I started hosting with Airbnb just over a year ago - August 2018.
The first couple of months went pretty well, but then December hit and occupancy rates went through the roof. Once it hit January, the festive season was over and occupancy shot back down. That's when I realized that an empty apartment adds no value to me so I had to come up with a strategy to maximize my occupancy rates, and it worked!
On average, I am now always at least double the average market occupancy rate. These are some of my strategies:
Smart Pricing
The power of smart pricing is highly undermined. The ability to adjust your rate to fit the demand and supply of the market is a great tool. There are genuinely times I get a booking with a rate about 10-15% higher than I was expecting because the smart pricing took effect. For the most part, though, I have set my minimum rate as a fairly high amount so it does not usually go higher than my minimum.
Price Tips
The price tips essentially tie into the smart pricing. For the most part, my occupancy rate is quite high competitively but I always want it higher! So whenever a date is approaching and my calendar is available for that period, I turn off smart pricing and just follow the price tips. Airbnb claims that it is 4 times as likely to being booked if your price is within 5% of the recommended price. Not sure about the exact percentage, but it definitely helps by slightly dropping your rate to get a booking.
Booking Settings
The number of bookings you get surely depends on you as a host and your rating, but your booking settings play a big part in this. What is your minimum length stay? What is the latest time a guest can check-in? Imagine a guest who wants to stay 2 weeks but intends on checking in really late, if you can't host a late check-in then you've lost that reservation. Also, imagine there was a guest who wanted to stay 3 nights but because you allow a minimum of 4 nights, the guest does not even come across your listing as an option.
While all hosts have all kinds of restrictions, it helps to be as flexible as possible when hosting a guest.
Calendar Rule-Sets
This is my favorite one lately... I personally set my minimum to 2 nights so I can host almost all guests (except 1 night because I personally find it not as worth it with the fixed cost of cleaning, etc). However, I do have certain situations when I have two guests staying with a 1-day gap and since I have a minimum of 2 nights, it's impossible to fill that in.
Well, it isn't... this new finding has genuinely generated a lot of revenue. Basically, you go to the calendar tab and select the specific available date and a rule-set for that date. That basically means that this rule-set can allow you to deviate from your booking settings for specific dates. For those empty days, I just put a rule-set of minimum 1 night and chances are it's gonna get booked if it's not too last minute. You could also potentially lower the rate a bit to promote the booking.
Conclusion
All in all, there are many tools to help with maximizing your occupancy. Some others include faster responses, a higher acceptance rate and more additions of your listing on the guests' wishlist. I am not going to dive into these since they are frequently spoken about on forums. But if you'd like some tips
on that, please let me know 🙂
