How often do you get day-of bookings?

:question::question: This is in the first post.

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Sorry, maybe I misread, or that was part of the edit.

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I do allow instant same day bookings, and those are the month savers, for me it’s a business so those extra guests make up for the 30% of the total reservations.

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I think that’s because she went back and edited the post @JJD

Good tip thank you for the heads up!

That’s pretty significant! Yes this is meant to be our main source of income while I take a break from work- almost like a sabbatical. We need to book 40/60 days per month (two listings) to pay all of our expenses (cleaning, rent, travel, food, utilities, etc). Anything extra would be just extra awesome. So I hope we have the same results that you do!

Good luck! That kind of occupancy usually comes with a price - a low nightly price. I suggest you diversify, too - list the condo (I presume it’s renting as a whole property and not a shared one) on Vrbo/Homeaway for more exposure.

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Oh wow that’s a great tip! Maybe a dumb question, but how do you manage the bookings? Do those sites have calendars you can merge?

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Every host/property and market is different but I agree that’s a lot of occupancy in this competitive environment. I am booked about 80% of my available days (days I haven’t blocked due to being out of town or needing a break between guests). I’m not the lowest price in my city but I have other competitive advantages. Some you can try to replicate, most you probably can’t.

You are going to get disruptions from weather in VT, I don’t. I live in El Paso TX so I have people driving through and stopping at my place just off the interstate highway. You may get cancellations you can’t rebook.

It took me years to find what I think is the absolute sweet spot on price. You don’t have that luxury. If you are too low you may attract some problems. Make sure you don’t get a family squatting in your apt while you are gone. If anyone leaves a huge mess or causes damage you’ll need time to clean/repair. I’d have two days between booking for a whole place in your shoes but you want to book out to the max so you’re going to take your chances.

I have over 500 reviews at 4.98 average, I take same day last minute bookings, sometimes as late as 9pm. I’m on the first page of searches despite there being hundreds of similar listings in my city. As I said in another thread, if you start out at 4.5 or below I think it’s hard to move up and there are just too many superhost level (4.8) and above to compete with.

I know nothing about the ski resort rental business. I would guess that you could do very well in season if you run a top notch rental, but again you are competing against people who have done it for years.

At least you’ve found this forum to get helpful advice. I found this forum early on in my Airbnb days and I feel that it helped me avoid many mistakes.

I accepts pets but I’m onsite. I wouldn’t recommend it for a brand new remote host.

Not my area of expertise but I know you can merge calendars. Some people just try to do it themselves manually and some use third party services.

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Are your prices fairly locked down? (Understandable if there’s a lot of competition that’s already set the price). Your occupancy and prices are tied to each other. I prefer to have higher prices at some loss of occupancy, since that means fewer turnovers (our biggest cost) and less wear and tear.

As for day-of bookings:
We’re a drive-to destination 3-6 hours from cities where guests live. Most people book weeks to months in advance. On the rare cancellation, it’s about 50/50 chance we’ll get a last minute reservation, usually weather dependent. (Nice weather encourages the last minute vacation). You might get something similar in VT.

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Not mine either but I was able to figure out how to merge my VRBO & Airbnb calendars. It wasn’t too difficult. If I remember correctly you have to set your VRBO to pull in the Airbnb calendar AND set Airbnb to pull in VRBO.

Anyway—follow their directions and you will be fine. Occasionally my Airbnb calendar was slow to update but I wasn’t getting rapid fire reservation requests so it didn’t create a problem.

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One other thing to note with using multiple booking platforms:

I’ve heard a few hosts suggest you only take instant bookings on one platform. Synching usually has some lag that could allow a double booking.

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Correct. The basic iCal sync can be both problematic at times, and slow to update.

The problem is that VRBO/HA only allow an XML connection (instant updates) if you list five or more properties. Airbnb and BDC have no quantity restrictions and the majority of channel managers will keep things tight for both.

JF

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Well update - the first day we had an opening we had a same day booking! Going to test it out for the next few weeks and I’ll see what the numbers are. Thanks everyone for the feedback!

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I generally get 1-2 same day bookings a month but don’t ever get 15 guests in a month. Probably half of my same day bookings are willing to arrive within 20 minutes to 4 hours. I generally require at least one hour notice of it is at my whole
House listing and it is ready and I just need to get there. (I rarely allow self check-in and only if I am not physically able to get there). 90-95% of my bookings are within the 5 day moderate cancellation policy time limit.

I will note (I have posted about this in other threads the last couple years) that I manually increase my rates nightly for same day, next day and day after next bookings. $5 then $10 then $15. So by the time a same day booking occurs I am actually getting $30 more. Note that my prices are currently $37-$65 with $20-$62 cleaning fees. Increasing the prices nightly does a few things: gets me more money for being less able to plan their arrival, shows the algorithm I am “actively managing” my listing, and I think then increases my listing visibility (not that it is bad because I am usually on the first few pages if not the first, even for searches an hour or two away, which is annoying for its own problems).

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I almost never get same day bookings. The vast majority of my guests are here for business or visiting family. My AirBnBs are all entire house listings so that probably factors into it too.

We don’t get a lot of bookings (maybe 35-40 a year). Most of our guests are booking months ahead for a week, so I’m taking the risk of instant book on both AirBnB and VRBO/HA. However, I did not do that until we had been in business for a couple of years, and I knew the likelihood of two bookings for the same dates coming in within a few minutes was very low.

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I only accept same-day bookings until 8 or 9 AM. If it’s any later than that, I have to scramble too much to get the door codes in, and the closer the booking to the arrival time, the more likely (I think, anyway) that people booking may throw a party or something.

As a new host @Kate_Barry you get an artificial boost in the rankings so expect more bookings in the first month or so.

Testing out same day bookings over next few weeks therefore isn’t necessarily a great indicator on how many last minute bookings you will attract in the longer term.

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Oh my. I think this is the Airhost Forum Jinx? We’ve had 4 same-day bookings in the last 24-hours.

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