All Forum Posts by: Brian Eilering

I have gotten a lot of traffic and traction off of Booking.com and filled a lot of empty dates that weren't coming in on the Airbnb/VRBO site. BUT - and this is a huge but - there are some serious caveats you need to keep in mind:

1. You need to have your own ability to take payment. We have our own portals - we have all the major stuff already because of our LTR company - Stripe, Square, Zelle, Paypal, etc - but if you don't have this, you will need to get it to use Booking.com. Eventually, I'm told, you get to be a gold star type host and they'll collect payment for you, but no one can tell me when or how this will work because...

2. They're a foreign company and not very easy to work with. Reps speak rudimentary english at best. You will spend some time on the front end waiting on long holds, and you'll do this because...

3. They don't charge the guest's credit cards, only take them to book on your calendar - so if the guest cancels during your "no cancellation" period, you are SOL because you don't have the CC number and can't see the CC number. Eventually, I'm told, you can see this once you're a gold-star type host, but until then the info is masked so you have no way of pre-authorizing or charging the card. You have to physically contact the guest yourself to get their credit card info to have them pay through an outside portal (like those I listed). And because they don't actually charge the CC and you have no way of charging the CC until they pay...

4. You get a decent number of scam and "lookey loo" bookers, because they know they haven't actually paid for anything. This ends up being a problem because once someone books, they've locked you into that booking according to booking.com's rules - you can't cancel until they day they don't contact you with a valid credit card. 

So I have had my battles with them. I've done a lot of traffic and stays with them so far - probably 50% compared to 50% total Airbnb/VRBO - but I have worked for that money for sure. 

If you use them, I would highly recommend blocking out high-value dates on their platform and leave them open on the other platforms, and either manually sync your calendars or just leave the booking calendar off of VRBO/AirBnb, because you don't want some BS booking clogging up Christmas, New Years, etc. 

This is actually not true at all. Airbnb, like the Ubers, GrubHubs, and other VC backed imposters pretending to have a business model simply used the same play of pouring cheap money into flashy marketing and lofty, if empty, claims about changing the world. In reality all AirBnB was doing was what others have done for generations: trying to push out competition by subsidizing the cost of massive losses on the platform in the early days in order to try and exploit platform effects later. 

Read enough other short term rental operators posts and you’ll see they failed to establish that monopoly and now have to show profits, which have been a challenge and will get far more challenging unless things improve with their image and operations over the next 1-2 years. Airbnb sees hosts as simply an inconvenient overhead, instead of the actual foundation of their business.

This is even more true now that they’ve pivoted into designer properties, which is basically just a fast-follow to what Hilton and Marriott have been doing in allowing smaller boutique hotels/brands to book off their main sites, without the rest of us even knowing it’s not a Hilton or Marriott property. 

As several others have posted here the future of short term rentals is owning your own platform and becoming your own Airbnb. This is actually not that hard, but does involve more than 10 clicks on a platform website that’s not acting in your best interest anyway.

@Brian Eilering Do a search and you will see that you are not alone... :-)

My thoughts are: 1) You say that VRBO has not worked for you  (yet?) I would not abandon them as they are spending a huge amount of $$ trying to regain market dominance. Look up last year's Superbowl ad for starters.

2) I would try out the other booking platforms....Booking.com, Trip Advisor, Houfy,  Etc... You never know which one might be your goldmine...!

3) You have to build and enlarge the presence of your own website. I built one last year but have not spent any time developing or advertising it. So I gotta get on that too.

4) Explore Facebook and Craigslist. Some people on here swear by them, I have not yet really gotten into them as I should.

5) Word of mouth and return guests, especially return guests! We are starting to get the advantage of this market. We promote this with all our guests, after they leave. Text/email/verbally....

Good luck, and PM if you want to, you are definitely not alone!

We do not list our properties on Airbnb due to ethical concerns. I am all about the customer, but when Airbnb forced hosts to give refunds indefinitely during COVID, no questions asked, we felt that to be completely unethical:

Airbnb was essentially placing the homeowner in the position of insurer, with the homeowner absorbing all of the financial brunt of cancellations. That’s not what hosts signed up for. Death, illness, job loss, and all sorts of other valid issues, can cause an unexpected cancellation.  That’s why you buy travel insurance.  

Meanwhile, for all the cancellations that were insured - guests that purchased the insurance pushed by Airbnb - Airbnb simply pocketed all of the premiums, not giving a dime to the hosts!  How they escaped a DOJ or FTC inquiry is truly incredible.

If I was forced to do business with Airbnb, I would simply shut down the business.

I think the only alternative is direct booking. Pay for ads to drive traffic to your own website. I assume all the PMS systems support this and provide you with the widget to place on your website to allow guests to book. I am actually planning on (have been for a while…) setting this up then blasting all my past guests, inviting them to direct book next time they visit. 

I've never worried about what Airbnb is doing as we get so few bookings from them. Me get most all our bookings from Vrbo.

 It only takes one bad guest problem with Airbnb to realize they probably won't believe you, and will believe a lying guest...it can be bad, although rare. They are horrible when there are issues with guests. I had one that wouldn't leave on check-out day, and he did alot of damage to the home. It was a nightmare. Airbnb didn't care, and doubted me. crazy... I have excellent customer service, but sometimes, there are guests looking to scam...although very rare.  All this being said, good luck.

 I deleted my Airbnb account when they began the whole "sharing data with China" thing. I've had my bad bouts with the company a few times and just don't like the way they do business... I wish VRBO would bring constant bookings, but only in vaca areas. I too am looking for other platforms. I think there is a huge opportunity out there for a new platform. This being said, there are many new platforms charging listing fees and bring 0 results. It's a pickle right now.