How to Get Direct Bookings for Your Airbnb Short Term Rental

(00:00) direct bookings can be a really great way for short-term rental investors hosts or co-hosts to make more money gain more control over their listing and avoid the fees that are associated with platforms like Airbnb booking.com or vrbo now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t list your property on any of those platforms on the contrary it’s a really really great way to build a foundation for your property and then go and leverage direct bookings to make even more money and gain control it’s a really really nice feature and in this
(00:33) video today I’m going to show you my top strategy for generating direct bookings without incurring any marketing expense or I mean pretty much no marketing expense at all it’s nearly free this setup you’re not going to have to pay per booking I’m going to show you exactly how to do it and if you’re interested in a full step-by-step tutorial of all the tech setup and you want all of my different templates for everything then you can check out B&B tribe link l in the description down below where we’re going to be releasing
(01:03) an entire in-depth training video um and whole kind of content series around direct booking and specifically going into this strategy I’m going to share with you here today so without further Ado let’s jump right into it and I’ll share with you my favorite strategy for direct bookings and it’s leveraging email marketing so if you can see my screen here now you’ll see that I’m opening up on a page called stayfi. So stayfi is a hardware and software company basically they primarily have the software but there’s
(01:37) Hardware that you need in order to make it all happen so what Safi is is a uh a little module that you connect to your uh to your Wi-Fi router and that basically makes it so that when guests go to access your Wi-Fi they get to a splash page that looks just like this now you’re probably familiar with this from staying at hotels or different places where in order to access the Wi-Fi you need to put in some contact details now what’s really cool is that we can do this for your short-term rental you can see that this is actually
(02:07) customized to one of my properties so you can see I’ve got this cool image in the background I’ve branded it with the name of that property the kind of name that it goes by on Direct booking platforms um on our social media handles that kind of stuff and so you can see here that in order to access the Wi-Fi the guest needs to put in their first name their last name their email and their phone number now the cool thing here is that this is going to be for absolutely anyone that looks to use the Wi-Fi whether it’s the person that
(02:34) booked with you or another person in their group now as you can see a little bit in the background here this is a whole single family home now the home that this is set up for is a four bedroom home with a dome two bathrooms and a lot of the time the people that are booking the property are going to be either large families uh with extended relatives or they’re going to be large groups of friends now what’s really cool about this is that there’s lots of adults who could actually be really great potential customers for rebooking
(03:06) at my property but they might not actually be the person that made the reservation they’re just someone else in the group maybe the aunt maybe the uncle maybe the other friend that their their friend booked it for them and so it’s really great for me to be able to capture all the contact details for everyone that stays not just the person that booked because that Aunt or Uncle might want to go with a group of friends later on or that friend group might want to go with their family later on or a different group of friends so it’s
(03:31) really really great to be able to getting your to be able to get your property in front of all these different people now what’s really cool is that then you’re going to start I’m not going to show you the uh the contact list because I don’t want to share anyone’s contact details but it’s really really easy literally all you do is set this up with the property you integrate it with the software which takes only a couple of minutes and then now you’re just on autopilot collecting guest email
(03:53) addresses there is absolutely no maintenance to do and let me tell you you’ll quickly start to collect hundreds and hundreds of guest emails and their phone numbers now within stayfi you can also then go over to email marketing or text messaging and you can do an integration with campaign monitor Switchback I don’t know what they use for their SMS uh but you can basically toggle it all on and do a lot of the email uh sending or SMS sending right here through stayfi now that’s great and you know if you like that I recommend it
(04:24) what I prefer is to integrate it with a tool called active campaign are you a brand new or experienced Airbnb host co-host or investor who wants to host as successfully as profitably and with as much fun as possible if so then I would love to invite you to check out BNB tribe Linked In the description down below this video it’s our exclusive Community for Airbnb hosts investors and co-hosts from all over the world where I share some of my best trainings that go into detail on every single aspect of Airbnb hosting from A to Z we’ve got
(05:01) Advanced Training playbooks that will help you to use more advanced strategies to take things to the next level and make more money and have more fun hosting co-hosting or investing on Airbnb you’re also going to get access to an incredible community and over $2500 worth of deals perks discounts bonuses that I’ve negotiated with other vendors in the short-term rental industry so if you want access to all of that and a whole bunch more check out the link in the description down below for B&B tribe and I would love to see
(05:30) you on the inside so you can see here you can come over to Integrations they’ve got all kinds of different PMS providers that they integrate with different email uh email providers that they uh integrate with and so you can connect it directly in and what I like is I’ve got experience with active campaign I really like it it’s very affordable um and the automation capabilities are pretty awesome so what you can do is we come over here I’ll show you the kind of bones of the email automation that I’m going to be
(05:56) providing to people inside a BMB tribe with all the emails templated out and everything basically what it’s going to do is once someone subscribes that list mean they opt into the Wi-Fi it’s automatically going to come over into active campaign it’s going to send them a welcome email that just welcomes them to the property uh just going to kind of warm them up make sure they know who you are so they’re not surprised when you send emails to them in the future and then we’re going to wait for a week so
(06:20) now after the week has gone by and you can toggle this if you tend to get longer than one week stays uh then you can toggle this basically you want to go by uh right after after their checkout you want to then send them a an incentive to book their next stay so we then send them a nice email that’s going to be just thanking them for staying with us and giving them an incentive to book their next day right away meaning a discount for doing so now the cool thing here like I mentioned before we don’t have to we can but we don’t have to
(06:50) direct people to one of the OTAs if you want to you can direct people right to your direct booking platform so that you can avoid any of the fees and commissions associated with listing your property and getting bookings on Airbnb vrbo what have you what’s really nice about that is that I can offer a 5 or 10% discount to my guest if they booked their next day right away but I’m still going to make more money than if those dates got booked on Airbnb because I’m not going to have to pay the commission
(07:17) to Airbnb so it’s really great I get to pocket more money I get to incentivize my guest to book another stay right away so I get that repeat guest already booking back right after they’re on their high of just having stayed at this awesome property and I’m also going to give the guest a better deal than they would have otherwise gotten now what I like to do from there is just wait until a specific day of the month so whenever you want to send your emails out there’s no one better day than the other but
(07:41) this automation is set up to just wait until the fifth of the month um and then once the fifth of the month comes by it moves them over into this automation now this one if we kind of zoom out a bit here you’ll see it looks very very complicated I promise you it’s actually not it’s relatively simple all this email is doing this automation here is it’s trying to figure out what month of the year it is and then it’s plopping the person down into the corresponding email for that month then waiting a
(08:08) month and then putting the next email out so what’s really really cool about this is that on the 5ifth of every single month you’re going to have all your contacts automatically go in here and no matter when they stay at your property they’ll get dropped in right where they should be so you can have a seasonal promotion going out to them that’s going to promote your property for booking in April or for booking in May whatever you’re trying to incentivize now what’s cool about that is you can then go into these emails and
(08:34) customize them so that if you have a property like mine that has four very distinct Seasons throughout the year in the summertime we can be talking about and highlighting and promoting all the amazing things to do during the summertime if they book their stay for the summer so when it’s May it’s summertime we’re talking about the beach nearby the golf course nearby all the great hiking and we can have photos of the property and things to do in the summertime whereas in December in the middle of winter we don’t want guests to
(09:01) be getting some random email about all the amazing beaches to go to well they’re all frozen over that just doesn’t really make any sense what we want to do instead is we want to promote all the ice fishing the snowshoeing the snow adding all the winter activities maybe highlight the hot tub and the sauna that we’ve got at the property so you can have these really seasonal emails going out that are actually relevant to the guest at that time and we don’t have to do literally any manual work at all all we have to do is set
(09:29) this up one single time and then we can completely forget about it you might want to come in here once a year and refresh these emails and just update them with any new amenities you might have added to the property any new photos you might have but it just makes it so so dead simple the the thing I love most about this is that you can be promoting your property year after year after year without any work after the initial setup and you can see here that after it gets down to December it already Loops them right back up so it’s
(09:59) going to keep sending them one email every single month all throughout the year multiple years it’s not going to end and if you want you can even have this wait 2 weeks and send them another email and then wait two more weeks and send them another email so you can be emailing them with Whatever frequency you want I have it set up by default just email people once a month so it’s not too intrusive but you can email them multiple times a month if you want the reality is it’s very very easy to set up
(10:23) because the way the automation works it’s going to start them at the 5ifth so if we want them at the fifth of the month to get one email and at the 20th of the month to get another one we can very very easily do that so again really really cool way to set it up and now we can start getting direct bookings on autopilot the other cool thing about stayfi is that they just launched uh something called Wi-Fi experience you can see I haven’t even set it up yet uh but you can basically set up your what they call homepage which is where guests
(10:48) are going to land after they go and connect to the Wi-Fi so automatically they’re going to get redirected over to this page this is a really great place to be able to share more information about your property you can have a link to your guest book here you can have a link to your social media here you can have a link for them to book the property again if you want them to go right in there and book it again right away you can send them to your social media there’s all kinds of different things that you can do with this and one
(11:10) of the other really cool things you can do here is leverage upsells so you can give guest the opportunity right when they connect to the Wi-Fi to do things like extending their stay or booking a massage or you know hiring a chef there’s all kinds of different things you can do and they’re actually connected with I forget the I think it’s called hostco um so that you can actually integrate with that directly and right here on the homepage set it up so they go there and now they’re linked to hostco and they can go and get all
(11:38) those Services I just mentioned like a private Chef or a masseuse something like that and they can pay for it that goes through hostco hostco takes care of all the logistics and all the Fulfillment of that and you get a cut off of that so it’s a really great way to offer different services and add-ons to your guests that are going to enhance the quality of their stay and that you are going to be able to make additional income on without you LIF in a finger without you having to go and find a local massuse and organize them going by
(12:04) schedule everything all that extra headache you can just do without it and you can have that right here so hands down stayfi is a really really great tool to use for just growing your listings performance helping you improve better helping you make more money and this is a really really great robust setup so that you can be completely hands-off now again if you want discounts on stayfi on their Hardware their software if you want full tutorials if you want to literally be able to just copy and paste this whole email automation and the
(12:30) template emails to go with it and access to every other training that we’ve got then I highly recommend you check out BMB tribe it’s linked in the description right down below this video so go ahead and check that out jump in we’d love to see you in there um and if you liked this video as always do give it a thumbs up it helps me out tremendously with getting these videos in front of more people and growing this channel uh if you want to see more videos like this where I share some more kind of advanced
(12:52) strategies let me know by liking the video as well uh if you have questions thoughts anything you want to share let me know in the comment section and last but not least make sure you hit that subscribe button if you want to stay up to date with the two new videos WE Post every single week here on the channel on Tuesdays and Thursdays if you hit the notification Bell you can get notified when they drop as well so you can be one of the first people to watch them that’s all for today I hope you enjoyed this
(13:13) video I hope it was really valuable and really helpful for you uh and yeah that being said have a great rest of your day and I’ll see you in the next [Music] video [Music] all