Veteran AirBnB/VRBO Host - First time experience with Booking.com

[Luke Carl]

So. My February is very light. I spend hours on my 6 listings every day. I'm pulling my hair out. My prices are lower than I want and still, the bookings just aren't coming in. 

I decided to try Booking.com and wanted to share my experience with the forum. 

It was a complete waste of time and here's why. They send snail mail to the property with a code to verify the properties existence. My property is in a Vacation Rental Only area and doesn't even have a mail box. I called customer service. They said they might be able to send someone to the property and verify its existence and paperwork to verify that I own it. 

I checked the site. There are Zero single family homes in my market. Only hotels. In my case we're dealing with Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg log cabins. There's somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 of these cabins in existence and there are zero on Booking.com. I wish I would have done this step first, maybe I would have realized it was a waste of time. 

I'm sure this is market specific and you may have different results but instead of it being a complete waste of my morning I thought I'd share this info with the forum in order to hopefully save someone else's time. 

If for some reason I'm the first person that has tried to put a cabin on Booking.com and they call me back and verify that it's going to happen I will post an update. I'm not holding my breath. 

[John Underwood]

@Luke Carl Thanks for posting this information.

I think I had to do a similar verification when I started with Homeaway.

As you know I get most of my bookings through HA and VRBO. I also use Airbnb and I get a small trickle of reservations from them. They email me occasionally and ask if I want to offer a discount for a week they see as not booked at say a 26% discount. Then they show this discount online but they say they also send targeted emails to certain customers with this discounted price. I have been bumping up the price for that time frame and then accept the suggested discount. It sometimes works and I get a Airbnb booking within days of this. Sometimes it doesn't work but worth a try.

Have you noticed that Homeaway has a show on A&E Saturdays at 11AM? It is called Vacation Rental Potential. I set my DVR to record it. It is interesting and they are in a different part of the country each week.

Homeaway also has some cool new tools. They identify your competition set and you can tweak these. It shows when you loose a booking to someone else on Homeaway/VRBO and you can go check out their property to see what their pictures, amenities and pricing looks like. If you win a booking it tells you what other properties they looked at before choosing you. Sometimes it is properties in other states. I received a booking for this summer from someone from Rhode Island and I saw that my competition was located on other lakes in other states. It also charts prices from your competition, it shows what percentage of your competition is booked, it also shows the average price for booked properties vs unbooked properties. One very powerful tool is it shows how many inquires there are for certain dates so you can anticipate a high demand time frame. I love these new tools and look at them several times a week as they are always being updated.