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In the past month, AirBNB has given me the “opportunity” to offer discounts. This promotion adds a banner on the listing marketing the discount and sending emails to accounts that have been searching for a place near me.
Two of these offers were a result of cancelations [AirBerlin I am looking at you!] and the third one was this morning in response to an opening in my calendar for next week.
I did the promotion for one of the cancelations and received a booking almost immediately. The other cancelation was booked as well, but without the promotion.
I accepted today’s promotion, but only after raising my price a bit since I was already at my “bottom line.” No nibbles yet.
Have these promotions worked for you? Do you think that an email sent to potential guests is useful?
[This is a continuation of this thread’s detours: Promotion]
I’m in El Paso TX and I’ve gotten them. They are pop ups on the desktop when I look at the calendar. I’ve also gotten push notifications on my phone.
It seems like I’m only getting a booking for half the nights that I use the promotion. One guest may have booked in the last week due to it. It was kind of stressful for me because she got very close to my rock bottom price and then I read her reviews and she’s given and gotten a number of negative ones. She had a question expressing concern about hearing barking dogs at my place (I board dogs here too) So if you want quiet, why do you look at a place with dogs (or kids). It seems that she wants to book low price places but isn’t happy with the compromises that comes with those places. She was happy with my place though and said she wants to book again.
Annoyingly, she used the liquid bath soap but took both small individually wrapped bar soaps with her. She also left the makeup wipes open so the top few dried out and there were stains on the pillowcase. She asked to borrow a bowl and spoon to warm her soup. Normally I tell people who complain about that sort of thing to raise the price and quit bitching. But when I’m at my lowest and they take 50 cents worth of soap to use elsewhere it’s annoying. (Edit: it’s sounds so petty to read this but at $30 a night…) Edit: I noticed this morning that she took 4 teabags but had no tea in the room.
Short story long…when you discount and get someone wringing every penny out of your listing it doesn’t encourage you to continue. It’s been kind of slow but it seems the more stays you sucessfully host the more bookings you get. I’ve been trying to “prime the pump” so to speak.
I have seen these promotions pop up when I log using my laptop. The only problem was I couldn’t work out how to change the period when to offer the discount. The one that popped up said something like “apply this 10% discount for the next two months until 31st December”
My weekday price is so low. And my minimum stay is 2 nights. Pretty much it’s 2 nights because 1 night pays for the cleaning when we aren’t able to go and clean ourselves (off site hosts, location is 1.5 hr, we all have full time jobs)
So if I take off another 10% then I would be losing even more of the margin I’m making
I could increase my price but that seems pointless. And I am still relatively new so I am trying to keep my prices low to get some bookings a few months in advance as well as fill in gaps that are soon.
I didn’t want to apply 10% off right through until after Christmas either.
Not sure maybe if we can add in promotions for our selected days that would work for me. It seems to be the case for some I just couldn’t find it and haven’t had it pop up since…
