How To Get Longer Stays
As An Airbnb Manager
Introduction (Welcome)
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We only need one or two nights!
Or
Oh no, someones just booked two nights for Christmas eve!
If you are constantly getting shorter bookings through your Airbnb account or through other booking channels your property is losing revenue big time. While you are acting as your own property manager one of the hardest things to do is to turn down bookings which aren’t the best for your property. Most of our clients come to us after self managing for a couple years and without fail there will be almost every booking accepted and no settings or strategies set to get better longer stays through the property.
There are a couple key questions to answer when setting up your account to be better geared towards longer term stays.
1: Who is your ideal guest?
2: What is the min and max nights will I accept?
3: How can I get more guests like this?
Choosing Guests
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While a group coming through with 20 extra guests “just for a couple hours” will bring you in some extra cash it might not be worth it for you long term. Consider the following two profiles:
Jenny Jimes
- 5 X 5 Star Reviews
- All Account Verifications
“ Hey xxx,
We are coming up for a family stay with myself, my husband, our two kids and another family. We are really looking forward to staying at your property! Please let me know if you need any information from us 🙂
Kind Regards,
Jenny “
Booking Details:
14 Nights
$4000 Total
Samantha Plant
- No Reviews
- No Verifications
“ Hi, just coming up with a couple friends for a good time away “
Booking Details:
2 Nights
$450 Total
How To Get Longer Term Guests
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If you were given the choice between those two bookings most people would lean towards Jenny for a number of reasons. These include, more money, longer stay, reviewed guest with great reviews and she provided more details about her group.
The annoying thing is you might have had Samantha accepted and this then prevented Jenny from booking removing money from your pocket. This might have sparked the statement “ I want more guests like Jenny, how do I get them?”
Excellent question!
In our property management guide we go through how to create your listing for a specific audience. Once that’s done you can start configuring your account. A few things you can do without engaging a professional property manager are as follows.
First things first, change your settings for instant bookings. We only enable instant bookings for guests with verifications as well as reviews and recommendations from other hosts. This will help prevent bad guests and will also allow you more choice.
Next setup discounts for longer term stays. The easiest way to calculate and allow longer term stays. We recommend a simple 10% discount for a week plus long stay and 15% for a month plus. Keep in mind also that in busier periods like Christmas with advanced strategies you can remove these discounts for those periods and tier your pricing strategies.
Make sure to select your minimum and max nights you want also! Most successful hosts have a two night minimum and no max nights depending on the time in the year.
Finally you can setup your listing to be more attractive to longer term customers. A basic example is having “LIGHTNING FAST NBN” in the title of the listing.
For those of you who want to establish a truly advanced strategy for your property and include things like tiered minimum nights, advanced discounting and automatically adjusting nightly rates according to supply and demand. Get in touch with our team for a free consultation anywhere in Australia!
See What Your Property Can Really Do?
Call On 1300 347 670