Ultimate STR strategy?

Question

Is the (your) long-term strategy to eliminate platforms like AIR and VRBO? Do you let your guests know to contact you directly the next time they come to town?

As we are in our second year of vacation rentals, we see an increase in the number of return visitors who are happy to avoid the fees from these companies. We'd certainly like to increase that number, theoretically until we are 100% full with 'private' guests.

I assume most of us have our own website to attract new visitors..... Any other ways to attract guests?

Luke Carl · Answer

Yes my friend but you’re missing the point. No one handed me these properties. I started with zero dollars as the son of a mailman and did it ALL on my own. If you want to go from where I was (where you are) to where I am. You might want to listen

Dave Stokley · Answer

I have 32 STRs and am 100% on Airbnb. For 3% you cannot replicate the service they provide. Good luck driving that much traffic, let alone handling the payment processing, tax collection and remittance, and property and liability coverage.

Luke Carl · Answer

Not mine. 800k gross STR income this year. I’m not interested in off platform at this time.

Ken Boone · Answer

@Bruce Woodruff - Yes I have a website but it does not drive much traffic. It is really there for me to be able to give them an easy reference to find my cabins. Instead of telling them vrbo/xxxxxxx I just tell them to go to peacefulcabinrentals dot com or hand them a business card with it on there, or have it on my tag at the bottom of my emails. Airbnb and VRBO have so much SEO going on you can't beat it. So to your point, for return guests sure, but that is not going to be the bulk of your traffic. The longer you have your STR the more return guests you will get, but it is not going to grow to be anywhere near 50% of your traffic.. More like a few each year. You do have liability insurance automatically through VRBO and Airbnb which you lose going through your direct booking so now your personal liability insurance kicks of course but there is something to be said for that. If you are in a market where there are not a lot of STRs then perhaps you might get more traffic due to google not finding anything else to pop up when someone searches for an STR in your area.. but if that is the case you would probably not be in a great STR area anyway. I am in the Pigeon Forge market and if it was not for Airbnb and VRBO I would not be able to generate enough traffic through my website to survive. That is because there are TONS of vacation rental mgmt companies out there with there websites with LOTS of cabin and LOTS of SEO and when someone searches for an STR in my market, unless they know my cabin names specifically these other companies are going to pop up on the first 20 pages worth of google results. It is really only because of VRBO and AirBnb that self management became a viable option to make some great cash flow in the last 5 years. Just think of it this way. You pay them for marketing your cabin to the masses at a level a private website cannot even begin to compare too. Back your question though.. for return guests sure.. It's just that return guests are great, but sometimes they want discounts, and the percentage of guests in a given year that our return guests I just don't think is going to be that great that you can walk away from those two platforms.Best strategy with STR.. IMO.. and you know what thats worth. Is to take your cash from your first STR and put it into another STR. Then take the cash from those two STRs and put it into another STR.. and so on until you reach where you want to be with STRs. Then take all that cash and invest into more passive options after that.

Mike Shemp · Answer

Hi Bruce,We get the majority of our bookings from AirBNB and VRBO, and are fine getting them that way as we generally only accept people with previous reviews.The other thing we do is post on Tik Tok, Instagram, and Facebook almost every day which helps drives direct bookings. It's also nice because many of the people that book with us from social media we get to build a relationship with a bit before they book..they get to know us...we get to know them... so in general those bookings have all been very good with no guest damage, etc.Hope that helps.Mike

Bruce Woodruff · Answer

@Lauren Kormylo @Alex S.Thanks for the input!

John Underwood · Answer

I'm happy with the bookings Vrbo provide, I take off platform bookings but it's not my goal to replace Vrbo.

Joshua Strickland · Answer

A product like Stayfi will allow you to capture guests emails so you can market directly to them in the future for return bookings. I don’t think Airbnb and VRBO are going anywhere though, but nice to have the option.

Bruce Woodruff · Answer

Thanks but no. I get it. We just retired and this is all we want. Just need to maximize every single dime.

Ken Boone · Answer

If you use a channel manager for message automation and all that stuff, instead of the stuff built in to AirBnb/VRBO, when you go direct, all your automations still work for you. May not be something you are interested in but thought I would throw that out.