How Did Airbnb Survive 2020?

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What's up guys, it's James here and in today's video, I want to break down how Airbnb was able to survive 2020. As a lot of you know, Airbnb has done actually very, very well through everything that's been going on as of late and did exceptionally well in 2020, all things considered. And I think there's a lot to be learned there. There's certainly a lot that I've learned over the last 12 months being involved in everything, all the craziness going on with Airbnb.

And so I think it's worth reflecting to see what we can take forward and what we can use to actually help ourselves to run better businesses moving forward by looking back at, you know, how was it that Airbnb was able to survive such a meltdown in the global tourism industry, and still come out so, so much stronger than many of the other tourism based companies that you see. So without further ado, let's dive right into it. The first thing I want to look at is domestic travel. Now, obviously, we've talked about this before on the channel and talking about how domestic travel was sort of the main pillar of why Airbnb was able to perform well, and what booking fuel we're getting that we're having it perform well throughout 2020. And still right now to quite an extent as well. Now, the the the plain and simple answer of domestic travelers pretty obvious.

But the question still remains, why did Airbnb perform so much better for domestic travel than, you know, compared to hotels or other platforms? And just seem to run circles around them? Why is that? And the answer that I've come across is that people that are traveling right now are looking for a few things. So number one, you're seeing that domestic travel, a lot of people want to be outside of hotels, they want to be outside of crowds, that's a pretty obvious one. But the other thing to remember is that for domestic travel, a lot of people tend to be traveling with their families. And so larger listings are a lot more desirable. The other use case for an Airbnb that we're seeing a lot of is people that are actually using it as a place to live. You know, it's not just a place to vacation to take quick holiday, but it's often being used a place to live for an extended period of time, whether that's someone that is going to be working remotely and is moved as a result, or someone that is maybe a traveling nurses decide to move.

And so what you want to remember going forward is that your listing serves a different variety of different use cases to different guests. So whereas before, you might have seen yourself as competing with hotels, you might now look at yourself as competing with actual living accommodations. Now, traditionally, people think about living accommodations, and they think long term. But I think going forward as well, we're going to see a lot more short term bookings. And even in the past, before this, we saw a whole bunch of people that were capitalizing on mid to mid to long term stays, for example, when I travel and work remotely, places all often stay in a location for three to six months.

And I can tell you right now that I pay a premium to do that over what I would pay for a 12 month lease. Now, I've stayed at plenty of places where the property owner has to do very, very little work compared to having a 12 month tenant, because I just check in once I don't ask a lot of questions, but they're able to make probably 30 to 40% more than what they would on long term rental. So it's worth remembering that in your circumstance with Airbnb, if you continue hosting or if you're managing properties on Airbnb, that you do have a certain degree of flexibility to offer short term stays medium term stays, or longer term stays depending on what makes the most sense.

Personally, I think there's a huge opportunity if you operate in a seasonal area, to list your place for medium to longer term rentals for the low season. Because you're going to get relatively the same rate that you would doing short term rental, you're going to get fewer guests, fewer turnovers, it means less overhead expenses on you less operational time that you have to put into the business during the low season. And then you still get the security of having those months booked out in advance. And then you can still freely capitalize on the highest seasons, whereas most of us know that's where the majority of all the profit comes in. So there's a really, really big opportunity there.

And I think it's also important to remember that domestic travel, although it's heightened right now doesn't necessarily go away once international travel opens back up. And a lot of people that are looking for medium to long term stays might also be international as well. So if you can position your listing well and you can reposition at different times of the year, depending on what you're looking for, then there's a really big opportunity there. Speaking of repositioning your listing, I think that's a really, really great key takeaway.

What we've seen right across the board is that the strongest performing hosts over the last 12 months have been the hosts that are the most dynamic and updating their booking policies, for example, having flexible cancellation policies, or the hosts that are updating their listings to attract the ideal guests that's very much changing and evolving constantly throughout all this Well, that was before international travels and now it's traveling nurses or maybe it's it's a domestic travelers.

So the people that are more dynamically updating their listing updating their pricing, updating their cancellation book, policies, those are the hosts that are succeeding. Now, that doesn't mean that it has to be a whole bunch of additional work, it just means that you have to be mindful of what's actually going on in the world and who is booking your place. And what's important to them. If that starts to change in to stay on top of that, and the great benefit of being on Airbnb, I always like to say is that you're competing largely with amateurs, you know, the reality is not everyone on Airbnb is going to watch this video, not everyone is going to know what you now know.

So if you can go and out compete them, then you're going to be miles ahead of them, because most people aren't doing generally just any of this stuff. So if you do that, you're going to be able to capture a large share of the bookings. What I always like to remind people is that even in the low season, you still are going to have 20% of hosts performing exceptionally well, it's great because in the high season, everyone performs well. But in the low season, there's only a select few of us who perform really well. It doesn't mean that everyone drops down more, it just means that only a few people get to reap all of the rewards. And if you're one of those people, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

So those are honestly some of my biggest takeaways from 2020 that I think are highly applicable moving forward going into low season going into high season as well. Really just looking forward into the future, and seeing how we can use these assets and use this business that we built, whether you're hosting your own property or hosting properties for other people to our advantage as much as possible. So if you're interested in learning more about how to become a top performing host on Airbnb, or you want to get started managing other people's properties on Airbnb without buying or renting any properties yourself, then check out the links in the description down below.

We've got some free trainings that highly recommend you check out where we're gonna walk through our specific strategy step by step by step and also give you some free tools that will help you to progress along that journey. So again, just check that out in the link in the description down below, just click one of the links, whichever one interests you most whichever one you want to check out, there's gonna be a free training there, you can just click the link, go to the page, enter and select the time for your training and then check it out I highly recommend that it's really great for your training. So check that out.

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