Hello all, I decided to diversify more and added my property to homeaway. It seems that their listing platform is even more basic than Home Escape. I can’t change the order of pictures or add a description. My listing has about 10% of the information my AirBnB listing has. Am I missing something?
Oh, and is the price I set what people see and pay and all fees come out of my rate? I want to make sure I’m priced properly.
95% of my bookings come from Homeaway/VRBO, so I’m very familiar with it. (I have a 4000-square foot, three bedroom home in the Caribbean which is the type of home best suited to VRBO/Homeaway travellers.)
To change picture order and add a description: On your Dashboard, choose “Edit Listing” from the menu on the right. (Oh, you do have to be on your desktop browser for this - the mobile app is not yet functional on these, but they are working on it). To change the order of the pictures, click on “Photos”. Then just click and drag the photos to the right order. As on AirBnB, the first photo is the main one (“thumbnail”) guests see when you are in the results on the search page.
To add a description, choose the description tab. (My listing is 487375, in case you want to see an example).
The price you set is your nightly rate (or weekly rate - but they do divide that by 7 as the nightly rate for stays longer than 7 nights). You can set a monthly rate, too (I never have - we don’t get guests for that long).
You define a “season” under “Add a new rate”. You can vary the nightly, weekly and monthly rate within that season. You can also vary the extra person rate by season (which I do).
Under the rate table, you can add extra fees (cleaning fee, pool heating fee, pet fee, etc). These apply for all seasons.
Then you can set your damage deposit. This is the same for all seasons.
Thank you. I finally figured it out, I was unable to edit it until my listing went active!
I’m trying to diversify a bit and increase my exposure. It looks like this site is a better fit for me than some of the other options.
Here’s a question for you or others: How do the payouts work? Because it looks like I won’t be paid out for 2 weeks after the booking ends? Is this to make sure the damage deposit has a chance to be returned first?
@Sarah_Warren -
Are you on subscription or pay-per-booking?
I’m on subscription, but I have alternate payments (only take PayPal), so Homeaway never holds my money. It’s slightly less convenient for the guest (they have to pay the service fee, then pay my PayPal invoice for the deposit, then pay the second invoice for the balance), but it works well for me and no one has complained. (For those of your reading this that are thinking this is a lot of hassle, keep in mind that my nightly rate is between $450US and $800US and many guests stay for a week or more, so the dollar figures are usually $1500 US or higher - they aren’t paying three payments of $49.95…)
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Yes I discovered this the hard way.
Took in a large group for two weeks as my first homeaway booking.
What they conveniently fail to mention is that for YOUR FIRST booking, payout can occur up to a week AFTER CHECKOUT and even longer.
So I got paid 3 weeks after the guests arrived.
If I’d known I’d never have accepted a 2 week booking as my first booking.
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Good to know. So does it speed up with subsequent bookings or is this standard?
Yes I’m doing pay-per-booking as this is not my primary listing site.
They claim that with subsequent guests payout is 24 hrs after check in, but I haven’t had other guests from them to confirm that this is what actually happens!
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Ok, here’s another HA question: what kind of guests do you typically get via the HA platform? Because most of them have been looking for long-term housing while moving to the area for work or a summer internship. I just turned down a college student wanting to book my place for the entire summer for an internship. I doubt they’d want to pay my summer rate at a cost of $8,000 for the summer, but that’s what I can make renting it ST. Just wondering if I should be expecting more of this. I’d totally do 3-4 month stints during off season, but I almost laughed at this inquiry this morning.