged across the whole year came to about £920 for seven nights. Cornwall was about £1,280. Devon about £1,250. Edinburgh about £1,600. Those are year-round averages, not your August week. None of them include breakfast, dinner, petrol or the aquarium when it rains.
A £1,800 deal that already contains flights and food will beat a £1,800 cottage that contains neither. That is not you adding a surcharge. It is two receipts.
The Which? average Spain package for two that same August week was £1,812, or £2,328 all-inclusive. Put that against the year-round £920 UK let and Britain looks cheaper. That is not the pair of numbers on the guest’s phone.
Why your week costs more to put on
The cheap abroad number is not a cottage price. Tour operators buy hotel rooms and plane seats in bulk, months ahead, by the thousand. They get a bed rate no one-house owner can match. An empty midweek seat still flies as part of a block. An empty week in your house is just an empty week. You are pricing one building. They are pricing a factory.
Britain then loads more onto that one building.
- People cost more. The National Living Wage is £12.71 from April 2026. The cleaner between parties is on that rate. So is the pub kitchen the guests walk to. A buffet in Marmaris is not.
- Tax on the stay is higher. A VAT-registered UK night and the meal out sit on 20 per cent. Most Spanish hotel stays sit on 10 per cent. Portugal 6 per cent. Greece 13 per cent. Turkey 10 per cent. The Treasury has no plan to cut the UK rate.
- The building costs more, and there is only one of it. Insurance, repairs, energy, and either council tax or business rates sit on your house. A 400-room resort splits the same kind of bill across a block that stays useful for more of the year.
- The useful season is shorter. February still has bills. August has to carry them. School holidays then squeeze almost every family with children into the same weeks, so that August rate is doing two jobs at once.
None of that makes your August week feel cheap to the family paying it. It is why the week cannot match a bulk-bought buffet on the raw number.
Point to this
- Deal week against peak house. They are holding a sale package with flights and food. You are quoting August, house only.
- Not the same product. Package: plane, hotel room, often buffet and a pool. Cottage: a whole house, a kitchen, usually parking, no airport, weather as it comes.
- They bought it wholesale. You did not. Rooms and seats bought in bulk by a tour operator are a different cost from one cottage.
- VAT and wages are higher here. 20 per cent on a VAT-registered night and the pub meal. £12.71 an hour for the people who service the stay.
- One house has to cover the quiet months. A resort spreads that cost. You cannot.
- The abroad headline is not the final bill. Bags, airport parking, insurance, transfers and the spend over the wristband sit outside the figure they quoted you.
- Sun is part of what they paid for. A week of pool weather is a different holiday from two washout days and a paid indoor attraction.
What each price actually buys
- Package: flights, a hotel room, transfers, and, if it is all-inclusive, three meals and most drinks.
- Cottage: the house, a kitchen, often parking, linen if you say so, seven nights with no airport day at each end.
- Usually in neither: travel insurance, paid attractions, a week’s pub dinners, spending money.
Compare house with house, or package with package.
If you let the house
A short line on your own site stops the row landing on “they just put the prices up”.
Say what the week includes. Parking, logs, a cot, dogs, towels.
Show a May price next to August. People forgive a school-holiday week more easily when the rest of the year is not the same number.
The platform cut is in the guest’s bill even when they never see it. Airbnb takes 15.5 per cent on most UK listings. Booking.com is about 15 per cent before Genius and Preferred extras. A direct booking on a site the owner controls is usually a 2 to 3 per cent card fee. Some of that gap can come off the week. Some of it can stay in the welcome.
StayLocal is built for that job and sits alongside the big listings rather than asking anyone to take the house down tomorrow. The demo is at cottage.demo-sites.uk.
A British week will not match a Turkish all-inclusive deal on the raw number. Wages, VAT, weather and the fact that one product is a house see to that. What it can do is stop treating a sale package and a peak cottage as the same piece of paper.
Key sources
- Which?, Why it still pays to holiday abroad rather than at home, 21 May 2026. AirDNA 2025 UK let averages, shown as seven-night totals. Starting and average package prices for the first week of August 2026 from TUI, easyJet and Jet2, collected 1 May 2026.
- House of Commons Library, VAT on tourism and hospitality services, SN06812. UK standard 20 per cent after March 2022. Treasury line, May 2025, no current plan to cut the sector rate.
- HOTREC / national VAT tables, 2026: reduced hotel rates in Spain (10 per cent), Portugal (6 per cent), Greece (13 per cent), Turkey (10 per cent).
- GOV.UK, National Living Wage from 1 April 2026, £12.71.
- GOV.UK, business rates for self-catering in England, 140 nights available and 70 actually let.
- StayLocal, visitor levy, https://staylocal.uk/visitor-levy.
- StayLocal, holiday cottage tax and the 140/70 test, https://staylocal.uk/holiday-cottage-tax.
