Losing out to too much competition

[Ajay-K0]

Hi everyone

We are a family hosting a Ministry approved B&B in New Delhi, India since 2009. We joined Airbnb in 2012, when they had just a handful of properties in New Delhi. Over the years though, we have noticed a lot many accommodations coming up due to which the pricing has kept lowering irrespective of what we are offering as compared to other properties - with none of the parameters of location, room size, pedigree, services etc. withstanding. In fact, we are at a price point lower than we first started out.

Now there's a lot of properties in Delhi that pose as homestays / B&Bs but are different from us on two major points - 

a) We are registered with the Ministry of Tourism; 

b) Our family stays at the same property where we have the guest rooms - so there's a personal touch in everything we do 

As a direct result of both the above, we are able to offer a proper homestay experience to our guests.

Even still, we seem to have gotten lost amongst the hundreds and thousands of new rooms that have been added and are fighting for visibility with new(er) properties that fundamentally seem to be working on the keep-lowering-prices-to-fill-rooms principle. We personally know other owners in the vicinity who are just acquiring apartments on yearly leases and then listing the rooms at dirt low prices! In the past, we have received huge amounts of business from Airbnb so much so that we have seen 200+ nights being booked on Airbnb in peak season which is down to maybe 10-15 now. We have seen time and gain that the moment we decrease our room tariff (as proposed by Airbnb price tips), guest interest generates almost instantly and any increase in pricing kills any traction very quickly.  We do understand that pricing is vital to a guest, but surely it can't be the only thing one looks at while booking. We are in no way undermining any of the other hosts and/or properties. We are sure they are all working very hard and are genuinely wonderful accommodations. We are just trying to pull Airbnb's attention towards a possible marketing opportunity - that of distinguishing homestays from other properties or sectioning different types of offerings - thereby making it easier for guests to locate their kind of property. Maybe have a section that shows which properties are actually registered with the concerned local authorities.

Can we suggest Airbnb to have a separate section for (in want of a better word) genuine homestay properties like ours?  We have tried, but are still waiting to hear anything from them for a long time now. Have any of you been facing such an issue? Or is there something we can do to improve visibility and stand out apart from lowering the prices? Airbnb says our listings are as complete as they can be.

Thank you for your suggestions.

[Jennifer1897]

Unfortunately when you live in a largely populated and/or well traveled area, you are going to have a heightened level of competition. Sometimes you can be offering the best of the best and still have trouble standing out.

I did look at your listings, as well as complete a search for your area, and it seems like you are priced a bit on the higher end. I saw entire apartments being listed for less than your private rooms. Since money is typically the first thing taken into consideration, this could be costing you some bookings. I wish I could generate a magic solution for this, but lowering your price is really the only answer. 

Aside from that, a few of your listing have some slightly lower ratings. While a 4.7 or 4.5 may not seem "That bad," in a market as competitive as this, those ratings hold a lot of weight. Also, the breakdown ratings reflected some lower scores for "Cleanliness." Aside from price, cleanliness is one of the most important areas to score well in. When comparing your ratings to others in your area you sit somewhere in the middle, which could very well be affecting your bookings as well. 

As for being registered, that is great, but at this point in time is probably not going to serve you better in anyway. As far as Airbnb creating a different category for registered properties, I do not see that anytime in the near future.

As someone who hosts, and stays at airbnb's I would suggest maybe integrating more of the family aspect into your listing. I myself love staying with hosts who reside in the home, especially when I travel out of the country. It makes for such a unique experience to really connect with someone who is local to the area. I remember when I was going to Cuba, we picked a place that was hosted by a local couple. Some of their photos displayed them cooking breakfast for the guest, or smiling in front of their residence with people they had hosted. Of course you need to always ask permission to post any photos of guest, but this was really a selling point for me as a traveller. 

Hopefully bookings will pick up for you, happy hosting 😃

[Sarah977]

@Ajay-K0  Home-share hosts have been asking Airbnb to separate home-stays from all the entire place, off-site host, property managed listings for a long time. They have consistently ignored this, and yes, it's frustrating and unfair to be lost among all the other listings. Even though Airbnb started out as a home-share platform, they are increasingly unsupportive to small-time hosts and actually promote the big boys and hotels. A lot of those big boys are even allowed special things that other hosts aren't, like securing a cash security deposit from guests.

All you can really do is try to make your listing stand out in some way, either by the photos, what you offer, or marketing towards a specific type of guest, or a combination of all of the above. And, as @Jennifer1897 said, try to keep your ratings high. Cleanliness is a rating it's easy to get higher- you just have to clean better, fix up or replace things that look old or ratty, etc. For instance, your place looks great, but the shower floor looks like it's cracked and stained. It may be perfectly clean, but guests will equate stained or cracked with "dirty". Replacing things like that, if you can afford it, can help.

And yes, I'd take some photos of you with guests (they don't have to be guests, they could just be friends or family), sharing a meal, or sitting in the garden, or laying out food on the table- it will emphasize the personal nature of your business.

[Susan17]

@Ajay-K0 

Sorry to hear you're bearing the brunt of the "professionalisation" of Airbnb, and paying the heavy price for the company's insatiable greed, their relentless (and reckless) quest for world domination and their deliberate gross over-saturation of almost every market on earth, in their desperate efforts to create the illusion of super-strong stratospheric pre-IPO growth for their potential investors.

Unfortunately, the platform and operational infrastructure - and the company's increasing failure to attract and retain new and existing guests - doesn't even come close to being able to support the sheer volume of hosts that Airbnb continues to aggressively recruit with ridiculously high referral fees for recruiters, and incentivised start-up bonuses for new listers, so the churn has to come from somewhere. In trademark cynical Airbnb fashion, they've decreed that you, me, and hundreds of thousands - and possibly millions - of other small, independent hosts around the globe (whose commitment, dedication and hard graft have been instrumental in helping build this company's brand image, reputation and fortunes, from the ground up, since long before 95% of the world's population had even heard of Airbnb, let alone used them), must be the collateral damage 

The reality is, the longer your tenure with Airbnb, and the more they've hyper-scaled in your local market - the less business their algorithms will route your way, and the closer you'll be pushed towards the exit door (regardless of how faultless your track record you may be, or how much goodwill and repeat business you may have generated for them over the years, and irrespective of how perfect your listing may be, or how faultless your service to both the company and their guests has been). No such thing as loyalty bonuses and rewards for tenure of exemplary service - it's all about the fresh blood with this crew (presumably because the longer-termers start to wise up to the fact that the Emporer is actually strutting about buck-naked, so best get rid of them, before the start spreading dissent through the ranks)

It's not by accident that longer-term hosts are going to the wall - it's by design. And the more Airbnb mushrooms, the quicker the churn, and no amount of nice new pics, or exemplary reviews, or lowering your prices to unsustainable levels, will change that one little bit.

The only hope of survival for small, independent local hosts, is for Airbnb to be forced by authorities worldwide to clean house and jettison the armies of illegal operators with vast inventories from their platform. But they're not about to do that - voluntarily, at least - anytime soon. I'm sorry I don't have anything more positive to add - other than to urge you to make sure you're also listed on every competitor site available in your region - but that's just the way it is, sadly. 

[Susan17]

@Ajay-K0 

Have you found that OYO-related activity has been impacting the New Delhi market much over the past 12-18 months?