It’s a full-time job to be an Airbnb host. Taking care of a short-term rental business takes a lot of time, energy, and work. But there are ways to make the process of hosting more fun and rewarding.
You can use these Airbnb host tips and tricks whether you’re just starting in the vacation rental business or you want to improve your listings. We’re here to tell you some insider secrets about making and keeping an attractive listing, optimizing your listing, getting more bookings, and other tips for being an Airbnb host.
With all of these Airbnb hosting tips, your work will get easier and bookings will start coming to you on their own.
When making your listing, do something to catch the customer’s eye.
When you make your Airbnb listing, spend some time on a catchy title and professional photos right away. Make it different from everything else.
When people look through Airbnb, they interact most with the pictures. They get the user’s attention and show what’s special about your vacation rental.
Your pictures should be taken by a pro and have a lot of light. The cover photo should make people want to book your property, so ensure it shows the best view. In addition to the cover photo, you should have attractive photos of each room, including any special features like a pool or yard.
Your pictures are only one way to get a potential guest’s attention right away. Your listing title needs to match what is shown in the pictures.
The title of your listing is the first thing guests will see, so make it interesting and unique. Don’t use words that are too general. Instead, think outside the box and focus on what makes your property special. If you’re running out of words, use an online thesaurus.
Write short, powerful descriptions
Never forget how powerful a good Airbnb description can be. This is your chance to use words to wow your guests. Include everything you have to offer, but don’t try to write a novel. Your guests want to know what’s going on, but they don’t want to be buried in scripts.
Highlight the most important facts about your vacation rental and talk a little bit about what makes it special. What’s unique about your vacation rental? What is the area around it? Is your property close to a river or a well-known building? How many beds does it have? How many rooms?
Also, this is your chance to show off all your amenities, like WIFI, toiletries, heating or cooling systems, laundry facilities, and more. When guests want to have a special time away from home, the little things make a big difference.
Set a fair price.
If you price your Airbnb rental too high, you might lose customers, and if you price it too low, you might lose money. Price is a big reason why people choose where to stay. Do your research to find a comparable price to other places to rent in your area. When setting your price, you should also think about things like holidays and busy times of the year.
Lodgable integrates with dynamic pricing tools, that will automatically suggest prices based on current market trends and data. This can help you figure out how to set your prices.
Plan the length of your reservations.
Often, there will be one or two random days on your bookings calendar that seems impossible to fill because they are in the middle of a bunch of booked days. This is a common thing to do, and you’ll notice that many hosts set a minimum booking period to cut down on the number of empty days.
People also call these days “orphan days.” You could also offer a discount for longer stays over the weekend to get people to book more days and get rid of these empty days on your calendar.
You need to decide if you want to rent out your home for short stays or longer ones. What you choose will depend on many things, like whether your property gets more bookings during the summer than during the rest of the year and how much you can charge.
Get involved with reviews
Getting reviews can make your day, or it can stress you out because of one bad review. Whether a customer leaves a positive or negative review, it’s important to respond in a polite way to all of them.
Learn from your bad reviews how you can improve your business, and if you see a pattern, make those changes.
Responding to every review shows that you care about your customers’ needs and thoughts. At the end of the day, your Airbnb listing needs reviews so potential customers will trust it and interact more with your profile.
Make the most of your reviews.
Airbnb cares about how their guests feel and always puts the guest experience first. In the same way, it’s important to show off good reviews from your guests if you want people to trust your listing.
If you tell people about your good reviews, they may choose to stay at your place instead of others, especially if the reviews mention things that guests like.
Good reviews are the lifeblood of a listing, so you should try to get as many as possible by going above and beyond what guests expect.
Add your property to more OTAs.
Even though it may seem like just listing on Airbnb is enough, we recommend listing on several other online travel agencies (OTA) to increase your visibility and your chances of getting bookings. Vrbo and Booking.com are two good ones to start with. Each channel has a slightly different audience, so you’ll be able to bring in a wide range of people.
Having listings on different sites is a good start, but once you know more about the short-term rental business, you should also consider making your website so that people can book directly. When you have your website, you can control your marketing and improve your online reputation.
Your calendars should be in sync with a channel manager.
The best way to make it easy to boost your Airbnb listings is to use a channel manager. If you list on more than one OTA or on Airbnb, a channel manager lets you sync your calendars, bookings, and rates from each listing site into one central dashboard. Yes, you can manage and control all of your listings from one place.
When a reservation is made on one channel, the other listings’ calendars will be blocked. When you change the daily rate for one listing, it also changes for all of the others. The channel manager cuts down on the number of mistakes in your listings and double bookings, which in turn cuts down on the number of bad reviews you get.
Use software to manage your Airbnb.
The Airbnb management software helps you take care of all the tasks you have to do every day to run your property. You can automate tasks that you often do, like cleaning or turning over guests and communicate with guests, like sending them emails with house rules, directions, or requests for reviews. In short, running your Airbnb business easier and saves you time.
Like the above-mentioned channel managers, the Airbnb management software also has a multi-calendar view that lets you see all of your bookings, both on Airbnb and other channels.
Not every part of being an Airbnb host has to be hard. With Lodgable, you can find great software for running Airbnbs.
