Follow These Best Practices on Airbnb and Vrbo to Ensure Your Rental’s Success
It’s the big day. Your new short-term vacation rental listing is live on a popular website and ready for bookings. The home has been cleaned, staged and has eye-catching photos. The price is right, and the calendar is open. What’s next?
Our team created some best practices for property owners who are self-managing and new property managers looking for some expert tips. Scroll to read more.
Don’t look and click on the property every day.
Websites such as Airbnb show unique search results to every individual user, based on what it thinks that user is likely to book.
If no action is taken (such as booking the property), the website will eventually stop showing that unit in the search results because you (the user) has made it obvious that they aren't going to book that rental. This can hurt the property's rank in search results.
Keep Artificial Intelligence (AI) in mind.
These websites also take into consideration everything the user has ever done on the platform when presenting search results.
For example, if a user has ever searched for and booked a pet-friendly home, there's a high likelihood that search results will lean heavily on pet-friendly homes in the future. Even if they do NOT filter/specify for pet-friendly homes.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Use rate management strategies.
If you don’t use a current rate management strategy, now is the time to start. To maximize revenue potential, adjust rates often based on supply/demand, local comps, events, added amenities, etc.
Adjusting rates often helps algorithms read the listing as ‘recently updated’, which helps the listing’s overall rank in search results. Other updating tricks include adding new photos, adding amenities and rearranging the first few images.
Remember flexibility matters.
Many factors contribute to increasing bookings and traveler’s habits change. Our most successful properties are flexible in rate adjustments, night minimums, cancellation policies and have updated headlines that showcase the properties best amenities.
Would you like more tips? Contact a professional short-term rental manager or find more articles on our blog.