Why Is My Airbnb Listing Suddenly Not Getting Booked?

What’s up, guys? In today’s video, I’m going to share with you some of the things that I’ve found to cause your Airbnb property to suddenly stop getting bookings, so that if this is what’s happening to you, you can turn around and fix it and start getting bookings rolling in again. So let’s dive in and let’s start talking about it. The first thing you want to make sure of is just that your property is actually set up the right way. There’s not been any suspension, nothing got accidentally paused because I’ve seen it from time to time where someone accidentally pauses their listing or something funky will happen with one of the softwares they’re using that causes them to then stop getting bookings. So it’s not often the case, but it is worth double checking, especially if you use any third-party software like a channel management software, pricing software, just to make sure that your listing is actually live, that you can find it on Airbnb in the search results, if you go on an incognito browser or something like that, that it’s actually there and bookable. Once you make sure that your listing is actually live, diagnose where the biggest bottleneck is in your booking chain. So if you’re getting bookings before and now suddenly they’ve dried up, it’s likely that your issue is going to come down to either the number of views you’re getting or the conversion rate of your property. So what you want to do is go into your Airbnb hosting dashboard and take a look at your Insights tab to see exactly how your Airbnb is performing and specifically, toggle the option so you can look at it compared to other similar listings. If you’re suddenly getting way less views than other listings, then we know that views are the problem. If you’re suddenly, if you’re still getting the same number of views, but suddenly you’re just getting way lower conversions, then we know that something with your listing conversion rate is the problem. Now, troubleshooting your listing conversion rate is generally a little bit easier to do, and it’s a lot less likely that this is going to be the issue if you already had conversions happening before that. Because if nothing changed, then your conversion rate should stay pretty constant, aside from just views going down. And so if you do find that your conversion rate decreases, then you’ll want to check a couple of things. Number one, make sure that your pricing is good. That’s going to be one of the big things that’s going to impact your conversion rate, is if your pricing is just all out of whack potentially. Number two, check to make sure that your listing is available. If you have a lot of reservations in the next one or two months here and maybe it’s only available for a couple of months in the future, then I wouldn’t really worry about it too much. You might just not really be getting bookings because people aren’t looking that far in advance with as much frequency as people that are looking for more short term, last minute stays. The other thing that you can look at is from time to time, if you just have something not performing well in your listing that used to perform well and now doesn’t. A perfect example of this is let’s say that you had your photos and maybe even your listing title and your listing description geared towards a specific reason that people travel to your property and stay there for the summer, like its proximity to the beach or some big attraction or big event that happens locally. And now suddenly the season has changed and people are coming for a totally different reason. So maybe they’re not coming for the cottage, maybe they’re coming for the nearby Ski Hill instead. You’ll want to just make sure that your listing is up to date with the most pressing amenities and most desirable aspects of the property for the people that are booking right now at this specific time of the year. Those are going to be your main levers to pull if conversion rates are your issue. If, however, you’re in the more likely scenario of having fewer views and that’s what’s causing you to get lower bookings all of a sudden, then there’s a few things you’re going to want to try doing. One is look at the seasonality trend. If you find that now that it’s just low season and you’re getting fewer bookings, that could just be totally normal. Don’t worry though, I am going to give you some tips towards the end of the video of how you can still increase your bookings, even if you are just in a low season. The other thing you want to do is just look at your listing. Go and actually make some changes. I’ve talked about this in other videos around Airbnb SEO, is that just making changes to your listing, adding some new photos, changing the description, the headline, those things can help boost your performance on Airbnb, have you showing up higher in the search results. In fact, I would highly recommend that you watch that whole video where I give a whole bunch of additional tips on how to improve your Airbnb SEO, because if you are suddenly getting fewer bookings, that might be something to try out. One of the most important things you can do there is the promotions that I talk about in that video. You can run promotions on Airbnb. So again, if visibility is your issue, one of the most sure-fire ways to get an inflow of additional views is going to be from promotions, just running some promotions to get additional views to your property. Now, that being said, your low view count could also be caused by bad reviews. If you got bad reviews from a few recent guests, then you could be in a bad spot where your listing is now going to go lower in the search result, and because of that, you’re going to get fewer bookings. So what you may want to consider doing, depending on the extent of the bad reviews that you’ve gotten, is you may want to, number one, fix those issues, absolutely. Make sure that whatever caused those bad reviews to happen in the first place gets completely resolved. And then after that, you may decide that you want to relaunch your listing and start over because you’re just being punished by Airbnb’s search algorithm. That is a last resort, I will say. And you absolutely must fix the underlying issue because if you just go and relaunch, which I see people doing from time to time without actually fixing the issue, you’re just going to end up in the exact same spot all over again, or worse, get your listing completely suspended or removed from Airbnb. If you’re in the position where it’s just low season, you’re getting good reviews, the property is doing well, it’s just not doing as well as you want it to be, and you’re getting fewer reviews, still getting strong conversions, but you’re just getting less views because it’s low season, then my best recommendation for you is to look for other traffic sources. After all, the name of the game in high season is really just maximizing on the views you are getting and leveraging those into the highest nightly rates possible. Whereas in low season, the name of the game is maximizing your exposure. The more views you get, the more bookings you’re going to get as long as your conversion rate is good, and therefore the more revenue you’re going to get. It’s not so much about getting the maximum nightly rate you possibly can. It’s more so in low season about just making sure that your nights don’t sit completely empty. And so what you’re going to want to do is go and launch onto other platforms. Now, keep in mind this isn’t my first go-to suggestion for most people. A lot of time you’ll have an issue with your conversion rate or you could be otherwise improving your Airbnb SEO, but if you’ve already done that, then the best thing you can do is expand what’s working onto other platforms. That’s going to immediately amplify the exposure that your property gets and help you to get some more bookings. On the flip side though, if you’re not doing a good job on one platform, expanding into multiple platforms is just going to make the issue grow. It’s just going to multiply your problems, not multiply your solutions. So bear that in mind. One other thing you can do, aside from just listing on other OTAs, other actual platforms, is you can also try to stimulate direct bookings through something like Instagram or social media marketing or my personal favorite, email marketing. You can install something like a StayFi device, which I’ve talked about at length in other videos as well, some way of collecting guest email addresses when they stay at your property, and then you can add them to email remarketing lists so that you can remarket to drive direct bookings, and you can set up your own direct booking website through a channel management software. There are tools out there for doing that. Then you can drive direct bookings that are going to fill some of those gaps in your calendar. The nice thing there is you have a guest that you know you want staying at the property because they have stayed with you before and they’ve had a past positive experience, and you’re going to be able to get more bookings that way because you can offer a better price given that you’re not going to be paying platform fees. Hopefully, this has been really helpful. Hopefully, this helps you to diagnose and solve why your listing is suddenly not getting bookings. If you have any questions, any further insights you want, just let me know in the comments section down below. If you liked this video, if it was helpful, this helped you get out of a jam and get some more bookings coming in, then I would absolutely really love and appreciate if you could just hit the like button on this video. It helps you out tremendously with growing this channel and getting these videos in front of more people. Last but not least, if you are new here to the channel and you haven’t yet subscribed, make sure you take half a second and just hit that Subscribe button so you can stay up to date with the two new videos we post every single week here on the channel helping you to succeed with your Airbnb and short term rentals. Thanks so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next video.