My details have always been on the listing but quite well hidden, I can only presume someone at the EU headquarters said it has to be more prominent.
EU regulations
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If someone really wanted to find my contact information they could use my dog business to do so. Thatās only happened once and I told the guest who was having trouble with Airbnb to look up my dog boarding site, they didnāt think of it on their own. Even people who have stayed before donāt tend to contact me directly even though I leave business cards with my contact info in the room. They just book a second/third/etc time on Airbnb. But I get lots of one nighters, they arenāt saving hundreds by cutting out Airbnb.
It doesnāt really hurt AirBnB.
People are lazy creatures, once they are on the AirBnB and found their place they just want to book (that is why AirBnB pushes for IB).
BDC already has this āproblemā for years, but most people like the convenience of instant book without needing to wait for a reply, even though they have to spend 14% extra.
Only when not IB people will wander of and look if they can book direct.
The same goes for building your own website. Once they are on your site, and they want to book, you should close the deal, and not send them of to a booking site where they can see other properties.
If you have a single property and want to spend money on a site, then subscribe to a service like www.lodgify.com. You get a website, direct booking engine, channelmanager and central communication. List on AirBnB, BDC and Homeaway so maximum exposure.
Its only $29 a month, and will give you much better ROI then a $1000 investment on a word-press site without any added functionality.
(There are plenty of other services like this, I just had very good experience with them, although I decided not to use them because my requirements were too complex.)
I donāt know about that. Every lost booking is a lost booking. Why make it easy for people to go cut out Airbnbās shareā¦ever? Logical answer is that itās required in the EU?
I completely agree with this. I usually search first for IB hosts. I recently found a place I loved in Maine, US and had to wait 23 hours to be approved to book. That was 2 weeks ago and this host still hasnāt messaged me. At all. About anything. This is a SH with 220+ 4.5+ star average reviews. Iām very close to canceling and going back to IB only or maybe not going to ME at all.
60% of the time when I go with a non-IB host Iām sorry. More and more Iām wishing Airbnb would require it.
Yes, it is required by EU law, and theoretically they could lose business to direct bookers.
But in real life the percentage of people that go off-site to book is very small.
Like @HumptyDumpty my business data has been on AirBnB for several years now, but maybe 1 in 200 bookings came from AirBnB to book direct with me.
Although I have a private guestroom-rental website (MeadowsLair.com), I insist guests book their stay with me using one of the four major reservation platforms (Airbnb, FlipKey, Booking.com or TripAdvisor). The weblinks to these four booking platforms are on my homepage.
As I mentioned in my other Airbnb Forum posts, my last Airbnb booking was in February. Since then, the rest have been through Booking.com.
I think Booking.com has a greater advertising budget throughout the USA than Airbnb.
But why? What advantage do you think it has, besides payment processing?
And how do you handle 4 different calendars and rate sets? Especially if all are on IB, sooner or later you will be double booked.
Chris: I am not on Instant Booking. And I like the online payment system through the four booking platforms.
My reservation calendar, with daily rates, is shared with Airbnb, TripAdvisor and FlipKey. But when I have a Booking.com reservation, I must quickly block-out those dates on the other calendar to avoid ādouble booking.ā
Overall, this system works for me. I have been averaging one booking per month, as our two-bedroom rental unit is in a semi-remote Northern California mountain community.
I do not rent the second unused bedroom, if only two people booked one bedroom, to provide them more privacy. Yes, I know I am losing rental profit. But I do not want two groups of strangers sharing the one full-bathroom and TV lounge downstairs, if they do not know each other.
I wish I could also list on Trivago. But my home does not qualify, as my wife and I live full-time upstairs and our downstairs guests may not use our upstairs private kitchen.
Agree on IB. We took a weekās vacation to upstate NY. Got tired of waiting on two hosts. They made no attempt to vet. I will ONLY IB in the future.
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No thank you. I am a software developer myself and I do websites, web and mobile applications for a living. But as it happens, the shoemakerās children go barefoot. i never found the time to do it. Also I didnāt see the value in it since I canāt process credit cards and people canāt book me directly.
I donāt mean to be a debby downer, but my husband runs a marketing agency (emphasis on SEO - ranking on Google). Iāve talked to him about this quite a bit and his strong stance is that with sites like AirBNB and VRBO (who are investing a lot of money in their websites) itās really hard to compete with them. E.g. you might be dumping all this time and money into a website that will hardly get seen and maybe rarely, if ever, result in a booking. What you might want to do instead is set up a [free] Facebook page and spend the money on ads there. No need to set up and maintain a website when these sites are doing all the work for us.
I totally agree with everyoneās comments, and appreciate the feedback!!
One thing you all might want to consider. Owning your own traffic, what I mean is if you relying solely on Air BNB or a similar platform to drive bookings you are putting yourself at the mercy of that platform. What if they change their business model and charge to show your listing? Similar to Facebook, for a while, people ditched their website and other avenues for customers to find them since FB was so greatā¦then it changed, and changed and changed again. Many lost so much business because they didnāt prepare for the future. Maybe its not a $500 or $1000 webstite, maybe you just DIY or use a similar service that some have mentioned. But I would never depend on a single source to bring my business revenue. Just my opinion, I have no idea who things will look in the future, but I like to hedge my bets. My friend, we set up a website (right now directs bookings to Air BNB but could change if needed), FB, IG and Pinterest (which is doing well), and a Google My Business Page. If she had more time I would have her write blogs about the area she lives in, but she doesnt right now.
Oh I get the shoemakes has no shoes! Most of my clients websites are nicer than mine 
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Nice work. I like the site. Clear and easy to read. I did notice that when I went to booking it linked straight to Airbnb. Do you know if many clients are thinking to do their own bookings on their web page?
I was thinking of starting the web page to do the actual bookings and limit my use of short term rental platforms in the future. Booking directly on my own web page. have you heard of this approach?
We have booking enabled on our website. There are several āthemesā to do just that - they are designed for vacation rentals and have a calendar and booking section.
It can be a lot of work to get a website to look the way you want. Iāve spent countless hours on ours and am working on the third redesign!
Youāre speaking my language, Chris. Iām trying to grasp if I can charge the additional 3+14%=17% total to the guest if I create a website. The only way it interests me if the website is for bookings direct.
Will a guest pay 117 dollars on my website when they can get the same home on Airbnb for 100? Airbnb offers the guest more flexibility and customer service. it offers me host guarantees. From my perspective, Iāll take the risk for the additional 17%. Will the guest book on my webpage for the additional 17% is the question,
No you cannot, your goal should not be more money, but more control.
Guest on AirBnB are very price driven.
They will not give up all their platform benefits (easy cancelation) if they pay the same.
We charge about 10% less than on the OTAās (and still maken 5-7% more).
A guest has to pay the full amount in advance of which you get nothing. You can now charge a deposit (we taken 30%).
Guest is happy that they only pay 30% in advance, we are happy that we have some reserve and cancelation insurance.