Hi. My place is located near a natural tourist attraction and a great town. Guests love it and most stay to go visit the falls. Because if its attraction, guests come from all over the country and even other countries. What I didn’t anticipate so much was that the majority of my bookings are for a weekend; Fri-Sunday or Monday.
It makes sense for that length of stay if they are coming for this attraction, but I wonder if you have a similar location if there was anything you’ve done to increase the desire for a longer stay?
We are in an area that gets a full winter so several months of the year are slow (or no) bookings. Thanks.
Hi CLM, I’m in a similar situation, with an apartment in a great beach town that’s a very popular tourist destination in Sydney. When we first opened our Airbnb, I took the advice of a property management agent who said we should allow bookings of just 2 days so that we could get a lot of bookings in order to get reviews and establish ourselves as a known entity.
As a result, almost all of our bookings were weekend stays, and because almost nobody wants to book a place for 4 weekdays, it sat empty in between those weekends, except for the rare occasional week-long booking. So, it’s not like we were getting more ratings faster! However, following the property manager’s advice, we set a rather high price for weekends which somewhat made up for that.
I got tired of doing the turnover, so I switched to a 5-day minimum, with only a nominal difference between weekend and weekday prices. We still get just as many bookings, but we make significantly more money, and there’s less cleaning work.
Another thing I recently did to encourage longer stays was I created a second listing for the same apartment, with linked calendars: one listing allows shorter (5-10 day) stays and has instant booking; the other is for longer stays (21-35 days) and people have to request to book and have a strong review track record on Airbnb. I leave the long stay listing calendar open for months in advance, and then I only open up the calendar for the shorter stay listing about month in advance. That way, I don’t fill up the calendar with shorter stays which would prevent someone from booking a longer stay. I charge less per day for the longer stay, but it’s worth it to me to not have to worry as much about turnover. And since I started changing when the two calendars open up, I’ve gotten a couple of long stays whereas I almost never did before, because the calendar was always cluttered with a smattering of shorter stays.
Why don’t you try setting your minimum stay to 4 or 5 days and see what happens? Set a competitive price, and then you will get the people who are staying longer in that area, by default. Then if, any given week, you don’t have a booking and are nervous about that, you can set a special rule for one week or two weeks of the calendar to allow for shorter stays.
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Mind. 
Airbnb allows the same accommodation being listed twice???
I totally understand why you (or anyone else) would do that.
Looks like I do have to read the entire TOS… 
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Yes, it does! Both of my listings explicitly reference the other and use the same photos, just with a different cover photo. I did this following advice from people here on this forum actually, and it’s worked out great!
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I’m floored. 
We ran into the same issue of having a brand new studio and looking for long term stays which initially worked out but since most Airbnb reservations completely tanked here we reduced the minimum stay to 3 nights just to get “some” reservations which now clutter our calendar making long stays nearly impossible.
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Now you know how to manage this! Once you make sure the calendars are linked so you can’t double book for the same dates, you’re golden.
I actually did it for a very specific reason: in Sydney, by law, you can only rent your Airbnb (unless it’s a home stay where host occupies same home) for 180 days each year (and Airbnb and the other companies report stays to the government). However, that restriction doesn’t apply for stays of 21 days or longer. I was therefore highly incentivised to find a way to encourage those longer stays!
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Thanks for the heads up. The two studios we have are on our property so we’re good 
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@Hosterer, Here is the conversation we had about setting up @lisanddavid 's second listing for the same unit in case the details might help you do the same. If you scroll through there are some step-by-steps and detailed ideas.
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Thank you for the original discussion. I love the idea how to use those two listings as they facilitate a host’s fine-tuning routine BUT and this is what will give me sleepless nights…: According to the Airbnb TOS under point 5.1:
… You may only maintain one Listing per Accommodation, but may have multiple Listings for a single property if it has multiple places to stay. …
Since the hosting of our (on-property) studios has become a rather important income stream, we could not afford to loose Airbnb as a hosting platform if they were to block us due to a violation of their TOS.
Are there any such cases known where Airbnb would kick one out because of a second listing? Just because you can do it (and it makes a lot of sense) doesn’t mean we’re safe…
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No, not in the way that you’re interpreting it.
That clause in the terms really has more to do with having a listing and then you get a bad review so you take it down and put up the same exact listing but without the poor review. However, hosts do get away with that as well. It is to keep people from “cheating” and not from having more than one listing that varies in details from their other listing.
What we’re talking about is akin to the second part, may have multiple Listings for a single property if it has multiple places to stay. If one listing is for short-term stays and the other listing is for long-term stays then they are effectively multiple places to stay.
It is very common and I’ve never heard anything about it being any kind of issue at all. There are even “Help” articles that give some guidance on setting up listings in such a way. For example, some hosts have a listing for 2 of 3 bedrooms in a house and another listing for all 3 bedrooms. I’ve also seen a listing for the pool being heated and a listing a for the pool not being heated and the like.
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I’m in a great tourist place too but your area might be like mine in that people do come here for other reasons too. Is your town the same?
Or maybe you have events within a ten-mile radius that people travel to that take place during the week ? (For example, exhibitions, food events, concerts, trade fairs etc,)
Many local businesses have staff visiting from other branches as temporary workers or visiting for training or meetings.
Remember that if you are making most of your profits Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights you can offer a lower price for the remaining days. That lower price will attract guests who are travelling for business or an event, despite your place being a few miles away.
You can actively market it to event organisers, local businesses and so on.
Of the four nights a week that you have to fill, it’s a good idea to leave an unbooked day every two weeks (or 3 or 4 - whatever is best for you) so that you can attend to maintenance in your rental, upholstery cleaning, appliance servicing and so on.
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I have to wrap my head around that one, as, to me, the fact of the same physical studio remains ONE place but with different “rental plans”. So, if this is considered “fair use” of the two listings I would be relieved and may be able to actually still catch some Zs at night.
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Also reading here as much as you can as having two or even three variant listings on the same property has been discussed many times.
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OK, another thing I wasn’t aware of. I will do some digging. Thanks.
There are thousands of hosts who have more than one listing for the same physical property, with different permutations. No, Airbnb doesn’t kick anyone out for that.
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Ok thanks for confirming this!
Just increase the minimum stay, especially for dates far in the future.
You can always drop back to a smaller minimum.
You do not want people to be able to book just 2 nights 12 months ahead. Keep the dates open for longer stays as long as possible.
Wow, that’s actually a brilliant technique. I did something like this before when we rented 2 of my guestrooms, I created a third listing of both the rooms together so small families and groups could book together. It worked out well. If we got overwhelmed with turnovers of both rooms, we’d sometimes block the smaller of the two when the larger room was booked. I might suggest your strategy to a friend of mine who just listed her space which is a whole separate apartment. She actually wants longer stays, but she gets a lot of shorter stays.
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