Navigating through the low booking season can be challenging for Airbnb hosts. In this video, I share some smart strategies to tackle this period effectively and increase your bookings.
Performance Analysis: We start by examining your recent changes. Did modifications in your description, photos, or pricing affect your bookings? Understand the impact of transitioning from high to low season and how to adapt.
Implementing Data-Driven Pricing: Learn to avoid emotional pricing. I’ll guide you on how to use data-driven methods to set competitive rates that are appropriate for the season.
Calendar Optimization: Make sure your calendar is open well in advance. I’ll show you how having an open calendar for 6-12 months ahead can capture early planners and increase your booking opportunities.
Flexible Minimum Night Stays: I discuss the benefits of adjusting your minimum night stay requirements, especially during lean periods, and how to strategically use pricing tools to manage different booking windows.
Targeting Existing Bookings for Extensions: Discover how to offer additional nights to existing bookings effectively, using specific scenarios like upcoming weather changes to entice guests for extended stays.
Direct Booking Strategies: Learn how to leverage direct booking tools like StayFi to collect guest emails and send out season-relevant promotions, cutting out OTA fees and offering competitive rates directly to guests.
Whether you’re new to Airbnb hosting or looking to optimize your existing listing, this video is packed with valuable insights and tips to help you thrive during the off-peak season. Watch now to transform your approach and maximize your occupancy rates!
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Expand Transcript
What’s up guys, in today’s video, we’re going to be talking about how to get more bookings on Airbnb in 2024. I’m going to be addressing specifically what to do if you are getting views, if you can see from the insights tab on Airbnb that people are seeing and looking at your property, but you’re just not getting bookings. Coincidentally, a lot of things that are going to generate you more views are actually also going to help you to get more bookings. But what do you do if you’re getting the views and you’re just not actually getting booked? Well, that’s what we’re going to dive into right now.
The first thing that you really, really, really want to look at is just your history, your track record of performance. If you were getting a bunch of bookings, and now all of a sudden they’ve dried up, then you want to look at what actually changed when that shift happened. remedying that is often the best place to look. Because it’s, you know, ultimately just going to be the thing that actually clears up the issue and helps you get more bookings. So for example, if you change your headline, or change your listing description, or change out your photos, or maybe you made a significant update to your pricing, or maybe the season changed and went from high season and low season, whatever happened, there is going to give you clues of where to best focus your efforts. Now, one of the common things I see happening is that people go from high season into low season, and that’s when booking start to dry up. So let’s start there. And let’s talk about what you should do in this scenario. Now, assuming that you were actually getting booked up really, really well in high season, meaning you’re getting booked at premium rates, you’re getting booked at, you know, a good occupancy rate, a competitive occupancy rate, then ultimately, that’s going to lead me to say, hey, it’s probably your pricing, you probably were doing a really good job of pricing in the high season, but you’re probably overly optimistic or overly aggressive with your pricing in low season. And so dropping your pricing down is probably going to be the answer for you. Ultimately, the name of the game during high season is about maximizing your nightly rates. Whereas the name of the game in low season is about maximizing your occupancy rate, you’re not going to get those sky high nightly rates that you got in high season when you’re in low season. So you just have to be more competitive with your pricing in order to get bookings in low season. But if you were doing okay, doing well, which a lot of people do in high season, because you can be making a lot of mistakes and still performing well. And now suddenly, it’s dried up. And it probably has more to do with your listing optimization, you probably were masking the fact that you actually don’t have a very good listing, you maybe have room for improvement on your photos, your headline, your description, what have you. But it was just masked because of high season all the chaos and all the bookings are coming in that even the kind of average or mediocre properties, were still getting booked up. And now that it’s low season, you’re not. So you have to be really humble and honest with yourself and say, you know, is my listing really, really optimized, in which case, let’s look at pricing, or is my listing really is there quite a bit of room for improvement. And then let’s focus our efforts there. Now, ultimately, one of the best ways to manage all of this is by having a really, really good and robust data driven pricing strategy. If you have a really good pricing strategy, it will tell you and you’ll know when and if you should increase or decrease or hold your pricing as it is. And not having a different pricing strategy is going to drive you to make very emotional decisions, where you’re going to either hold your pricing too high because you’re being emotional and think your property is worth it. Or you’re going to be emotionally dropping your prices way lower than they need to be because you’re kind of panicking and trying to get bookings in the door. Now neither one of those strategies is going to lead to an optimize return on your investment and optimize your revenue. So you want to have a good data driven pricing strategy. You can check out the links in description down below. We’ve got free trainings that walk through how to do all that and it’ll give you some free tools to get you started so that you can actually price your property effective property effectively. 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 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 ease. 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’ll 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. That will definitely help you out when you sign up for that
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. Now, beyond just your pricing strategy and basic listing optimization, what are some of the other ways that you can make sure your property gets more bookings? Well, number one, make sure that your calendar is open and available. I know it sounds kind of silly, but you want to make sure that your calendar is open for at least six months, ideally 12 months into the future. So that get guests have the ability to book with significant lead time, I see a lot of hosts making the mistake of only opening their calendar up two or three or four months in advance. And that just means that you’re missing out on any of those early planners that couldn’t be booking your property for six months out or for a year from now, because they’re just a planner, they know that they’re going to be traveling and so you’re just missing out on that demand by not having your calendar open and available and ready for people to book. Now a couple other things you can do to increase the amount of bookings you get is lowering your average night stay or your minimum night stay, I should say. Now, you don’t, in my experience want to drop that down below two nights. So if you’re already at a two night minimum stay across the board, then I wouldn’t recommend dropping it down to one because in most cases, that’s going to create more headache than is really worth dealing with as a host. However, if you’re currently sitting with a three or four or a five night minimum stay, you may want to consider either outright lowering that down. Or you might want to selectively lower that down for specific days or specific timeframes, where if someone’s booking last minute, maybe they’re not going to have to book for three or four or five nights, maybe they can book a two night stay as long as it’s within the next 30 or 60 days because it helps you to fill that calendar vacancy there. Now in order to do that, you’re going to need to use a third party pricing tool for that I recommend price labs. But there are other tools out there that can also get that done for you whether it’s wheelhouse beyond pricing, what have you. Now, another really, really great trick or hack that I have for generating additional bookings, without having to generate new customers is to go to the customers, you already have the people that are already booked in your calendar and ask them if they’d like to extend their stay. Now there’s a really strategic kind of right way to do this that I found generates the best results. I’ve found that if you reach out to people without any real kind of forethought, and you just ask them, Hey, do you want to stay for like an extra night, maybe you do a bit of a discount, it just doesn’t really work that well. Whereas if you reach out at the right time with the right messaging can be very, very effective. What I’ve found to work really, really well and I got this idea of someone else is and it works very, very well is you basically reach out to a person who is checking in on say a Friday night really common popular time for people to checking in. And you offer to extend their stay quoting and citing that you saw like there’s a weather thing or just that you know how busy it can be to get everyone out of the house on a Friday night. And hey, do you want a cup a day earlier, Hey, I saw the weather is not going to be that great on Friday, do you want to call up a night earlier, so you don’t have to be rushed getting up there. And a lot of the time if you do that, and you offer them a bit of a discount, then the big benefit is that now you’re filling up a night that probably otherwise would not have gotten filled up. You’re incurring next to no additional like marginal costs, because there’s no additional turnover, no additional admin work needs to be done. It’s literally just an extra night, maybe a roll of toilet paper or something. And you’re just getting basically free money at that point. So it can be really, really helpful to do that. Same thing when people are checking out if they’re checking out especially on a Sunday, I’ve found to be really effective. Hey, do you want to extend to the Monday and then you can just leave at the end of the day on Sunday, we’ll just give you like a late checkout basically a very late checkout or don’t extend an extra day so you can get the most out of your weekend. Or hey, there’s weather coming in and I saw that your you got a long drive back, I just want to know if you want to extend your stay so you didn’t have to rush, that strategy can be really really effective for getting additional bookings. Now another really great strategy for driving more bookings again without having to generate a new customers is by taking the customers you currently have and getting repeat bookings from them. And I talked about this in my other video and I’ve talked about this in a few other videos is a direct booking strategy. And for this, I recommend using a tool called stay phi. Now not sponsored by stay fi but I do really like using their tools as a host myself. What I like to do is install their stay fire router in my property and basically what that means that now when a guest is checked into that property, they want to use the Wi Fi they’re going to have to put in their email address in order to access it similar to what you would have to do if you were staying at for example a hotel and the nice thing about this and I’ve say this in other videos is that it allows you to now collect the email addresses of not just the person that booked with you but all
All the other members of that group who may want to stay at your property again, with different people, maybe they’ve got another group of friends or another group of family that they want to stay at your property with in the future. So you collect their email addresses, and then you can set up a simple automated email sequence to initially just send them a couple of welcome emails, and thank them for joining and staying with you. And then boom, put them into an auto mailer, that just mails them once every month, with a different kind of highlight of your property for that specific month. So if it’s January, and it’s winter time and your properties area, then you’re going to highlight winter activities and things to do. If it’s summertime, you’re going to highlight summer things to do, if there’s an event happening, you’re gonna customize these emails, one for each month of the year, when you can set them up on autopilot, and then just update them if there are different events happening, or even things that change. And so it becomes really, really easy and automated hands off to generate additional bookings. And the nice thing about those additional bookings are, they’re coming from guests that you already know you’ve had a great experience with. So they’re really good guests that you want to have back staying with you again. And number two, is that you’re also going to be able to drive those bookings into a direct booking platform, rather than going through an OTA like Airbnb or VRBO. So you get to save the guests money while also saving yourself on fees. What I like to do is charge somewhere in the middle of what I would receive if they booked through Airbnb and what they would pay so they get a bit of a discount, I make a bit more money because we’re missing out on the fees from the middleman there, and then everybody’s happy. So those are my top recommendations to help you get more bookings to your short term rental property. If you have any thoughts, questions, comments, concerns, strategies, tips, anything you’d like to add, let me know in the comment section down below. I’d love to hear from you guys. If you liked this video, if you got value from it if it was helpful for you in any way, shape, or form. Or if you just want to do me a bit of a solid, then make sure you hit the like button down below this video, I post two new videos every single week. And anything you do to share more love more likes more appreciation on really helps me to get these videos in front of more people. So I really do appreciate any of you who take half a second and just hit that like button. Speaking of which, the last thing I’ll ask you to do is hit the subscribe button down below as well. Like I said, I do post two new videos every single week here on the channel helping you succeed with short term rentals. So if you want more access to those if you want to stay up to date with them if you want to keep watching them consistently so you can make more money on Airbnb, then make sure you’re subscribed to the channel. I know a bunch you guys watching here are not yet subscribed. So make sure you take a half a second and hit that subscribe button as well. I promise you you will not regret it. With all that being said thank you so much for watching this video and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye