"How are other listings priced?" Email today

Reading comments here and on other sites, I very strongly suspect that many hosts - especially beginners - don’t factor their time into their hosting expenses. And it’s not just cleaning and laundry - we can spend ages answering inquiries, writing reviews, updating the calendar, tweaking the listing and so on.

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Don’t forget the time spent waiting for the guests to arrive.

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Very true! Hosts have to determine what their time is worth and price their rental accordingly. So many new hosts must get tired of renting when they look at the bottom line.

Near me, for instance, someone is renting a private room with en suite for $40 per night. We are in a great location. I’m sure that he’ll soon realise that the costs and time involved are really not worth whatever ‘profit’ he thinks he might make. Surely just the laundry and cleaning plus his time just isn’t worth it?

This is the problem - that people want to ‘try Airbnb’ to see what happens and because they don’t factor in their time, they are undercutting great and experienced hosts. Temporarily, hopefully.

Also, I’ve found lately that return guests expect to pay the same extremely low price they paid when the place was first listed. I recently had a return guest who wanted to pay (cash) $55.00 per night for two guests. They wanted me to pay the 14% Transient Occupancy Tax out of the $55.00 and they wanted to cheat Airbnb out of their fee. I have a few regulars who whine like crazy when the price increases.

Some guests are so weird! I admit that I will give discounts to previous guests - as long as I know that they were great people to host. Better the devil you know… :slight_smile:

Yes I’ve got a resorts guest coming in January and they’ve got the same rate as last year. Happy to hand the repeat business :slight_smile: