How easy is to make money while hosting?

[Vivek72]

Hi Folks,

I am looking for advice on starting hosting soon and was wondering how all of you are managing your expenses and ensuring that you stay profitable. 

Any watch-outs that people can share will be greatly appreciated. Also, I recently renovated my place with lovely decor and I am wondering if I can somehow share my products with my hosts and on my insta with folks to actually go and buy (helps me generate additional $$ from affiliate). Wondering if someone thought of that / dabbled into it.

[Helen3]

If you want to know if your STR will be profitable you need to set up up a profit and loss budget for all your start up and ongoing costs.

Then do your market research to estimate daily rates and how many days a year you are likely to let your property for.

This will give you your likely profit levels.  @Vivek72 

[Sudsrung0]

@Vivek72 

Some tips here on how to pricing strategy might be useful for you

https://bit.ly/3UfRE6K 

[Gillian166 · Accepted solution]

@Vivek72  i think this is possible, I know of a few STRs that have large insta followings and use high end products which they seem to 'advertise' on insta, so they must have some kind of sponsorship deal going. you might want to build a following first. If you're just linking to stuff on Amazon, you want to be sure the products you have are actually high end and amazing, ie, you need to have more knowledge of them and understanding of their worth than your guests. 

When I first started I watched a few guys on YT making vids and they had many amazon links to products they recommended, and as a wife/mother of 20years I disagreed with so many of his choices. a year later he had changed his reccos on a few things, because he didn't have the skills to actually know what was good in a kitchen as he's never really cooked before.

TLDR: if you are going to curate items in your home make sure you have the skills to be a curator. 

The other option is to try to get local places to give you a discount, in exchange for you sending customers to them. 
We've done a deal with 2 local wineries who offer us great discounts on wine that we give to guests, as well as enjoy the discount for ourselves, and guests get a free tasting if they visit the winery. I tried to get a very famous local skin care brand to offer me a discount in exchange for product placement and insta posts and they haven't responded, so i suspect i'll need to build my following before they care. I ended up buying their product in a 50% off sale so it worked out fine for me. I also have some vintage/rustic/farm items in my listings with price tags on them, as I have a lot of vintage pieces and i keep finding more, but so far i haven't sold any. 

There are lots of ideas! I keep thinking I should frame some of my photos (I'm a professional photographer) and see if I can't sell a few prints to guests. 

[Vivek72]

Thanks a ton Gillian. Love that you are trying out different ways to share products local to your community/area. Your point on curation is pretty spot on - as long as things that you are putting out there are exciting and not run of the mill - those can stand out!

[Sudsrung0]

@Vivek72 

We live on an island almost all of our guest are tourist, we are surrounded by many other islands that you can only get to by boat, So we sell boat trips years ago we picked the best ones for service a full day trip pickup from our place take them to the marina includes a BBQ lunch on some deserted beach, we get 30% commission,

We also offer luxury minivan from the airport, car rent, motorbike rent, 

We also recommend local restaurants then we get discount when we go in,