Your booking calendar is empty more often than you’d like, your overheads are creeping up, and you’re constantly pressured with the question: what more can I do to boost Airbnb bookings?
You’re not alone. Running an Airbnb is as stressful as it is rewarding.
Airbnb hosts have to juggle endless tasks to keep up with the competitive hospitality market, and it’s likely you do most of it on your own: from daily operations and maintenance to managing the guest experience and optimizing your listings. It’s nothing short of overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.
If you’re looking for ways to get more bookings without adding to your stress, this article will give you a rundown on the best strategies.
4 reasons why your listing isn’t showing up on Airbnb
Your ambitions of earning big profits from your vacation rental business have fallen flat so far—and you don’t know why. Let’s take a look at possible reasons:
1. Poor quality photos and descriptions
Using unappealing images is a quick way to get ignored, and so is a lacklustre property description. Make sure you have professional quality photos and an accurate, easy-to-read description of the property and amenities to draw guests in and show them what to expect.
2. Poor guest experience
If your guests are unhappy, it’ll show up as bad reviews and discourage potential customers from hitting the Reserve button. Any friction points in your guest experience—like disorganized check-in—will damage your reputation as a host. Find out what your guests want and do your best to provide a seamless experience.
Pro tip: read and answer guest reviews carefully. This proves you take customer feedback seriously, and gives you a chance to show how you’ve acted on feedback and improved the situation for new guests.
3. Long response times
Making prospects wait too long to confirm their booking request can backfire. If you’re not prompt with your responses or have a lengthy screening process, your potential guests would rather look for other options.
4. Lack of market understanding
A lot is riding on how well you know your local market. Without a solid understanding of the market and hospitality practices, you’re setting yourself up for failure—with ambitious pricing, unplanned availability, and no personalized communication.
11 essential tips for getting more Airbnb bookings
To keep your property fully booked, you must build a sustainable framework to get repeat bookings. Here are 11 proven strategies to help you do just that:
- Avoid cancellations
- Enable Instant Book
- Offer top amenities
- Get dynamic pricing
- Boost your listing with SEO
- Leave the cleaning to the professionals
- Sell an experience, not just a place to stay
- Communicate like a pro
- Upgrade your systems
- Think outside the (Airbnb) box
- Get the right property manager
Let’s understand each of these tips in more detail and design a fail-proof system to boost Airbnb bookings.
1. Avoid cancellations
Multiple cancellations can weaken your credibility and hit you hard with penalties. On the flip side, if your guests keep canceling their reservations, it tells Airbnb something is off with your listing. This can bring down your visibility and significantly limit bookings.
- Set the right guest expectations. Avoid misunderstandings with your guests and tell them exactly what to expect in their stay.
- Streamline guest communication. Build a healthy and meaningful relationship with every guest from the time they confirm their booking.
- Proactively update your calendar. Assess local and global travel seasonality and plan your availability well ahead of time for short and long-term stays.
- Share a welcome packet. Impress your guests with an extensive welcome kit that includes crucial information about their stay and local recommendations.
Hosts often struggle with managing guest comms and planning their booking calendar simultaneously. That’s where tools like Jetstream can do the heavy lifting for you. Jetstream can manage end-to-end communication with your guests and automatically update your calendar in just a few clicks.
2. Enable Instant Book
The Instant Book feature is one of the easiest ways to beef up your monthly bookings. It gives guests an effortless booking experience with one-click reservations and gets you closer to Airbnb Superhost status.
For all its benefits, Instant Book can backfire if you have multiple booking channels and don’t update your calendars. You run the risk of double bookings, cancellations, and same-day reservations, which can prove problematic and spoil your guest experience.
Besides, letting guests book instantly doesn’t allow you to screen them properly.
But, the right booking management tool can sync calendars across every online travel agency (OTA) you use and update your listings in real-time.
And, by using Jetstream’s integration with Autohost, you can automate background checks verify every reservation with intelligent data screening to reduce chances of fraud and bad behaviour.
3. Offer the top amenities
A few kitchen and bathroom amenities, reliable Wi-Fi, and decent security—that’s all it takes to impress guests, right? Not quite.
Airbnb’s customer survey reveals customers prioritize the quality of experience over the mainstream amenities. Here’s what it takes to deliver a 5-star guest experience that wins repeat bookings:
- Functionality over style. Guests prefer amenities that make their lives easier to fancy, overstated features. Think of free parking and a BBQ station over luxurious landscaping.
- Homely utilities. Customers want their stay to feel like a home away from home—with air conditioning, kitchen, washing machine, and other facilities they’d find at home.
- Pet-friendly places. Pets are one of the top factors affecting travelers’ booking decisions. Making your property pet-friendly can significantly impact occupancy rates and RevPAR.
- Guest-specific amenities. If your property serves families, add family-friendly supplies like baby gates and changing tables. If you host remote workers, create a laptop-friendly workspace with speedy Wi-Fi and throw in a coffee machine.
The amenities you offer can set you apart from the competition and win repeat bookings. So, give some extra thought to planning and placing your amenities.
4. Get dynamic pricing
As an Airbnb owner, you’ll be familiar with fluctuating demand. But there is a way to protect yourself against this volatility and price your property right. The short answer: dynamic pricing.
A dynamic pricing tool will help you keep up with changing demand and supply curves. It factors various rental analytics to ensure your prices aren’t too high for your guests or too low for your profits. Every night, your prices will update to reflect the sweet spot between demand and supply.
Ideally, it also identifies guest preferences, reviews listing placement, assesses seasonal demand, and compares other properties’ performance to create a valid price. You can also set minimum pricing to create the lowest limit for your property.
5. Boost your listing with SEO
Creating a standout listing can help you rank high on Airbnb and maximize discoverability, resulting in better conversions.
But winning higher Airbnb search rankings isn’t enough. You have to stay on top for a long period to see a tangible increase in your bookings. Here are a few handy tips on Airbnb SEO to put your listing on top search results:
- Present your property in high-definition and well-lit photos
- Optimize your listing title and description with relevant keywords
- Maintain a high response rate and quick response time
- Ramp up the number of 5-star ratings and positive reviews
- Offer one-of-a-kind amenities to get an edge over your competitors
- Keep cancellations to a minimum and become a Superhost
Airbnb’s algorithm relies heavily on data points to present the most relevant properties tailored to each user’s preferences and past searches. So besides these factors, it’ll help to learn how the algorithm works to optimize your listing strategically.
6. Leave the cleaning to the professionals
Cleaning and maintenance are among the most time-consuming and high-cost responsibilities of an Airbnb owner. But what if you could outsource everything to a professional service instead of going through the hassle of hiring staff, scheduling tasks, and inspecting cleanliness standards?
Hiring a professional cleaning company can take work off your shoulders and give you more time to:
- Build meaningful guest relationships
- Deliver high-standard housekeeping
- Minimize miscalculations leading to negative reviews
- Level up your SEO and marketing game
A simple Google search for licensed local cleaning companies can offer several options for outsourcing vacation rental cleaning. You can also jump on platforms like Yelp to narrow down your search and find more relevant companies to partner with.
Alternatively, Jetstream’s integration with Operto Teams makes it easier to manage cleaning and maintenance by automating your cleaning schedules and tracking your team’s efficiency in real-time.
7. Sell an experience, not just a place to stay
Guest expectations are constantly changing, and so are Airbnb’s standards for top-notch service. Customers expect more than a generic welcome note and a few mainstream amenities.
But if you can offer an unforgettable experience, immersed in local culture, it can translate to good reviews and more bookings. Here are some best practices to elevate the guest experience:
- Create a unique theme for your property in line with the locale and sell it as a themed experience rather than just another place to stay.
- Design detailed guidebooks to tell your guests everything they can do in the area. Or, go a step beyond recommendation lists and upsell local tours.
- Personalize the guest experience by communicating about their preferences and hosting activities or experiences for their trip.
8. Communicate like a pro
There’s little doubt that solid communication can significantly enhance your customer service and build your image as a seasoned host. But how exactly does proper communication boost Airbnb bookings?
For starters, a fast response time reflects on your Airbnb profile and takes you closer to Superhost status. Besides, potential customers would rely on guest reviews to understand the host’s conduct and friendliness. If several of your guests have good things to say about the host, it can nudge other customers to book a stay with you.
But there’s no secret sauce to effective communication.
The key is to empathize with your guests—put yourself in their shoes and identify different situations where your guests expect or need your support. It can be before the booking process, a few days before their check-in, or during their stay. Then deliver personalized information on a platter!
Jetstream works with Operto Guest to automate guest comms and do the talking on your behalf. It can significantly increase your response rate and save you the time and effort of answering multiple queries, often the same ones repeatedly.
While automating guest communication can reduce the hassle for hosts, you also have the option to add a dash of personalization with Jetstream’s guest-facing teams. Give your customers round-the-clock, multilingual support to give them a homely feeling and instant help whenever required.
9. Get the right property manager
Most rental property owners believe a property manager can do the job and get more bookings. That’s true, but only to an extent.
Yes, a property manager can increase the number of bookings for your Airbnb—but only if you have a good one.
A good manager can proactively handle all operational work and grow your average monthly bookings. Instead of going through the hassle of choosing a property manager and making sure they’re worth the money, you can take the DIY approach and be your own. But you’ll need tools to help you do it.
10. Upgrade your systems
Lastly, if there’s one way to scale your operations and get a steady flow of bookings without burning yourself out, it’s building advanced processes with the right tech.
A solid tech stack can do most of the legwork to make guest management and backend operations a breeze. Here are a few tools to build a robust system:
- Wheelhouse: for dynamic pricing
- Autohost: for automated guest screening
- Operto: for guest communication
- NoiseAware: for noise monitoring
But what if you’re not tech savvy or don’t have the time to train your staff on a bunch of new tools? Well, you could outsource it all to Jetstream. We’ll act as your property managment toolkit, syncing your entire tech stack and handling all your guest communications so you can focus on the things that matter.
11. Think outside the (Airbnb) box
There are lots of platforms besides Airbnb to choose from, whether it’s Vrbo, Booking.com, Homestay, or even a more niche booking website like Plum Guide, Mister B&B, and Handiscover.
But managing multiple channels is no cakewalk.
Connect with experts from Jetstream to get a clear idea of the rental market. Use our consultancy services to figure out which platforms will work best for your property and make a game-plan to venture outside Airbnb.
Once you make your listings live on different channels, Jetstream will do the legwork to optimize and maintain your listing to enhance visibility and increase revenue.
Boost your Airbnb bookings effortlessly
Running an Airbnb successfully is not an easy feat. The real challenge is when bookings stop coming in, and you’re clueless about how to get out of the slump.
A sustainable framework of proven strategies can move the needle for your business and set you up for long-term success. Start by identifying the exact reasons behind the shortfall in bookings. Once you’ve pinpointed the cause, use relevant strategies from this guide to power up your backend processes and elevate the guest experience.
And if you want to cut through the hassle, save money, and resources, then you should partner up with Jetstream. We’ve got a whole team of experts ready to optimize your listings for you.
Frequently asked questions about getting more Airbnb bookings
Do superhosts get more bookings?
Yes, a Superhost gets more bookings than regular hosts because their listing shows the Superhost badge, promising a better guest experience. These listings get better search placements and users have the option to filter Airbnb search results specifically for Superhost properties.
What is a good Airbnb booking rate?
The average Airbnb occupancy rate varies for different regions. Several variable factors also come into play to decide the average booking rate. Based on hosts’ responses on the Airbnb community and other forums, anywhere between 2% and 2.5% is a good booking rate for your property.
Why don’t my Airbnb listings appear?
If your Airbnb listings don’t appear in the first few search result pages, it’s due to some issues or faults in your Airbnb SEO. Some reasons can be the lack of proper optimization for relevant keywords, poor property photos, bad reviews, or slow response rate.
