How to Attract High Quality (& High Profit) Guests to Your Airbnb
How do you walk the fine-line between maximizing occupancy with high-quality guests and maximizing your profits? Our clients tell us that no matter how profitable a guest stay is, it is not worth the headache if they create trouble within the home, building, and/or neighborhood.
In this post we’re going to be exploring 5 ways you can do both, attract high quality guests and maximize your profits. The good news is that once your listing is set with the right triggers on the Airbnb platform, attracting high quality guests at a profit can be a simple repeatable process.
The beauty of Airbnb is that it is built on a system of mutual trust. The system is the reason why attracting bookings through Airbnb, versus typical hotel booking platforms, is safer for you. We talk all about this “trust system” in our post here. If you take advantage of the system’s tools, you can ensure that you are attracting high quality guests.
Let’s dig into the details so you can start maximizing profits with peace of mind.
1. QUALIFYING GUESTS - GUEST REQUIREMENTS AND HOUSE RULES
As you can see to the right, Airbnb allows you to qualify guests before they can even book with you.
One of the first things you want to do under your Booking Settings is allow for Instant Booking. Instant Book increases your listings SEO and makes it easier for guests to book.
Guest Requirements
This said, we have to set guest requirements so the guests are looking to attract are the ones instantly booking with you. Under guest requirements, we always require a profile picture - a clear full frontal profile picture to ensure the guest is who they say they are. This ensures the safety and security of your property.
You have the option to require guests to upload a government-issued ID and have recommendations from other guests. These increase your chance of attracting a high quality guest, but they shrink the total pool of potential guests for your Airbnb. Use the government ID and recommendations as you see fit. Our rule of thumb is to turn one of these on once our listing has obtained at least 20 5-star reviews because we know we are ranking higher with Airbnb’s SEO and we feel confident a large enough proportion of potential guests are seeing our listing.
The last part of the guest requirements is your welcome message. We ask every guest who is interested in booking, “What brings you into the area?” and “Who are you coming with?” We ask these questions to see if the guest answers them in their initial booking inquiry. If they don’t, it is a yellow flag and requires additional dialogue to make sure they are not coming to your Airbnb for any sketchy reasons (ie parties, more guests than they input on their booking, etc).
House Rules
The House Rules are important to set from the start of your listing because guests must agree to these rules before they can book. Airbnb gives you a few preset House Rules like:
Airbnb also allows you to set your own additional rules. These may dependent on your neighbors and the building you live in, but our standard additional rules are:
No local guests
This is a big one because 98% of local guests tend to create trouble. What is the reason a local guest needs to stay at your home? Typically they want to have a stay-cation and throw a little party
$500 smoking and party fee
This deters party-going guests, and allows you to collect payment if the guest creates trouble
Quiet hours: 10pm-8am
This depends on your building, but is a good rule of thumb to let guests know that staying up all night and creating noise is not okay in your Airbnb
The last part of the house rules is “Details guests must know about your home.” We recommend all of our clients obtain a simple camera on the outside of the entrance to 1) ensure the guest is who they say they are, 2) ensure the number of guests is accurate, and 3) deter guests from lying about each. So check the box that says “Surveillance or recording devices on property” and you will telling potential guests that this is no place to do the mess around.
2. ATTRACTING HIGH QUALITY GUESTS - COLLECTIONS AND AMENITIES
When guests are looking for homes on Airbnb, they have the choice to filter their options based on their profile and needs. This creates a perfect opportunity for you to tailor your amenities and home to fit your ideal guest.
In 2018, Airbnb created a new way for homes to be highlighted for these specific guests called Collections. A collection is a set of homes highlighted for a specific type of trip or occasion–like work travel, family vacations, or honeymoons. Guests can discover and browse collections on the Airbnb home page, or filter for them in search results.
There are two collections on Airbnb as of 2019 - Work and Family. In order to add your home onto these collections, you must meet the requirements specific to each collection. Some are performance-based and some are amenities-based.
As Airbnb is becoming more of a travel hub for potential guests, guests are becoming more savvy with the platform by using filters to find their ideal home. Match their ideal home with the amenities and performance measures to attract your ideal guests.
3. CONVERTING HIGH QUALITY GUESTS - YOUR LISTING’S MARKETING
Airbnb has been around for about 10 years now, and is no longer a platform you can simply put your property on with a few iPhone photos and minimal effort.
Photographs are the single most important factor for marketing a vacation property. The photos on Airbnb look so good these days that it’s necessary to go above and beyond in order to stand out from the crowd. If you want to convert high quality guests, it pays to hire a designer to make your space “pop” in photos and to invest in a professional photographer to shoot your space. The combination will set you apart from 95% of the other listings in your area.
While photos are a major factor that make a guest decide to book a property, Airbnb users are often looking for something more from their travels than just a “trip.” Guests choose Airbnb because they want a break from the traditional and are looking for an affordable, authentic getaway. Create an Airbnb listing that focuses on experiences, not the property facts.
The question is: What kind of experience do you wish to provide? Based on the collections above, you can choose to focus on business travelers or families. With business travelers, you can highlight how close you are to the central business district or a convention center. You can take intimate photos of a work desk, screenshot your (fast!) wifi speed, or show them you have an iron/ironing board on hand to make their business tip as smooth as possible.
For families, you can highlight the nearby tourist attractions. Be sure give all of the mothers planning their trips a distance and time to the major attractions, and nearby restaurants that are kid friendly. You can also purchase a pack-n-play, a game console, or kids’ toys to give families a “home away from home” experience.
There are many ways you can turn your home into an experience for guests. What are the major amenities of your home, neighborhood, or city? Are you near a lake or a beach? Have you created a guidebook for your guests so they can explore your favorite places during their trip? Thoughtfully highlighting these in your photos, and then in your listing description will convert more high quality guests.
For the description, space, and neighborhood, you want to give guests a 30,000 foot view and an intimate view of your home. Our guests love having access to fast wifi, an easy check-in process, an iron and ironing board, and coffee or tea in the morning. When writing your description, you want to be envoke a welcoming vibe and you want to be concise about the benefits of your home. We recommend using a :) in your summary description and using bullets to describe your top amenities so it is easy for potential guests to browse your listing.
The more you can paint the picture of the guest’s ideal experience, and the more the guest can imagine themselves in your home, the better. Always write your listing’s copy with the guest in mind.
4. MAXIMIZING PROFITS - YOUR PRICING, CLEANING FEE, AND SECURITY DEPOSIT
When we think about pricing your Airbnb, we want to think about the ALL-IN cost for your potential guests. This means your daily rate + cleaning fee + security + taxes/fees.
For your daily rate, we always recommend that our clients use a dynamic pricing software in order to take advantage of weekends, Holidays, and special events.
When using a dynamic pricing software, the most important input is your base price. Best practice is to go onto Airbnb and to search for comparable homes to see how they price their nights. Once you set a base price, the software will update the dates for you based on demand and/or comparable listing prices. You can continually update your base price and daily prices based on 45-day window demand and booking windows (ie you may have orphan days from Tuesday to Thursday where you want to decrease the prices).
The most important part of managing your pricing in order to attract high quality guests is to set the price high enough so bottom-feeder guests are not tempted to book your place. In Chicago, our rule of thumb is to never go below $100 per night in Summer and $70 in Winter. This may vary for you based on your home and location.
Along with your daily rate, a higher cleaning fee and Security Deposit will deter problematic guests from booking your place for 1 or 2 nights. As you will read in our last point, the longer the stay, the better it is for all parties. For the guest, the cost of the cleaning fee and Security Deposit is spread out through more days so they end up being a smaller proportion of their total costs. For you, it is simpler to manager a 5-day stay, rather than 5 one-night stays.
5. THE LONGER THE STAY, THE BETTER - MINIMUM NIGHT STAYS
The goal of setting your minimum night stays is to maximize occupancy, but an added benefit is that you can minimize problematic guests with minimum night stays. You can find the minimum night stay settings under your listing’s availability settings.
We recommend setting your base minimum night stay to 2 nights because 1 night stays is where you often find the most problems and it still keeps your listing high with Airbnb’s SEO. Here are our ideal rules for minimum night stays (these may vary based on the size of your home. The larger the home, the higher the minimum night stay and vice versa):
20-45 days out - 3 night minimum stay
45-120 days out - 4 night minimum stay
You can set a special 1 night minimum night stay when there are one day gaps between bookings. Make sure you keep your prices high enough so you don’t attract bad guests!
Combining the pricing strategy along with the minimum night stays is the holy grail for maximizing your RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room), which ultimately means your profits.
If you qualify, attract, and market your listing according to our best practices, you can stand out from the crowd and deter potential bad guests. Adding the pricing and minimum stay triggers, helps you deter bad guests further, and also maximize your profits.
If you have putting a new listing on Airbnb or have a current listing you would like to make ironclad from problematic guests, you can request a callback from us and we can have a conversation together. We wish you the best in taking care of your home, your guests, and maximizing your profits!