Hi @Stephanie we’re in Johannesburg South Africa, where whole home airbnbs were allowed to open up last August, whilst international travel, including the inbound tourism, remained restricted, so some of our experiences might be relevant.
For some context, we run 5 apartments (4 of which are penthouses) in a building in the old city centre which is a trendy but up and coming part of town, that is close to most of the culturally relevant attractions, museums, art galleries etc. Our apartments each sleep 4 - 6 people in 2 - 3 bedrooms.
Historically 80% of our guests have been international tourists and our pricing is targeted at this group. We’d generally had a bit of an aversion to local staycation bookings as they accounted for 90% of the problem guests that we’d had over the years. And, in an apartment building, we came close to having short-term rentals banned, because of the issues these problem guests caused.
We saw a ‘mad rush’ of bookings for the first 6 weeks or so, after the things opened up. Clearly there was pent up demand for people to get out of their homes on staycation. With the exception of the December holiday period, things subsequently calmed down to pretty much weekends only, after that.
Whilst the penthouses are practically fully booked at the weekends, the non-penthouse apartment is getting almost nothing.
Of course, we’re aligned with the enhanced cleaning protocol and have gone a step further to include a whole house spray sanitization, after each stay. We’ve included an image, in our photographs, to highlight the focus on cleaning, to prospective guests.
In recognition of the fact that the rules (around who you can mix with etc.) can change, we’ve updated our house rules to emphasize that it’s the guests responsibility to ensure that their group make up meets the current Covid rules.
We’ve found that locals, who are much more likely to know the area, almost never read the listing or the house rules, so we resend the rules in the message thread and ask them confirm the have read and understand them, before we’ll accept a booking request. We’ve also turned off instant booking and insist on guests having a Verified ID.
One difference with staycation guests is they are much more likely to have a car. And, especially with our 3 bedroomed apartment bookings, perhaps even 2 cars. This has caused parking issues as the limited parking means each apartment has a single parking space.
We continue experimenting with pricing, looking to increase occupancy without encouraging more problem guests.
After such a long period of people generally working from home, we thought we’d see bookings from people that just wanted to work from somewhere else, but haven’t.
Hope that is useful
Ade