Airbnb VS. VRBO – What You NEED to Know!

What’s up guys, Airbnb and VRBO are two competing platforms. Let’s talk about what you need to know as a short-term rental host, as a short-term rental investor, maybe your short-term rental property manager. I want to walk you through in this video what you need to know about these two platforms. So you can decide whether you should be listed on one, whether you should be listed on both, the nuances of all of them. I just want to walk you through it all step by step by step, so you can gain clarity on when and how using both of these platforms can benefit you. So let’s start off with where you should start. My suggestion is almost always Airbnb. The reality is Airbnb is where you’re going to get the majority of your bookings for most properties. Some properties are exceptions to this rule, but for most, you’ll get the lion’s share of your bookings through Airbnb, making it a natural starting point due to its higher traffic. Generally, you’ll get more bookings if you’re only listed on one platform, which I recommend when you first start to keep things simple. For most people, that platform should be Airbnb, which is also the most user-friendly on the hosting side. While there are some issues, they make it easy to list your property, collect payments, and handle payment processing, sending payouts directly to your bank or PayPal account. Other platforms might be trickier. So that’s Airbnb. VRBO, very popular among vacation rentals, typically features whole-home listings aimed more towards families or large groups of friends, given its origin as “Vacation Rental By Owner.” These types of properties usually perform the best on VRBO due to the demographic of guests looking for larger, family-oriented accommodations. However, one major difference between Airbnb and VRBO lies in the liability insurance coverage offered. Airbnb provides up to $3 million of comprehensive liability coverage, safeguarding your property and contents from any damages caused by guests. Conversely, VRBO only provides $1 million worth of coverage with more limitations. This means hosts should collect a security deposit from VRBO guests and ensure they have robust insurance coverage, including a homeowner’s insurance policy tailored for short-term rental properties. Additionally, hosts might consider third-party insurance providers, like “Guest Hog,” to supplement protection, offering similar coverage to Airbnb on a per guest stay basis. These are just a few of the notable differences between Airbnb and VRBO. Another really big one is going to be payment processing. Now, if you have, I believe, one or two properties or as long as you’re not using a channel management software, which is what you’ll want to use as you grow larger and manage things on multiple different platforms, then you can have VRBO process your payments for you. This is great because it means you don’t have to deal with credit card fraud, chargebacks, refunds, or any of those headaches at all, because VRBO, just like Airbnb, will process your payments for you. I’m not sure exactly what the criteria is, but I think it’s once you start using a channel management software, or maybe once you have multiple properties, you will need to start processing your own payments for guests that stay with you through VRBO. A lot of times, these different channel management software you might use, like the one I use, Host Away, actually allows you to automate this, which is really nice, and you can collect security deposits, hold on to those, and then refund them to guests once they’ve checked out and you’ve verified that no damage was done to the property. But you still end up having to deal with mitigating fraud, ensuring people book stays with legitimate credit cards, handling your own refunds, and dealing with chargebacks, which can have different repercussions and can be a lot of headaches if you don’t know what you’re doing. I could put together a whole other video on just how to manage payment processing; that’s a whole other topic. But just realize that depending on your situation and setup, you may need to start processing your own payments when you list on VRBO, which is just an added step to the process to be aware of. I don’t recommend going in blind and just setting this stuff up without doing your research because you’re almost guaranteed to run into different headaches. Now, also, there are some benefits to being on VRBO, some pros to VRBO. For example, they don’t tend to have as picky of guests. In my experience, you don’t get as many low-budget travelers on VRBO as you do on Airbnb, and the people that pay the least tend to expect the most—it’s kind of counterintuitive. The people that I get booking through VRBO tend to pay more than those booked through Airbnb and they complain a lot less. I just don’t have issues; they check in, love their stay, have a great time, barely have any questions for us, check out, and leave a great review. Whereas on Airbnb, sometimes you can get some troublesome guests. Now there are a whole bunch of ways, and again, I talked about this in other videos, of how to prevent that and avoid troublesome guests. But I will say that they really don’t happen nearly as often on VRBO, which is a big benefit to the platform. VRBO also doesn’t tend to be as punitive when it comes to bad reviews, getting them on the platform. It’s not as out there in your face, and like preventing future guests from staying with you as it is on Airbnb. So that’s nice, you just have a little bit more leeway, it’s really nice, especially when you’re a brand new host just getting started because naturally you are going to learn some things as you get started, and there are going to be potential mistakes to be made, and it’s just not going to impact you as negatively on VRBO as it would on Airbnb. Now, another big benefit is that guests on VRBO tend to be less frequent, you get fewer bookings through VRBO generally speaking than you do through Airbnb, but they do tend to pay more, which is really nice; you can just make more money by charging a premium on VRBO versus what you charge on Airbnb, that’s really, really nice means that you’re just ultimately going to make more money. And this is a really, really big benefit if you’re trying to fill in some gaps in the calendar. Another big benefit of just being listed on multiple platforms in general, and this is generally why I recommend it to people when I recommend it to them, is that you’re going to increase the amount of visibility your property gets. If you have a good listing and you’ve got all the fundamentals nailed down to make sure that visibility is being converted into bookings, more visibility equals more bookings. This is really helpful when the bottleneck to your growth with your short-term rental is visibility, which tends to happen in slow seasons. So, at slower times of the year, the name of the game is getting your property booked and not having it sit vacant. Getting more visibility on the property will lead to more bookings and more revenue, a win-win for everyone. Whereas generally, what I found is that in the high season, the name of the game isn’t so much getting booked; it’s more so getting the highest possible nightly rate. And although more visibility will help with that because it’ll create more competition, it generally isn’t the solution. If you find you’re not getting booked during the high season, that is indicative to me that you’re doing something else wrong on the one platform you are listed on, and you want to fix that before you expand the problem out to multiple platforms. One of the best pieces of advice I can give is that if you are thinking about placing your listing on multiple different platforms, make sure you really perfected the one platform first before you expand out. The reality is you’re going to need to put some work into actually optimizing your listing on each given platform they’re listed on because they’re all slightly different. And so if you’re making mistakes over here, like you have bad photos, a bad listing headline, things like that, and you go and expand over there, well, now suddenly, you’ve just multiplied your problems and you haven’t actually found a good solution. So no matter what you do, you want to make sure that you really nail it on one platform and you can do so by watching all the other videos we have on this channel about how to really nail it on Airbnb, then you want to expand out that makes a good thing even better. Now I’m thinking about doing another video all about just direct bookings, and we can even talk about booking.com. Do you like that idea? If you want to learn more about that, then let me know in the comment section down below. If you liked this video, if it was helpful or valuable, or answered some of the questions you had floating around your head, make sure you let me know by just hitting the like button on this video to show me that this is actually content that you enjoy. And also just to help me get these videos in front of more people and grow this channel. Just take half a second to hit that like button, it really does help me out tremendously. And last but not least, if you haven’t yet subscribed to the channel, and you want to just do me a solid or if you want to stay up to date with the two new videos we post every single week here for multiple years running here with consistency just like clockwork, then make sure you hit the subscribe button. If you subscribe, you’ll be shown other videos of ours; you’ll be able to keep up to date. And with that being said, thank you so much for watching this video and I hope to see you in the next one.