More Pricing Flexibility

[Camilla55]

Has anyone ever suggested, or agree that the following would be big improvements in how hosts can price their listings.

1. Allow hosts to set different prices depending on the length of stay.  I understand there is weekly discount, but hosts would be far more amenable to one night stays if they could price these in advance, instead of having to go back to the guest with a higher price, which is often the case, especially if you don't want to use up the whole weekend of potential higher income.
2. Allow prices depending on whether the hosts are at home or not.  At the moment it's too black or white whether a host is 'whole house' or 'rooms', which means that where a host is away some of the time, he is unable to cater for the different availability.
3. Allow hosts to have number of guests available per night.  Some hosts can have up to 8 guests, for example, but not all of the time.  Some weeks, they may only be able to host 4, or 6 people, but there is no flexibility to achieve this.

It would be great if these ideas could be taken into consideration, as it would make both the host and guest experience more flexible, and therefore more enjoyable.

Regards,
Camilla

[Alice-and-Jeff0]

You can do all of these things already.  You need to have multiple listings that you make available on the days when you want the different options. So you make a listing for a room, a listing for the whole house with 8 people, the whole house with 4 people, and make sure to coordinate the calendars.  

If you don't want to give up the opportunity to make sure your room gets booked only for more than one night, make the minimum stay for 2.  You can do that just for weekends already. 

You make single night stays more "expensive" by having a cleaning fee - which is why single night stays are so troublesome - how much you have to clean and the time to ready it for the next guest.  So if you charge $10 to clean, a room at $50 becomes $60 with the cleaning fee for a single night.  The guest who stays 2 nights, that makes the room only $55/night, 4 nights becomes $52.50/night.  

If you need more help in setting any of this up,  come back with some specific questions.  

If you want to make a suggestion for a potential change to the website and app, you can do that in Host Voice. 

[Camilla55]

Alice / Jeff - thanks for taking the time to reply.  I can see how the multiple listings would physically work, but I don't really see that as a practical solution, having to maintain so many different options, as we'd need about 8 different listings due to being home sometimes and away sometimes, together with not necessarily wanting a houseful (we can cater for up to 10, but don't always want so many people).  As for the idea about a cleaning fee, not sure that would work, as we have a cleaning fee already setup, which if we increased to make a one nighter more expensive, would also increase all other bookings.

We charge 185 / night, plus 65 per extra guest after two people.  A group of 6 would therefore pay 445 for one night, but we'd look to charge somewhere around 50% more, especially if it's a weekend night.  We'd then have to make the cleaning fee 220, which means that any other bookings would also be subject to the excessive cleaning fee.

I'll follow your suggestion though and submint these ideas via the Host Voice.

Thanks again,

Camilla

[Lizzie]

Hello @Camilla55, just mentioning in @Alice-and-Jeff0 so they are notified about your reply. 🙂

[Top tip: add the @ symbol and selct the person(s) from the drop down list, they will then receive an email notification about your reply and it will also show in their Community Profile]

[Alice-and-Jeff0]

I'm sorry that you think this is too cumbersome.  You will find that most hosts do not need this kind of daily flexibility.   I offer this solution to solve your unique situation as it is only the solution Airbnb offers at this time.  As someone who WANTS so  many options, you have to maintain that many options.  Sorry that there isn't a better solution right now.  

You can set weekend pricing that is more than weekday pricing already.  If you are looking for a bigger cleaning fee based on the number of guests and rooms they use, you just need to list it in your house profile that the fee goes up and then charge them that fee through the resolution center.  So, if you start with a base price Sunday - Thurs for $185 which is likely based on one room (just guessing), so one - two people/one room.  If you want to charge more based on how many rooms they use, then you can do 2 things, make separate listings for 1, 2, 3, 4 rooms or announce on your profile that the extra person fee is based on an occupancy of 2 people per room.  If additional rooms are used, then there is an additional room fee.  So the price for 4 people would be, if they only used 2 rooms, be $185 plus (2) $65 charges for the extra people, however if they use 4 rooms, it would $185 plus (2) $65 chargers for the extra people PLUS an additional cleaning fee of $xxx for the use of 4 rooms vs. 2.    You can automatically set weekend pricing for the BASE to be more, but you can't arbitrarily charge more for the extra person fee.  

If you need more help, please feel free to ask more questions.  It looks like you've only been hosting for a few weeks, it's likely that you need more information.  

[Camilla55]

Thanks again for your comments.  My partner and I have been hosting for a number of years, but only recently has this really been something we'd prefer to be more flexible.  We already have extra information in our profile, but it seems that 90% of guests rarely read the details anyway, hence we don't go anywhere near the instant book option, but that's a separate issue.

It isn't necessarily that we WANT so many options, but it'd be much easier for guests if the flexibility existed, so that they could see the correct price in the first place.

As it is, we get 5x more requests to stay in our listing than we actually need, so we'll probably just carry on as-is and hope that AirBnB makes some software changes in the future, as in the long run AirBnB are the ones losing out.

Regards,

Camilla