Have a oil at the Airbnb Help website @Spark
Don’t allow yourself to be bullied
We’re willing to take the hit in exchange for the certainty of a “bird in hand” from the moment of booking, but if that bird only arrives a few days before check-in, I’m not sure it is worth giving up 10%
My cancellation rate is probably less than 5% and for me to justify giving a 10% discount to guests, I would need the cancellation rate to be higher, as a cancellation creates a hole in my calendar that usually requires me to drop my price quite a bit, more if its a last minute cancellation.
For me offering the discount just isn’t worth it as my cancellations are not much. Then again I almost NEVER get bookings for more than 10 days. I would probably think about my business model in a different way if my bookings were month long stays.
4 on B.con and everything else is direct.
sorry to hijack, but what is b.con and how do you do direct bookings? feel free to PM me if youre willing to share
Booking. com is frequently abbreviated BDC, but sometimes, tongue in cheek as b.con because it’s a con!
We seldom get a cancellation – my motivation is to fill my calendar back-to-back, and offering a discount for those willing to lock themselves in may be the deciding factor… and also I am making an educated guess that offering this option gives me a bit of a bump in the visibility/search algorithm.
This time last year we were 80% booked for the calendar year… this year we are down to 60%… so the decisions to go back to Instant Booking and to go back to “no-cancel/10%-discount” option and to advertise (in our listing headline) there is no cleaning fee were all designed to get annual revenue back on target.
To jump in here about the topic at hand, @Spark, when we launched our single small listing in Jan 2022, we began with offering Flexible/non-refundable. And of course the TWO requests to cancel in as many months asked to be refunded anyway. We granted them because they were months away from the stay date. But we then asked ourselves, “Is this gonna happen every time someone needs to cancel, but chose the discounted rate? WTF?” We answered ourselves, “Yeah, probably.” So we reverted to just Flexible. We get cancellations sometimes, but there’s no hassle involved, and the dates tend to get rebooked rather quickly.
It was my impression all along though that the N-R option with discount meant that once they clicked BOOK, they were agreeing to pay for the rental and never get that money back regardless of cancelling, whether a day after booking or a day before the stay. For that “promise” they got a 10% discount. But the fact that it’s possible to “accidentally” succumb to the discount due to it’s being the default option for a listing with that option, makes it kind of a “d*ck move” on AAB’s part and the host’s part when we demand that the policy be upheld.
I suggest to run a promotion if you want to entice, rather than dangle a discount just based on some promise to not cancel. That way it’s only for times you need to drive business and not for every stay or for every schmuck who will take any ol’ discount regardless of the terms of it.
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Direct bookings can be from a host’s own website, using marketing channels like social media to drive business to it, to a friend or neighbor asking if you have any availability because their family or friends are coming to town and they don’t have space to put them up.
I had an Airbnb guest who asked if I had availability two days after her check-out, because she had a friend in the group she had travelled down with who wanted to extend her trip, but the place she was staying was booked for further dates. As my guest was super nice, I knew she wouldn’t ask me to host a bad guest, so I said sure and the woman paid me in cash. I’ve hosted about 10 guests over the past few years who just came to me through family, friends, or neighbors.
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We always respond to any “no refund” booking by immediately writing the guest to confirm that they knowingly and deliberately booked a non-refundable reservation, and ask for confirmation. We have had one or two guests (long ago) who claimed “unfair,” and we wrote back politely pointing out that they were offered a refundable arrangement, but “you deliberately chose to give up the right to a refund in exchange for a discount of $182 [or whatever]”
Then we add
"Although the booking arrangement you chose does not entitle you to any refund, if we get a replacement guest for the nights you have booked, we will – as a goodwill gesture – instruct Airbnb to refund you for those nights with a voluntary payment from our account. Although there is no guarantee you will get any refund, this goodwill offer from us does create the possibility that you will.
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We are offering the no-refund option and running two local promotions:
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Neighbours A professionally-designed one-page promo hand-delivered to all front doors within a 10-minute walk of our place encouraging neighbours to think of us as a walking-distance alternative to having the in-laws camp out on their couches and tie up their family bathrooms. We specifically mention summer holidays, Christmas, and family events like weddings and reunions (Our minimum stay has been one week for a long time)
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Realtors A third of our guests – accounting for 50%+ of our bed-nights – are moving to town and stay with us for (typically) 2 weeks to 2 months while house-hunting or while setting up a recently-- purchased (or rented) home. All of our guests since the middle of last December fit this bill, including our newly-arrived 28-day stay.
We are creating a flyer for local realtors offering their clients 5% discount (if they tell us before finalizing booking). Also planning an open house (with nibblies and coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice) where they can come and have a look and meet us… waiting until the 1,500 spring bulbs in our yard are in bloom,
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