How Exactly to Get Repeat Airbnb Bookings

What’s up guys, in today’s video, we’re gonna be talking about repeat bookings, I’m going to cover what properties will get great repeat bookings on Airbnb or short term rental. I’m also going to talk about how to get them why they matter and how they can make you a whole bunch more money. So let’s start with what types of properties can actually generate substantial repeat bookings, as short term rentals or Airbnb ease? Well, not every property. So if you think about it, if you get a lot of international travellers to your Airbnb, let’s say that you have a property that just isn’t a tourist destination that attracts a lot of international travellers, and most of your guests, you know, are international, well, it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to get a tremendous amount of repeat guests to that type of property. And less people are coming there year after year after year. But most of the time when people are travelling internationally, that can be a repeat booking like some in some place like Florida, but for other locations, you’re just not going to get as much repeat bookings. Whereas if people are typically driving to your property, that’s a good indication that you can likely get a whole bunch of repeat bookings. Because if they can drive to it, that means it’s only a couple hours away from where they live more than likely. And so they can oftentimes come back multiple times throughout the year, and certainly year after year again, so anyone that owns a property that sort of a staycation destination, like a lot of the ones we talked about on this channel, you can get a lot of your bookings, as repeat guests. And next we want to talk about how do you do that? And then why does it actually matter? And stay tuned, because I’m also going to share with you exactly how you can use this strategy to make way more money on your short term rental. So first off, how do you get them? Well, there’s two ways that work the best to drive repeat bookings to any short term rental property. And those would be email and social media. Now, there are other strategies for getting repeat guests to book you can do things with actual paid advertising, there’s all kinds of different approaches you can take. But in my opinion, in my experience, the best two ways to get repeat bookings are going to be through email and social media. And when I say social media, I’m specifically talking about Instagram, and your Instagram organic strategy. So by far, the easiest lowest hanging fruit for driving repeat guests to your property is through email, it’s the simplest thing you can do, because it doesn’t require a whole bunch of ongoing work, you can set up some email automations, that are going to go out automatically without you having to manually input it, you can grow your email list automatically as you get more guests staying at your property. So it’s something you can set up one time, and then have it run on autopilot for the rest of the time that you own your property. And it’s typically going to drive really, really good results. So first off, how do you actually get those email addresses? Well, there’s a couple different ways to do it. Right now, I’m currently using the strategy of having a guest book on host fully, that requires guests to input their email address in order to access that guest book. That means that every single time I have a guest book with me, I’m sending him a guest guest book that has all the details about the property, it’s a digital guest book. And in order to access that they need to input their email. So I collect that email and can then send them future emails with promotions and deals and whatnot about the property. We’ll talk about what to send them in a minute here. But that’s one way to collect emails. Now another way that I’ve recently come across is by linking it up with your Wi Fi, using a tool like stay fi, which I just recently heard of this isn’t an endorsement of them, I haven’t actually used them myself, I do plan to in the near future. To test them out though, you can basically do what hotels do where in order to access the Wi Fi, you can require guests to input their email address. Now the obvious benefit that I see to this strategy over using the guest book is that it means that every single guest that stays at your property, everyone in the entire group is much more likely to actually give you their email because maybe not everyone actually cares to look at the guest book, it’s typically just going to be the person that actually booked the property. Whereas everyone you can be sure is going to actually access the internet. And so you can collect more email addresses because it’s not not necessarily to say that the person that booked with you once is going to book with you again. Maybe their friend who came along with them is going to book for something else for their family getaway someone like that. So I see a really big advantage there. And then the other really cool strategy shout out to Dustin Baker, I recently watched one of his videos and he talked about this if you haven’t checked out his channel, I would highly recommend it. He’s got a few videos out now that have done really well. He’s got great content in the Airbnb space. And so one of the strategies that he talked about in that video was having after you you have someone sign up to the Wi Fi you You can basically have it, redirect them right to your Instagram profile. So when they sign up to access the Wi Fi, what’s the first confirmation page they land on once they’ve gotten into the Wi Fi? Well, it’s your Instagram profile. So that’s a really cool advantage as well, I’m going to try out that strategy myself. And I’ll be reporting back on the result on this channel. But that’s something that I think is a great, really great, brilliant strategy to combine collecting guests, email addresses, and also getting getting people to follow your Instagram profile. So that is email. Now with email, there’s a few different things you’ll want to do. But you just want to be sending them emails, we use this right now to cross promote our different properties. So when someone books a stay at one of our properties, will send emails out to get them to book at other properties as well to really great way to fill in the calendars that way. And because our properties are relatively close to one another, we can drive a lot of repeat bookings that way, so it’s not necessarily the same guest booking the same property. But we can give them options to book another property that’s got some other cool feature, we’ve got one property that has a whole bunch of land, so it’s really close to this pond that’s on the property, they can do a bunch of hiking, we’ve got another property that’s really, really great for families, it’s right by the water, it’s got a hot tub, a sauna, it’s got tonnes of games, a big movie theatre in the basement, we’ve got another property that has a geodesic dome. So you’ve got all these properties that each have their unique value propositions. And so we can easily attract guests to all these different properties by just cross marketing to them, you can also get brought get people send them emails to book again. And so that’s just a really great, easy strategy. And again, you can set this up on an automation so that basically these guests are getting sent emails regularly without you actually having to be involved. So it does take some work to build out the automation initially. But then after that, it’s really just completely on autopilot. Guys just want to take a quick break to say that for those of you watching who want to build cashflow, and long term wealth by purchasing Airbnb ease and short term rental properties, there’s a link in the description down below for a free training, they’ll walk you through my exact strategy for investing successfully in Airbnbs. The training walks through the three most important things that you need to know if you want to successfully buy your first or next short term rental property. And again, the link is in the description down below for you to sign up completely free. When you sign up for the training, we’re also going to send you our ROI analysis tool completely free so that you can analyse properties the right way and find properties that will generate amazing returns. Again, the link to sign up is in the description down below. And both the training and the ROI analysis tool are completely free. Now the next strategy is Instagram. This is something I’ve just recently started experimenting with on my property that I most recently launched on with the geodesic dome, I figured that the geodesic dome give it enough of a unique factor that it’d be really cool to test out on Instagram and growing it on social media. Now we’ve also grown a social media for another property, but we just haven’t really done that much with it. What I’m doing with this property in specific is I did some organic growth and got some initial followers. So I got a few 100 people following the page right off the bat. And then what I did is I reached out to some influencers, that specifically were travel focused influencers in the area that my properties are located in, and I reach out to them and offer them a free stay for a couple of nights in exchange for producing really great content. I’m also considering running giveaways with them, because I’ve heard that that works really, really well. And again, I’ll be sure to report back, I wanted to give some of the newer strategies and just kind of opened people’s eyes to some of them on the channel here. But I will report back with the results of how it all goes. So the idea is that if you grow social media presence for the property, it means that you’re constantly exposing people that are potentially going to stay with you to properties, pictures of your property so that they’re building up a relationship with you game this year property game to see how how it is like other people are generating content for you as well. One of the things I’m really excited about about the influencers is that they’re gonna go up there, and they’re gonna post a bunch of content. And that’s really great, because their followers are going to translate over to my properties page. And that way, I’m gonna gather followers. But even better than that, I’m gonna get user generated content, I’m gonna get a whole bunch of content from the people staying at the property who inherently are pretty good at capturing content, they’ve made a living out of it. That’s why they’re influencers. So I’m sure that I’m gonna get some really great photos and really great videos on my property that I can then be reposting constantly and shouting out these influencers and just have a nice ongoing collaboration. So I’m very, very hopeful and excited for that. Again, I’ll report back with the exact results, how it grows. If I get any bookings from that. I’ll definitely keep everyone here in the loop. But that’s one of the really cool strategie

that I think is probably the best way to grow your social presence for a property is Instagram, just because the nature of that platform is that it lends itself really well to marketing vacation rentals. Now. That being said, social media marketing social media growing and Instagram means your car Somebody’s posting on that on that platform for the property. So it is definitely a lot more work than just setting up an email automation, which is why I wouldn’t recommend it be the first thing you do, I would definitely recommend starting with email, because you can set it up one time and have it run on autopilot. Whereas social media, it’s going to be constant effort. And although there are things you can do to optimise that, to streamline it to make it more efficient, it’s still going to require ongoing effort. And so generally speaking, I recommend doing that once you have a portfolio manager or a virtual assistant who can help take care of that for you. Because ultimately, if you’re investing or managing properties on Airbnb, then the higher leverage activity for you is going to be go out, going out and finding new deals, not going out and do posting on Instagram developing a better overall marketing strategy might be a good high leverage activity, but actually implementing that strategy is likely a better task that’s more suitable to someone else on your team who doesn’t have the amount of leverage that you do in your business, whether your business is investing in properties or managing properties for other people. Now let’s talk about as well why it actually matters, why not just rely on the OTAs. And you’ve heard me say it before on this exact channel, that I don’t really focus too much on driving bookings outside of the OTAs. I actually think that the OTA, so for anyone that’s not experienced that doesn’t know what I’m talking about OTAs, just referring to Airbnb, VRBO booking.com, these different platforms. And so the reason that I personally don’t see a big issue with them is because they do the marketing for you, I really like that a platform like Airbnb, you put the property up, and you don’t have to worry about building an audience. building an audience is time consuming, and it’s expensive. And so from a cost standpoint, yeah, you’re paying a percentage to Airbnb. But that percentage is very much in line with what you’re going to pay to acquire customer if you were to do your own paid advertising. And if you’re doing organic advertising, you’re just paying with your time rather than paying with your money. So for someone that’s running a business, whether that’s managing properties, or investing in properties, it’s just not a really great use of your time, because your time can be leveraged much more effectively by going and finding more deals. So I don’t really love pouring a whole bunch of time into these strategies, but they do matter. Because ultimately, you still want to, if you have the bandwidth by again, having a team, it really can augment the amount of money you can make on short term rental. That’s another reason why I’m a really big fan of email is because for the amount of leverage that you get, versus the amount of time you put in, it actually is something that is worth putting your time into, if you’re a business owner or an investor, because ultimately, you’re gonna put in maybe a couple of hours worth of time, but that time is gonna get compounded over and over and over again, because those email automations are going to run for months, and years and years in the future on hundreds and hundreds of guests. So I actually really liked that strategy, it is really high leverage, I liked doing that the social media went a little bit less so. But if you have a team that can do it for you, if you have a portfolio manager that can do it for you a virtual assistant, then that can be really, really great. Because it allows you to again, really just have to spend some time training that virtual assistant and then goes and does it for itself. So that can be a really good use of your time. And ultimately, what it comes down to is like how can this actually make you more money? Well, you know, the first part of that’s pretty obvious. If you just drive more bookings to your property and fill in some extra gaps, then you’re going to make more money. But the other question is, could you not have just filled those things up organically without having to do the remarketing? Yeah, you probably could have if you’re doing a really good job of hosting on short term rental on sites like Airbnb, good chances are, you would fill up the dates regardless whether it was from an email blast you sent out, or it was from a from just Airbnb in getting a new booking in the door. But what’s really great is that well, really two big advantages. One is that you can direct people when you’re getting them to rebook, you can direct them to your short term rental website, your direct booking website, which is super easy to set up if you’re using any number of different channel managers I personally use and really like host away for this, we use them as a channel management software, I’ve talked about them before. And host way one of the really cool things is that you can very quickly and easily set up a direct booking platform and start taking bookings directly where you can avoid the 15% or whatever fee from Airbnb or other platforms. So that’s a really big advantage because you can actually just net more money you what I like to do is give guests a bit of a discount on their rate for what they’re booking. And then also give them give myself a bit of a discount on the fees. So instead of just getting them to vote for the exact same amount and be pocketing 15% more, I might discount the rate 5% So they’re getting a bit of savings and have an incentive to book outside of the platform. And then also just rewarding them for being a great guest and a repeat guest and I also then I’m going to I’m going to make more money because I’m not paying that big fee to Airbnb or whatnot. So that’s something I really like doing. Because again, the advantage of these OTAs is that they do the marketing for you. But if you’ve already got that contact, and you’ve already done the marketing once, there’s no sense in paying that fee again and again and again as the guest rebooked, so you can make a bit more money that way. But the other really big advantage is that you get to get really good guests again, because you can pick and choose which guests you take off your email list because they left your place in less than ideal condition, or they were a hassle to have as guests. So you can really just pick and choose and how better guests staying at your property. Now, the other advantage of this that I think would be applicable to a lot of people right now is it when things do start to slow down in the market for any reason, like we’re seeing right now that a lot of properties are losing bookings, it really does benefit you to have additional marketing channels. So again, like booking like listing on a different OTA like VRBO, or expanding out to booking.com, having email marketing, having Instagram marketing, it’s just another marketing channel to add to your mix. And so the more marketing channels you have, the more people you can get in front of and if they’re all really well, optimised not just means ultimately, more bookings for you. Now, what I don’t recommend is doing this before you’ve optimised the initial foundations, I always recommend people get started listing on Airbnb and really master that dial it in and then look to expand to something like email marketing, or going on to VRBO or another platform. Because ultimately, if you don’t do a good job of optimising one platform, and then you expand to a whole bunch of different marketing channels all at the same time, you’re just going to be expanding a bunch of broken stuff, you’re gonna be multiplying broken efforts, and it’s going to be a real mess and a real disaster. So I recommend really dialling in one and then expanding intentionally and so email marketing and Instagram marketing, I think, fit into that really nicely at the right time for the right properties. So I hope this video was really helpful to you. If it was let me know in the comment section let me know by hitting the like button if you take half a second and just hit that like button, it really does help me out tremendously with getting in front of more people with these videos and helps you out with the YouTube algorithm. So I’d really appreciate if you would hit the like button if you hit the subscribe button as well. I post two new videos every single week on this channel. So if you haven’t already subscribed, make sure you hit the subscribe button. And with all that being said, thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video.