All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

Like others have said, this is probably true technically but not in spirit.

Airbnb's algorithm is even more opaque than Google's.  No one really knows how it works.  But it's widely accepted that it likely focuses a lot on interest/engagement, similar to social media platforms.  In that sense conversion probably does matter in the same way that someone seeing your post on Facebook but not liking/commenting on it is bad for the post's reach.  But it's unlikely that 1 measly view occasionally will have any tangible impact.

Generally the big box shops aren't the way to go in that area.  I would look at a more boutique place that's going to spend more time and energy on your place rather than your place just being another home in the blender.

Collin H and @Leslie Anne Morris come to mind.

 And now that I think of it, it's really everything, not just travel stuff.  Even if you go to walmart's website and go to a particular product page or your cart it doesn't show you the true price including tax and shipping until you get into checkout.

It's interesting that all the vitriol is directed at Airbnb for this when basically every website in the country does it the same way.

Maybe I'm confused.  I'm definitely not a financial advisor, so maybe I'm missing something.  But why would you pay off 3% loans just so you can take out a new loan on that equity at a much higher interest rate?

I think you need to make a decision on whether you want to buy additional properties or not.  Not just now, but ever.  If so, it doesn't make much sense to keep aggressively paying down cheap loans when you know you'll likely want to access that money later and have to pay a higher interest rate for it.

You can literally put the money you're using to pay down the loans into a fully liquid money market account right now that makes more than 3% interest, and retain complete access to the money at no cost when you want to buy another place.  So why is paying down the principal on the two non-commercial cabins even on the table as a consideration?

 Yes, I still think it's worth it in spite of that.

It's not that they're not able to connect, it's just that it creates distrust when the guest unchecks the checkbox to opt out of marketing, but still has to put their name/email in to connect.  StayFi should provide the option for the user to bypass putting in that info if they opt out of marketing.

If they opt out of marketing there's no reason to still require them to enter their info since we're not collecting it at that point anyway.  But then the user gets suspicious that they unchecked the box but still get an error that they HAVE to provide that info in order to connect, and thinks we're still collecting it even though they opted out.

I use it in my 3900 sqft house w/ no extender and so far so good.  The house is two stories so everything pretty compact.  They recommended the extender but I tried it without it first and it's been fine.

Good product.  I just wish they'd listen to my advice of allowing the option of not requiring the guest to enter their info when they opt out of marketing.  Gotten a few complaints and one bad review because of it, but captured a lot of emails.

 All I'm saying is you can't directly compare $3k/yr on a vacation home to $3k/yr on a timeshare.  Because it's really $3k/yr + losing reasonable access to $250k cash on a vacation home vs. $3k/yr + full access to $250k to do whatever you want with.

I'm not saying the latter is better, I'm just saying it often gets left out of these comparisons.  It's a huge difference.

Good as a consumer, but I do think this will have a larger effect than people are anticipating, even for folks not hiding erroneous fees.

The reality is the total price on Airbnb/VRBO/etc comes out much higher than the nightly rate, typically.  Even if you're not making up silly fees, just having the service fee, a reasonable cleaning fee, and of course taxes can really add up.  And I think people DO get sucked into spending a bit more filtering by nightly rate, looking through a bunch of places, narrowing it down to a few they like, and then clicking through and seeing a higher than anticipated total.  But then at that point they've already kind of fallen in love with the places, and with the quality of place they've been looking at the last hour, and don't want to go back and start over and start looking at cheaper places more in line with their true budget, now that they've flipped through the more expensive stuff for the last hour and started to picture themselves there.

Honestly, the same thing happens to me when I'm traveling.  I get a number in my head like okay this one is $2500 and this one is $2600 and this one is $2500 which one do I like better?  Then I click through and realize whoops these are actually more like $3500/$3600/$3500 in total prices but now I'm pretty set on those places, even if my original intent was to be more in the $2500-$3000 range, and if it had shown total price up front, I'd not have looked at those places in the first place and gotten to a point where I felt inclined to spend extra on them.

I've always thought it was funny how much flack Airbnb took for this compared to other industries that do the same.  Has no one shopped for a rental car recently?  They're even worse.  They don't show the total price on the next page, they make you flip through 5 pages and a lengthy checkout process before they finally plop the true total on you after showing you a different number throughout the whole process and hope you don't notice.

As I understand it, this is an American thing.  It's common for upfront pricing in other countries.  And as I understand it, in Europe, Airbnb has already been doing upfront pricing for a while (I could have misheard that).

Can't say that I hate it if we move in that direction, and maybe Airbnb will spur a change in all the other things as well so we can start getting upfront pricing on everything else too.