571. How to become a booked out Airbnb in 4 simple steps

0:00You're listening to the Thanks for visiting podcast. We believe hosting with heart is at the core of every short term rental with a net's background in business operation. And Sarah's extensive hospitality management and interior design experience. We have welcomed thousands of guests from over 30 countries, earning us over a million dollars and garnering us thousands of five star reviews. We love sharing creative ways for your listing to stand out, serve your guests, and be profitable. Each episode, we will have knowledgeable guests who bring value to the short term rental industry. Or we will share our stories of our own experiences so you can implement actual improvements to your rentals. Whether you're experienced new or nervous to start your own short term rental, we promise you'll feel right at home.

1:04Hello, welcome back to another great episode. My name is Sarah Caracan. I'm a net grant and together we are. Thanks for visiting. When a host isn't booked out, the first thing they blame is either their price or that the market is oversaturated. But the real reason you are not booked out, it's usually in four other places and here's the good news. They are completely in your control. It's your listing, your data, your calendar, and your past guests. And today we're breaking all four down one at a time and number three, we'll surprise you. We've been hosting for over a decade. They'll have a multi-million dollar portfolio and we work with hundreds of hosts who collectively generate over two million dollars in monthly bookings through our private coaching program, Strategic Host. One of our members, Audrey, used exactly what we're about to show you and moved her listing to booking conversion from 0.64% to 2.17% in just 10 days. So by the end, you're

2:06going to know exactly which one of these four things is costing you bookings right now. All right, number one is your listing itself. Every single guest decides whether to book you off of your title, your hero image, your photos, and or your listing description. And we still see hosts uploading an iPhone photo. They think looks fine next to five professional shots. Guests can tell every photo in that gallery is either pulling its weight or is costing you the click. There is a balance most hosts miss on a photo count. Okay, you can't have so few that guests can't picture the space, but you also cannot have so many that the potential guests get lost in the sauce of scrolling through 10 photos of your living room at like a slightly different angle each time. It's just way too much. We have found in the, I think, thousands of listing audits at this point

3:10that around 40 photos is ideal. Unless you're in a completely competitive market or you have a giant home, somewhere around 40 photos is ideal. Yeah, and with your title and your hero image, that's the one photo that's standing next to every other listing in your market competing for the exact same click, same guest. And here's where hosts get it wrong. They tick the hero image based on what they personally love. Your favorite angle of the living room means nothing if it's not the photo that steals the click from your competition. Continuing on your listing, your description has one job. Okay, it's to answer every question before the guest has to ask it. How many on sweets do you have? What floor is bedroom one on, bedroom two on, bedroom three on, whether the pool is heated, is campus a two minute walk or is it an Uber ride? Make them guess once and you've lost

4:12the booking to ever answer the questions that your potential guest has floating in their mind first. And then there's the ever important reviews. And this is where the hosts do the most damage to themselves. Oh, yeah. When a negative review comes in, we see hosts respond defensively. Quite honestly, they sound unhinged. They sound unreasonable, like they're almost arguing with that guest. We want you to take a pause, take a breath before you respond. And remember, the goal of your response, you were not responding to that guest that already stayed. You were talking to the next guest that will be reading it, deciding whether to book you or not. And answer the question review raised calmly, collectively, and keep that future guest in mind. All right, number two. And this is the one that I want you to like run and fix, do get into place.

5:18I would turn on Airbnb's professional hosting tools if you haven't yet, because they tell you in black or white, whether your hero image, your title, or your description are turning lookers into bookers. And listen, we talk to hosts who have been doing this for years, and they have never opened or even looked at their professional hosting tools. There is no shame in this, but understanding the easy to read data on this page is the fastest fix in this entire list. Here's what the professional hosting tools page shows you. It shows you if you are showing up in search at all. If you're being clicked at all, if you're being booked, once someone does click, you're listing. And if they're not, that means that you can see the exact moment where you're losing your potential customer, so that you can fix that specific moment instead of guessing at your whole listing. Reacting to this data is baseline, because we're not letting our instincts decide if your hero

6:21image is the best one you have. We are confirming it with the data. And I want to ask something here, you all know how design forward Airbnb leads. They make it really easy for us to upload our listing, and then they get really easy for guests to book a place to stay. That's Airbnb's whole stick, if you will. They make that a really easy to read. Don't you agree? Absolutely. Do not be intimidated by this page. The goal, look at it. It is so easy to read. The graph is simple. It is basic, but it tells you exactly what you need. All right, Audrey, who is one of our strategic host clients, we spoke about her earlier, is is proof in this, okay? Her search to listing conversion was holding steady at 24.21%, which is really healthy for her listing in her market. This meant that potential gas were finding her and they were clicking on her listing. This is good. So getting the attention of a potential gas, it wasn't her problem. The drop was happening lower in her booking funnel.

7:23So we start at the top of the funnel and we want that gas to go through the booking funnel and it gets smaller as it goes down. And this, she was losing them towards the bottom of her funnel, between the gas thinking, ooh, this looks interesting. And I'm going to book it. And at first, she thought it was probably because she was overpriced. But once we coached her on how to read her data, we encouraged her to first fix her photos. And once we did that, her listing to booking conversion went up from 0.64% to 2.17% within 10 days. She found exactly where her funnel was breaking, instead of assuming the fix was dropping her price. And if you've never looked at your listing data on Airbnb or if you've looked at it and you haven't no clue what any of it meant, that is exactly what we teach when you learn with us live. The link is in the description to save your seat. Number three is your calendar and you are completely in control of this. And this is where

8:27you would never know your losing bookings. So, and I love to say you have cash sitting in your calendar. And they're just hiding. It's hiding from you. Because most hosts, you have settings on in your calendar and you have no idea. You have minimum stays. You have blocked dates. Rules that you set once and you never went back to question. It runs in the background deciding who can and who cannot book you. And you have no idea that this is happening because you forgot. Like you said, when you were newer or maybe it just came with these settings, you didn't know you were doing at the time or it was during your busy season. Now it's low season or vice versa. And we hear this constantly and I host, you know, they got that seven night booking over the Christmas holiday two years ago. So now they require seven nights every single Christmas holiday going forward. And they wonder why they're sitting empty. One great booking turned into a baseless permanent rule in their

9:31calendar. That needs to change. That's a good point, Annette. How about every date you block off to avoid a same day turnover because the cleanery you're working with refuses to do same day turnovers? Instead, build a team that can handle same day turnovers. It's a date that you're choosing to sit empty instead of selling all 365 days a year and having the most flexible schedule you possibly can. Or host just deciding no one would ever pay to stay for just one night plus their cleaning fee. So they just don't even bother offering one night's days. That is a decision based on purely assumption. And it will bury you in Airbnb's algorithm fast. One of our client, Tracy, she thought just that. She thought, why would anyone ever stay at my place for one night? And we showed her the data in her market and convinced her to try it. Since making that change alone, she has secured

10:36five one night's day bookings, totally almost $2,000 in revenue. These are reservations that she would have never gotten if she continued to believe that no one would ever pay to stay for just one night. Under availability is one of the biggest reasons Airbnb rewards you or punishes you. Being bookable gets you seen and being closed off will get you buried no matter how good your listing looks. Number four, and this is the one that hosts skip the most because they are too busy hunting out there for their next new their new booking, their new guest to notice. It's fostering those relationships with your past guests, people that have already paid to stay with you. And this is what we call a loyalty loop. And this can be super simple. Don't over complicate this, okay? It can be as simple as wowing the guest while they're staying with you so that your place feels like they're

11:37home away from home every time they think about coming back to the area. It can be a QR code or a line in your guidebook that gets them to give you their email address so that you can email them in the future, ask them to come back. It can be while they're there, you notice why they told they're coming in the first place and engaging a conversation with them about it. For example, I mean, I would say this is back in 2018. I have a guest, Kelly, who messaged me that the hotel she usually stays at for her time at work in Columbus, Ohio is under construction. And do I have got to read the between the lines there for work for work? I was like, oh my gosh, this is weekday stay. She comes all the time. So she checked in. I said, hey, Kelly, I hope we're better than the hotel. How's your week going? She said it was amazing. And I picked up the phone and I called her and said, Kelly, I would love for you to stay with me instead of that hotel every time you come in a town for work. And it is now, I mean, was that six years, seven years later? She is still. That's

12:42eight years later by the way. No. Yes. You said 2018 2018 plus. That is if that's that's that's that's a long time later. I mean, I know her husband's name. I know her dog. It's she's amazing. And we have a great relationship. And it really is as simple as that. So the keyword might be work. The keyword might be visiting family. The keyword might be an annual event that takes place in your town. This is where you just have to go that one layer deeper and you really can have that loyalty loop keeper awarding new and the guest over and over again. All right. So let's recap it. And that that's four different things that we have control over. Simple, easy, actionable. Yes. Number one, cost you anything. Some time and focus. You're listing has to do the convincing why you and not your competitor. All right. The data that Airbnb gives us that is so easy to read tells

13:43you what's working in what isn't and you have to remove your ego from it. If it's your hero image, if it's that title that you've had for the same title for the past three years, like change it, test it, do something different. Your calendar, it needs to show availability. If you want to win on Airbnb, you got to play by Airbnb's rules and you have to be available. If you block it off for your family to stay once a week, you know, every month or every summer, when have you and you're not available and Airbnb is in the algorithm, that's the way it is. And you have to give your guests a reason to come back. They liked your place. They booked you before. Get them to come see you again. Inside of our coaching program, Strategic Coast, we help host app guessing and start knowing exactly why they're booked or why they're not. So join us live and see if Strategic Coast is right fit for you. Click the link in the show notes to find out more. And with that, I'm Sarah Caracan. I'm a net grant and together we are, thanks for visiting.

14:46Thanks for listening to the Thanks for Visiting podcast. Head on over to the show notes for additional information about today's episode. And please hit that subscribe button and leave us a review. Awesome reviews help us bring you awesome content. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to hanging out with you next week.