Airbnb's How to get more bookings and monthly reports?

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Hello BP!. My first Post, looking for some guidance and advice.  I have 5 STR listings that i help manage for a friend and was wondering what are some tricks for getting bookings on the off seasons and best way to price accordingly.  I'm also having difficultly with monthly reports.. when i export to CSV (w/ Airbnb) for monthly reports it exports to an Excel spreadsheet that is not the most convenient to use.   Any suggestions for monthly reports or how to increase bookings.  We just went live w/ Booking.com, FlipKey, HomeAway and VRBO so i'd like to have a better system in place.  Thanks and Happy New Year!

Chad Hensel · Answer

Hi BP, I'm Director of Operations for a STR Management company managing 90+ properties in the South. I can answer and help clarify some question on STRs, booking channels, and the STR ecosystem.

Each booking channel gives you slightly different information, and all in different formats. The easiest way to unify your reporting and cross market your listings is to use a PMS like Guesty, Jannis, Streamline, or one of many many other out there. They have already built the integrations and will give you a unified inbox for all the different booking channels. When we were smaller, we setup a relational database and email parsers from each booking channel, and used that to unify the reporting. It worked, but was not worth the effort to setup once we found out about how inexpensive some of the PMS systems can be.

@Bob Huggins More booking channels mean more exposure and ultimately more revenue, you are on the right path. I would also recommend using a dynamic pricing engine like BeyondPricing or PriceLabs. BeyondPricing looks at your STR and hotels in you market and compares the subject property, automatically adjusts your listing's price. PriceLabs does something similar, but they only look at STRs. One thing to be aware of with dynamic pricing, AirBnB's Smart Pricing will under price your property roughly 10%. That's a direct quote from several members of AirBnB's data science team.

@Jon Crosby You can also setup with Guesty as a channel manager. Their PMS and Guest Communications Service is less than half the price of Evolve. We use this setup plus two inhouse second level support members to manage 100 listings. I'm not trying to knock Evolve, but 13% is a super heavy fee. For some context, we charge 25%, but handle everything a normal PM handles, plus all the guest related issues, and cleaning.

@Robert Clifford AirBnB ranks based on just a few criteria. New PLUS listings get top tier, then normal new listings, then Superhosts, then everything else. In each tier, properties are ranked based on average reviews and occupancy rates and views. And these tiers stack. For example, as a Superhost, my new listings would show up higher than a non-Superhosts new listing, and we would both show up higher than a 3 year old listing with only 4 star reviews. A Superhost's 4 star listing would show up higher than a non-Superhosts 4 star listing. If two Superhosts have a 5 star listing, the one with more views will be ranked higher.

Jon Crosby · Answer

Hey @Bob Huggins, you might want to consider moving over to Evolve Vacation as those are all the platforms they are integrated with and have their own reporting platform and owner/manager portal.   They handle all pre-stay communication, booking, calendars and payments for 13% of nightly rate if you wanted to check them out.

Here is an article a wrote a while back on self-promoting during the off season as well just for your review:   https://www.biggerpockets.com/blogs/10042/66327-5-...

Best of luck and feel free to reach out directly with any questions I might be able to answer for you.

Cheers!

Tyler Work · Answer

@Bob Huggins if you're trying to get more organized as a property manager, the single best decision I ever made was hiring a bookkeeper.  I have a great recommendation for a guy who does P&L for each property plus generates great looking monthly owner statements, sets up vendor bills (for housekeepers), prepares 1099s and does all bookkeeping.

When I was managing 20+ in Denver Airbnb kept them all booked (Booking.com, VRBO, etc never provided any value, just a time sink to use a clunky channel manager), I use Price Labs for pricing, which is the most customizable price tool if you have a good base knowledge of your market.

Chad Hensel · Answer

A great starting point is the VRMA. They are the biggest association around. This spring they are hosting a 3 day event in Charlotte.  My team is attending. See you there.

Robert Clifford · Answer

Hi @Bob Huggins.  We have one in Greenville, SC and 2 in Columbia, SC. Reviews are key. If you have to discount or give a special rate to get them, it’s money well spent (lost). :-). Also, “They” say the search algorithms favor listings that update pricing. There are some tools that will update daily for you. We’ve been trying Wheelhouse.  Also, are you in AirBnB too?

I’m trying some things to market to companies and also local business. It’s a new strategy. We’ll see how that goes. Best of luck to you.

Bob Huggins · Answer

@Julie McCoy, @Jon Crosby, Paul.. thanks for the feedback! Julie i was thinking the same thing, it's probably just as easy to transpose the info to my own spreadsheet with the info needed.

Jon i was hoping to keep the 13% in house.. the communication and booking isn't something i can't handle for now, we'll see how that goes as it gets busier.?

Paul how did you market to those groups you mentioned?, any specific method?

Thanks for the input, it's all useful!!

Julie McCoy · Answer

Hey @Bob Huggins welcome to BP!  I maintain spreadsheets for all my STRs - each booking platform has different export/reporting mechanisms and like you, I don't find them useful.  I have four STRs and just log each stay in the appropriate spreadsheet with the information I find useful (I break out the amount by rent, tax, listing fee, housekeeping cost, etc.)  It sounds cumbersome but really doesn't take a lot of work to keep up.

Re: off season, I use the old tried-and-true of lowering your price :p  I typically set mine at/near the lowest I'm willing to accept and take what I get (I don't go too low because after a certain point the risk/reward doesn't pay off).  Look at what your competition is doing and price comparably.

Paul Sandhu · Answer

Rent them to travelling or temporary workers.  Nurses, specialty welders, industrial maintenance, construction crews, etc.  I rent my 23 STRs specifically to refinery contractors.  Those big burly guys with neck tatoos.

Chad Hensel · Answer

@Bob Huggins There are new services coming online everyday in the STR ecosystem. It is difficult to keep up, and I go to several conferences a year for this specific reason.

For less than 15 units, BeyondPricing is a great dynamic pricing engine with the best user interface for that service. Syncs with your AirBnB or PMS account to make it dead simple. We like Guesty as a PMS becuase it is not very expensive, and you can automate a good amount of messaging, including check-in and check-out instructions based on several triggers. It takes work to set up, but you can do some very complex automations if you want to go that route. If your cleaners are using any of the modern apps, they can be integrated with your PMS as well.

Jon Crosby · Answer

Hi @Keith C., just for clarification, Evolve charges 10% of the nightly rate and Stripe takes 3% for payment processing.  There are no additional fees on top of that from the OTAs.  It's not just secondary software either, in fact their software was subpar up until about a year ago.   Evolve handles all pre-stay communication, guest questions and any pre-screening I want done as needed.  They also handle all the professional photography and copy for the listings during setup.  Additionally they have integrated guest insurance with every booking (up to $3k in damages) which I have used a few times, and $1M in liability on top of my own coverage (which I hope I never have to use).

All that being said, it's definitely not for everyone I know so that's why I'm always happy to share my experience as not to persuade others to use Evolve, but merely show them alternative business models for their STRs they might not be aware of.

Thanks!

Airbnb's How to get more bookings and monthly reports?

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