The seasonal challenge of lower visibility for your Airbnb listing is hitting a lot of hosts. In this video, I share a series of powerful strategies to increase your property’s exposure and attract more guests.
And these work for hosts, property managers, and investors alike.
Maximize Platform Features: Learn how to make the most of specific platform tools designed to enhance your listing’s visibility. Learn a clever way to use these features to your advantage without impacting your original pricing strategy, and even find out how to get featured in direct communications from the platform.
Direct Booking Mastery: Dive into the world of direct bookings! I’ll guide you through setting up a system that not only captures essential guest information but also allows you to effectively bypass platform fees, maximizing your earnings and guest outreach.
Choosing the Right Alternate Platform: Every property type has an ideal platform match. Find out which platform suits your property best, whether it’s city-centric or a vacation rental. Learn how to approach this without overwhelming yourself and how to handle the additional responsibilities that come with it.
Leverage Social Media Marketing: I give you a specific strategy I like for social media, even if you’re not “good” at making posts yet.
This video is a must-watch for anyone looking to overcome the seasonal dip in Airbnb visibility.
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Expand Transcript
What’s up, guys? In this video, I’m going to be talking to you about three different pricing hacks and strategies that I’ve used to boost my bookings on Airbnb. Now, I’m going to walk through each one of these in detail so that you can apply them to your listings. Whether you manage properties, you invest in properties, just host your own space on Airbnb and make sure that you’re getting top dollar for the effort that you’re putting in on all the properties that you own or manage. Now, if you want to learn more, there’s links in the description down below to free trainings that I have that walk through the ins and outs in detail of how to successfully manage other people’s properties on Airbnb and earn a full time income doing that. Or how to invest in properties for Airbnb and build a successful portfolio of short term rentals. Or just how to host your own spare space on Airbnb. So if you’re interested in any of that, links are in the description down below. Now, my first tip and my first strategy for pricing is going to be to just open your calendar up further in advance. I think a lot of people, when they think about pricing and they think about tips that are going to increase your bookings, they immediately think about lowering their pricing. And although lowering your pricing at the right time, in the right way can be a really great strategy to get additional bookings, you only need to do that because you weren’t able to get bookings at the higher rate that you initially started with. And the best way to get bookings in at those higher rates that you want is to allow people more time to book the way you want to think about demand on Airbnb or any short term rental platform, is that for any given set of dates, let’s say that you’re looking at the dates December 20 to 25th, there’s only a set number of people that are going to be looking for places to stay in that specific area for those specific dates. But what most people don’t realize is that some of the people that are booking stays in that area. For those dates are going to be booking in January, some are going to be booking in February, others are going to be booking more like in July or August. Others are going to be more last minute booking in November or maybe even December. And so a lot of the time, what you really want to do is just, you really ultimately always want to capture as much of that demand as possible. And so the only way to do that is by opening your calendar up further in advance. I see a lot of people making the mistake of only opening their calendar up for three or maybe six months in advance, when in reality there’s lots of people that plan ahead and book trips nine or twelve months in advance. So personally, I recommend the longer the better. Honestly, I recommend that most people have their calendar open up at least twelve months in advance, surely no less than six months. But ideally you really want to be open up twelve months in advance. That’s one of the best strategies I can give you for pricing that is going to allow you to get those higher nightly rates. Now, the second pricing tip I have for you is utilizing promotions and discounts, and there’s a few different ways you can do this. So on Airbnb specifically, they have a tool called custom promotions that allows you to apply promotions to dates. And basically Airbnb’s algorithm, their pricing algorithm, is going to figure out what it thinks your property should be priced at for that date. And then depending on what percentage discount you give off of that price, they’re going to give you different perks that are going to increase your visibility, get you in front of more people, and hopefully get you some more bookings. Now, I don’t love using this tool overall, because Airbnb’s pricing tool, their pricing algorithm, is pretty horrible. It’s kind of all over the map. But what I have found is that on certain nights, it’s going to tell me that my property should be priced higher than what I’ve just manually set it at. And the benefit of that is that now I can discount off of that higher price that Airbnb thinks I should be priced at, downgrade it to what I actually should be priced at what I know I should be, based on my experience, based on the different tools that I use. And now, instead of being priced at just $200 a night, manually, I’m priced at $200 a night with this great promotion where I get all these great perks. So that’s one really great way to run promotions. But there’s other ways that you can do discounts as well when you’re not even using Airbnb as a platform. So for one thing, you can reach out to anyone that’s booked at your place that is trying to check in or has scheduled the check in or check out on a day when you know that right before that or right after that, you’re probably not going to get any other bookings, and you can just offer them to extend their stay. That’s a great way that you can discount your pricing for that night because there’s very little marginal cost of having that guest stay for one extra night and get some additional revenue coming in. Another thing that you can do is discount to repeat guests. So you can offer discounts to repeat guests that are going to stay with you again in exchange for them booking directly with you and avoiding any of those platform fees. So there’s a variety of different ways that you can offer different promotions and discounts that are then going to allow you to get more revenue for your short term rental listing. My third pricing recommendation that’s going to really help you to drive higher revenue on your listing is by strategically using minimum night stays. Now, depending on what tools you’re using, there’s going to be more or less functionality that you get when it comes to setting your minimum night stays. You might need to set a blanket minimum night stay across your property. Whereas if you are using a tool like price labs, you can set specific rules for when pricing or when minimum night stays change automatically. So that can be really helpful. For example, I can with price labs, have my minimum night stay set to three nights or four nights in a certain season like high season, and then in low season have it be a different minimum night stay. I can even set it so that if there’s a vacancy within the next 30 days or 60 days, that I can drop down the minimum night stay. So that can be really, really helpful. What you’ll want to do is for any nights where you know there’s enough demand that you can get those nights booked up with a longer minimum night stay. You want to set a longer minimum night stay. After all, why would you want to go through the hassle and headache of having two guests staying at your property when you could have one guest staying at your property for that same amount of time? Having that minimum night stay also guarantees that you’re going to get that whole chunk of days booked. Nothing worse than having a guest check in on a Friday or a Saturday and then prevent yourself from getting a booking that could have checked in on Thursday instead. So using longer minimum night stays is generally a really great strategy for high season. But for low season, you’re going to want to be able to drop those down so that you’re not limiting the pool of demand coming into your property. I experienced this firsthand going into low season this year where I had my minimum stay set to three nights because that’s what the market had been supporting up until then. And then I realized very quickly that I just wasn’t getting the kind of bookings that I needed. So I dropped down that minimum night stay to two nights and suddenly started getting way more bookings. You can also then set it if you’re using different pricing tools, you might have the functionality to be able to set your minimum night stay at three or four nights. And then as you approach and get closer to any vacancies, drop your minimum night stay down so you at least get something which is obviously better than nothing. Now, for almost all properties, I do recommend avoiding one night stays and keeping at least a two night minimum on your property. Because in my experience, the majority of the issues you get from problematic guests are going to come from one night stays. Now that’s not to say that one night stays are always going to cause issues. It is to say the majority of all issues are going to come from one night stays. So by eliminating one night stays from your listing, you’re going to be eliminating a lot of the potential issues. But using your minimum night stays strategically can be really, really helpful. Again, a lot of people get trapped in the mindset that there’s only one element to pricing. It’s just, is your price high? Is your price low? Well, the reality is that pricing is just kind of one of the different tools you can use to either capture more or capture less of the overall demand in the market and appeal to more or less people. And so you want to use this tool strategically and there’s a few different components to the price people are paying. Whether it’s the minimum night stay that’s obviously going to impact the total rate, whether it’s any promotions that are being applied, any discounts being applied, and just how far in advance they’re able to book, that’s also going to kind of factor in and be part of your overall pricing strategy. So I hope this video has been really helpful for you. If it has been, then let me know by hitting the like button down below this video. It helps me out tremendously with growing this channel and getting these videos in front of more people. Also, if you haven’t yet subscribed to the channel, make sure you do so by just hitting that subscribe button. Only takes half a second. It really helps again. And I post two new videos every single week here on the channel, so if you want to stay up to up to date with those, make sure you hit the subscribe button as well. All that being said, thank you so much for watching this video and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye.