How to Get More Airbnb Bookings

How to Get More Airbnb Bookings

What questions do you ask yourself when deciding to hire a property manager for your short term rental (Airbnb / Vrbo)? Is it even possible to do it yourself?

We need to understand the dynamics of “DIY” versus hiring it out. Whether you’re starting out or growing a portfolio, this question matters to all.

I’ll share the algorithm for this decision. Obviously, we don’t want to create a second job for ourself, but what are the pros and cons to creating our own systems? How much do we do and how much do we hand off to others?

From cleaning and maintenance to guest communications and portfolio management, I’ll guide you through the process. 

And if you’re leaning towards a hands-off approach, we’ll discuss when it’s right to hire a property management company.

There’s no one-size-fits-all in this game.We need to find which path aligns with your goals, resources, and investment strategy.

Let’s go!

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Expand Transcript

Hey, what’s up guys, in today’s video, we’re going to be talking about how you can get more bookings for your Airbnb or short term rental property. Now, this is not going to be a comprehensive video on how to optimise your listing, I have other videos on that exact topic on this channel. So feel free to go back and watch those if that’s what you’re looking for. In this video, I’m specifically going to share with you some tips and tricks and things to absolutely make sure of to optimise your property to get more bookings right now, the reason I’m putting this video together right now is because I’ve seen a lot of people struggling lately, a lot of people that are not getting bookings, their calendars are very barren, very empty. And so I want to share some things that I’ve done recently that have helped to generate more bookings, and start filling up some of those gaps in my calendar. So first off, let’s start with the obvious stuff. I do want to cover it at a very basic level. But like I said, I will dive into more detail in other videos on this channel if that’s what you’re looking for. So first and foremost, make sure that your listing is optimised with really great photos, a really great headline and really great listing description. Make sure all your photos have captions, things like that. So once that is made, you’ve made sure that’s done. That’s the most important thing because nothing I’m going to share in this video is actually going to help you if you have bad photos, you have a bad listing description, you have bad headline, that kind of stuff. Once those things are dialled in, the next thing you want to look at is your pricing, and pricing, there’s a whole lot of aspects to it. So let’s break it down. First off, you’ve got your cleaning fee, you’ve also got your nightly rate. And then another thing gets factored into pricing is your length of stay allowances. So we’re going to touch on that. And then the other thing is any additional fees you have for things like pets or extra guests. So let’s start out with one of the easiest ones to set, which will be your cleaning fee. Now what I recommend in most markets is that you look at what other people are charging for their cleaning fees. And make sure that you’re not above the high end of the market. If you’re priced more expensive for a cleaning fee than anyone else in the market, then it is going to have a significant negative impact on your listings performance. Trust me, I’ve tested this, what that tends to happen with people that are booking short term rentals is they’re willing to pay what the market is charging for cleaning fee, because they just accept that that’s going to be a necessary thing for them to pay. But as soon as you become more expensive for the same exact thing, guests aren’t really willing to pay that additional money for no real benefit to them. Me personally, I would rather as a guest booking on Airbnb pay more to get a nicer place versus paying more to just get a more expensive cleaning fee, because ultimately I expect that either property is going to be cleaned up to my satisfaction. And so if I just have to pay more for that same outcome, it’s just not really worth it. So what I found is that the most you can get away with charging on your cleaning fee is going to be the kind of maximum of what other people in your market are charging. And generally you want to be around average for your market going too low and trying to cut down the cleaning fee I haven’t seen make a really big impact. But as long as you’re in line with the rest of the market, then you shouldn’t be good. So that’s a pretty straightforward and simple fee to set. Now let’s talk about the other added fees to your listing. So these are typically going to be extra guest fees or pet fees. And my quick and easy advice is just don’t charge them. added fees are going to distract people from being honest with you, they’re going to dissuade people from just honestly telling you how many guests are going to be at the property or tell you if they’re bringing pets. So it’s likely going to cause more harm than good. And it’s going to deter people from booking your listing. So if you just add this extra fee where they don’t get a nicer place, they don’t get more value, you’re risking just not really being competitive from a value perspective with other properties in the market. So I recommend just keeping them out making sure that if you are going to be allowing pets, you just build that in your pricing and build that into your own expectations that there is going to be some additional cleaning and just don’t allow extra guests beyond a certain point, just make sure that you have a maximum occupancy and that you stick to it and charge the same amount. Whether there’s two guests, or four guests, or eight guests or whatever there might be. You can certainly give discounts sometimes if you’re trying to fill gaps with smaller groups of people and discount the property accordingly. But you shouldn’t really need to do that if you’re in high season and so there’s no real reason to add extra fees for more guests just charge a one time price for the listing overall. So those are the added fees. Now what about the main way that you’re going to be pricing your property which is through your actual nightly rate? Well first off, you need to make sure that you have a data driven pricing strategy so that you know where your prices should be set at any given time of the year. The biggest mistake that I see people making is a set it and forget it pricing strategy where they just set their prices at one time. And honestly they often almost always have the same exact price on weekdays as they do on weekends which is equally crazy because there’s so much more demand For the property on weekends, then we days. And so just having a really solid pricing strategy that’s driven by data, not by your emotions is a step in the right direction. But I assume that most you guys watching this already have some foreign pricing strategy in place. And so I biggest recommendation I can give to you is to make sure that you’re making the adjustments that you need to, because I see a lot of people that have a data driven pricing strategy, but then they factor their emotions into it. And they just avoid actually lowering their prices, because they feel like their property is worth more than that, or they don’t want to attract the wrong type of guests. My advice, have a bare minimum base price that you’re not willing to go below and stay true to that. But aside from hitting and going below that base price, don’t let your emotions factor in at all, really just trust the numbers. And if you’re not booked up where you need to be, then it’s generally a good sign that you need to lower your prices. If you’re overbooked, it’s not something to celebrate, necessarily, it may mean that you need to increase your prices. So just trust the data and do what it says to do. And you want to protect yourself against bad gas or the wrong type of gas, through having that bare minimum price that you won’t go below. But also through screening your guests, make sure you only allow instant book for people that have passed good reviews, not allowing one night stays, things like that. Now the other thing that I find really factors into this that I’ve noticed made a big difference on my listings, when I just adjusted recently is changing your minimum state allowance on your property. And so just changing up the minimum night’s to allow someone to stay opens your property up to a much greater pool of potential demand than if you have a longer length of stay. So for example, on one of my properties, I recently switched from a three night minimum stay down to a two night minimum stay. Now I generally don’t recommend going any lower than two, I never recommend allowing one night stays just because they are going to attract a lot of the issues that you’re going to encounter as a host and all those bad guests, you’re just going to be able to eliminate most of those issues by not allowing one night stays. But tonight’s days, I think are a really great way to open yourself up to more demand because the reality is there’s lots of people that are looking for places to stay for just a Friday and a Saturday or for just a couple of days. And so if you’re finally you’re just not getting as much demand as you need to fill up your calendar, then opening up and allowing more short term stays in in those calendar gaps is really going to open up to more demand and help you to fill in some of those spaces. Guys just want to take a quick break here 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 right down below for a free training that will walk you through my exact strategy for investing successfully in Airbnb. Now, if you’re not ready to actually buy properties, and you want to get started managing other people’s properties on Airbnb the same way I got started and build a full time income managing other people’s properties, there’s actually another free training linked in the description down below as well, that will be a really great fit for you. So whether you want to invest in short term rental properties and actually build amazing cash flow and long term wealth by acquiring the assets, buying the properties themselves, or you’re looking to earn a full time income managing other people’s properties on Airbnb, we’ve got some awesome trainings that are linked in the description down below, it’ll definitely help you out. When you sign up for the trainings, we’re also going to send you a few other tools and resources completely for free just to help you get started. Again, the links to sign up are in the description down below. And both trainings and all the tools are completely free. So make sure to register for the trainings, links in the description down below. There are also tools that you can use, for example, I use price labs to do a lot of this automatically. And so I’ve updated some settings that are going to basically allow this to happen behind the scenes. So it’s one time done, and I don’t have to go and worry about it again. So for example, the way I actually set it up is to allow two nights days, if I have vacancies within the next 60 days, because for my larger property that I was doing this optimization on, most of the bookings should come more than 45 days in advance. And so generally speaking, if I’m not booked up this month, in the next three days or the next 60 days, and I’m not where I want to be, then I want to start filling in some of those gaps. And so I allow those two nights days for people that are booking relatively near term. Whereas if they’re booking further out in advance, I do actually want to optimise for those three days, sometimes even four days, days or longer. And so I can adjust my settings. So it’s dynamically updating the minimum night stay based on how far out in the future I’m looking to make those bookings for. It’s also got some really cool functionality where if I have what’s called an orphan gap, meaning you know, someone checks out on one day, and then two days later, someone else checks in, well, if I have a three day minimum, then there’s no possibility to fill that gap because it’s only a two night gap. And so I can set it up on price labs to where it automatically will update the minimum that stay in that orphan gap to be reflective of whatever I want. So I can sit I can stipulate that I want to be the length of the gap. For example, two nights, I can specify other things. So it’s really really great. Well for being able to do that with a lot of automation, because otherwise it does become pretty cumbersome to go in there and do that. Now, another trick that I give to a lot of people that come to me looking for coaching, looking for advice on just how to stimulate some initial bookings get more people seeing your listing is going to be to use Airbnb promotions, one of the really cool thing is that people just don’t really know about this tool, I don’t use it nearly to the extent that they should be Airbnb has this feature where you can go in and update your pricing by applying a promotion to those days. Now the way that works is you designate how much of a percentage discount you want to give anywhere from I think it starts about 5% up to I think you can go as high as probably 50 or 60%. And based on the amount of discount you give, you get different perks. For example, at 10% a discount several perks kick in at 20%, you get access to all the perks that Airbnb has to offer from these promotions. And these perks are going to drive more people to your listing, they include things like strikethrough pricing on your listing, a special call out badge that your listing is on discount. And even if you go as far as discount of 20%, it’ll give you an it’ll place your property in emails out to guests that are looking for properties to stay in that particular area where your property is located. So in my experience, this typically will drive hundreds of use, if not 1000s, to your listing, and will generate bookings. Now, the icing on top of the cake is that the percentage discount obviously can’t be based off of what you have set your pricing at, right, because then who wouldn’t just jack their price up only to discount it and get all those cool perks without actually discounting the price of the property at all right. And so in order to solve this problem, Airbnb discounts based off of what they perceive your listing should be priced at. Now, this isn’t always all that accurate. So what I’ve found is that a lot of the time when I go in there to discount pricing and offer one of these promotions in suggesting I have the property at a higher price than where I currently have it. And so by the time I apply that discount, I technically am discounting 20% off of what Airbnb thinks the property should be priced at. But in reality, I’m actually only discounting the property, maybe 5%, or maybe not at all. Now on the flip side, other times it thinks my property should be priced to less than it is. And so a 20% discount is really more like 30 or 40%. But in those instances, I just don’t apply the promotion. So it’s really cool to be able to go in there and you can actually see exactly what the promotional price will be. And you can see if it’s in line with where you’re already priced at, then why not have the exact same price or a slight reduction in price for all these really cool perks and benefits. That’s a really great way to drive additional traffic to your listing and get people booking your place. So hopefully these tips have been helpful for you. If you have any other questions, thoughts, comments, any other strategy use, let me know in the comment section down below. If you liked this video, if it was helpful if you’re going to apply any of these tools at all, let me know by hitting that like button giving this video a thumbs up. It also helps me get these videos in front of more people. So I really really appreciate the support. And last but not least, if you’re new to the channel, or you’re not yet subscribed, and you’re one of the many people that view these videos every week when I post them but are not yet subscribed to the channel, then make sure you take a second to hit that subscribe button because i post two new videos up every single week. I want to make sure that you stay up to date and get the latest on how to improve your performance with Airbnb and how to make money managing other people’s properties or investing in short term rental properties. So with all that being said, thanks so much for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.

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