Airbnb advertising in South Africa

[Linda-and-Mvu0]

Hi.

We love Airbnb but it does not bring us enough guests. There are not many people that know about Airbnb in South Africa. 

We are not looking for advice how to improve our hosting but rather searching advice on how to advertise Airbnb itself. 

We have been superhosts almost a year now and applied every idea on improving hosting found on internet.

We would like to keep Airbnb as the only platform to get guests for our apartments but it is just no possible. We often see booking.com and tripadvisor adverts on Facebook and websites but never really Airbnb.

Any answers for this issue of Airbnb advertising? 

Thank you. 
Linda 

[Marzena4]

Hello @Linda-and-Mvu0. Availability of many options is one of the pillars of the free market. If there are other options, use them. I am not sure loyalty pays back that much in this matter (from experience, Airbnb's threats to remove my account, etc...)

[Marguerite33]

Hi @Linda-and-Mvu0, the only option I can see is to run your own online ads promoting your AirBnB listing. Doesn't have to cost the earth and might work. Thinking of trying it myself as we are new to AirBnB and have not had good experiences with Booking.com at all. The quality of guest is worth the smaller revenue from airbnb and might be worth it to promote it myself. Also Booking.com takes 15% which is hectic. 

I've also listed on Travelground/lekkerslaap which I've heard is good, but not got anything yet from them. Problem is they don't import/export calendars so either have to get a management system or do it manually.

That's all I've got. 🙂 Good luck.

[Linda-and-Mvu0]

Thank you Marguerite for responding. We also went the booking.com route and it was a nightmare. We now tried wheretostay.co.za and it's great. We take a damage deposit and meet guests in person to get them to behave;) it's been working for us. Airbnb gets us mostly international guests that are not likely returning but with local site we get South Africans and they repeat their stay which reduces lots of things such as need for advertising and damage deposit in future... All the best with your bnb and thank you again for taking time to respond! Linda