Seasonal listings

[Laura5961]

Hi,

Our listing is in a ski town and also great in the summer for hiking. Do hosts with similar listings try to tailor the listing during winter and summer seasons? For example, changing the listing and highlighting winter activities only and vice versa in the listing. Or just highlight both seasons in the listing?

[Lorna170]

@Laura5961   Tailoring your listing to your audience is a good thing.

My friend has a property that has a different winter/summer audience.  She has it listed on AirBnB twice -- once with only the summer months open and the other with the winter months open.  She has different pictures to attract the distinctly different guests.  As a result, she is booked year round, and can charge different prices for the different seasons.

[Fred13]

Yes, especially with properties that do not get booked far in advance.

[Elaine701]

Yes, summer and winter guests are here for different reasons and therefore are of a different demographic. 

Our capacity is 8 pax. 

In summer, we can depend on a "full house", guaranteed. Usually families of parents, their kids, and their grandkids. Therefore, we have one flat per-night price for the entire villa, regardless of number of persons. 

In winter, it's couples, two couples, maybe a family of four. They come for golf, cycling, hiking, or just to get away from the cold North. 

In summer, if we priced it on a per person basis, we'd be booked all summer with couples, at 1/4 the price we can otherwise command by pricing it flat rate. 

In winter, if we priced it "flat rate" for 8 pax, then it would be priced out of market for the primary winter tourist demographic. Or if we heavily discounted it for the entire villa, then we can be sure to get a full house, at less than half the regular per-person rate (because it's too cheap to pass up).  More pax means much higher costs to us. 

Airbnb doesn't have any facility to change the pricing model on a seasonal basis, so we're forced to have 2 listings. One for summer, one for winter. The summer listing is blocked from November thru March, and the winter lusting is blocked from April to October. 

It works well for bookings, yet it prevents calendar sync with other platforms, because if you sync both listings to another platform, then the other platform will be blocked all year. 

So, once winter is booked up, I sync the other platforms with the summer listing. Conversely, when summer is booked up, I sync the other platforms with the winter listing.

However, this does prevent advance bookings on other platforms, because the summer dates usually aren't made available until January or February, and the winter dates aren't available until September or October. 

I've asked Airbnb to consider allowing to change the price model on a seasonal basis many times in the past, but never received any reply, so I gave up asking. Besides, now I can't recombine the winter and summer listings without giving up a load of great reviews on one or the other of them. So I'm just stuck with it. 

So, there's my winter-summer story 🙂