Holy #$%@! When you look at view:book ratio, it doesn’t get more real.
This data is delayed a couple days and I did get a booking yesterday and another today, so this is actually the tail end of a 41-day booking slump (longest ever) for me.
None of this includes the time you were shut down? It always feels like it takes about the same amount of time to recover from a blockage as the block. Of course there are always seasonal variables and every year is different from the one before because competition increases. I feel lucky I’m still getting as many bookings as I am given the increased competition. Allowing pets and allowing late last minute bookings is keeping me in business.
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No. This data is from today but my calendar opened up August 5 (51 days ago). I actually had three bookings during the 40 days the calendar was blocked off. Those bookings were for stays in August and September. Then I got a couple of bookings in early August after the calendar opened up, then nothing until yesterday.
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I can tell it’s slow not only from my own listing but listings similar to mine who are discounting and offering the 10% off for non refundable who never did before.
My Guest House has been empty since September 3rd with a few inquires and 1 canceled booking for October this is typical for this time of year. My Cottage booked on September 7th to October 6th and I hope she will extend which she usually does, knock on wood. She just extended my Villa from her August 26th to September 29th to November 3rd, so another $8,500+ to me for the alteration today. Yeah…
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I got a booking day before yesterday for late October, then they cancelled yesterday. I am not surprised and everyone else around us is slow, too. No reason to come to our area when it is 95 degrees, kids are back in school, and the good weather is still ahead of us.
Occupancy rate, July vs. September (50% occupancy is effectively “full” occupancy for this drive-to, weekend market):
Yesterday it seemed so slow. Last night and today 4 days in the the next two weeks booked on top of what I already have and suddenly I have one free day out of the next 10. We’ve commented on this before but it seems like tweaking your listing helps. I manipulated the price including lowering it for one night (tomorrow night), and changed from moderate to flexible cancellation. One booking is a guest from last week headed back across the state. Another is a also a return trip booking but they haven’t come through yet. One is a fellow added a fourth day to his three day stay. Still, it’s a flurry of activity after a very quiet week.
I adjust my rates every day. Even if it’s only +/- $1
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It’s purely anecdotal evidence of course. Airbnb claims it has no effect on search ranking but every time it happens the ol’ confirmation bias kicks in.
My booking rate is currently only 1.8% not counting these last two days. Feb was my highest in the last year at 2.5%. But my reality is that I’m booked about 80% of the days I make available. It’s just not a useful metric for my listing. I have 700-1000 views each month. This is my Feb/Mar
Crazy, I just got another booking.
So 40 days blocked, followed by 2 bookings within 9 days, then 41 days of nothing, then 3 bookings within 2 days. It’s like they “caught me” blocking my days and they put me in time-out for the same number of days that I blocked. Still, my own experiments show that isn’t really the case, but if I was a conspiracy theorist…
I am feeling like my bookings have slowed to a trickle but when I looked at my stats I felt a little better…even though it’s not what I am hoping for at least it’s not zero.
Got nada from airbnb after this coming Sat, what we have is either direct or BDC.
Sad as it may sound, I spent an hour or so looking at similar properties in our area and October and November are looking pretty bleak for most them. A lot of them are also on BDC as well and their calendars are showing full availability from now until the end of the year.
Our booking window is pretty short so I’m not too worried, yet! I’m assuming it’s similar for many other hosts in this area, so here’s hoping things pick up a bit for everyone, apart from the multi property investment companies of course.
JF
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What is a rule set? I am so stupid with this.
Small update. We got another Airbnb booking; just the one, for four days next week.
Visibility appears to be well above the market median on Airbnb, but everything we have is now either direct or via BDC. Actually had more enquiries from HA than Airbnb.
Dug out some notes i’d made last year about this time, like real notes made with a pencil on paper 
where I’d been trying to work out our Winter pricing policy.
These are only whole house/apartment listings in the central area (most popular) and checked for a selection of dates, midweek and weekend stays…
Last year, between Oct and Dec the number of available listings on Airbnb, without free on the premises parking, was 229 or thereabouts. The available listing with free parking (very important in Spanish cities) was 49.
This year, for the same period and similar searches tells a very different story 
Available listings without parking 300+. Available listings with parking 127.
What a difference a year makes 
As far as I can work out there are about four or five property companies who have gone from two or three listings up to twenty plus. Bastards.
Plus side is that most of these companies have a lot of availability, as in nada bookings. Maybe they’ll just get bored and go away.
JF
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I wish it was possible to give a 
face, instead of a heart, just so we could say “I feel for you”. I used to check this page and see 700+ views and think “Where are you?!?” But then I quit looking. I’m booked at a good rate, but dang it hurts!
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My booking window is 3 months. I went from 2 weeks ago having ~$350 in projected earning for the rest of the year to having almost $4000 today.
I’m wondering if the 3-month booking window is good or bad. It seems like it’s bad for revenue predictability, but it might be better for maximizing revenue.
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I asked this already, too. Please can someone explain?
Do you mean availability settings or… what?
It’s a way of setting “rules” for different blocks of days. You can increase or decrease the price, offer a discount for booking 3 days, set different mins and max days for different check-in days, even just set multiple days they can check in or out - a bunch of stuff. You use it with your Multi-calendar. That looks like this:
You can make the rules by selecting blocks of dates for all, some or just one of the listings. I can select all of the empty dates and give them the same rule, maybe a discount if I want to book them or a minimum stay if I don’t want to book them (effectively blocking them). Like this:
These are the things you can set, they each open to a bunch of options. You can make all kinds of combinations of these options to create very specific rules (if this, then that, but only here). You’ll see in the last photo that you can “Save the Rule Set” and give it a color to code it to use it later or repeatedly.
On the multicalendar, you can “show rule sets” and they’'ll all come up with their different colors and such.
I used it a ton over the summer when it was super-busy. Sometimes I’d get a block of 4 days stranded together in the month and would prefer to rent all 4 of the days together instead of only 1 or 2 (depending on that listing’s minimum) so I could set a Rule Set that still allowed them to be booked individually (because a booking is a booking!) but the price would decrease if you booked 3 and then decrease a little more if you booked all 4 of them. It worked really well! And I liked it because, if I was going to end up flipping the unit more often, I’d also be making more money, so it seemed more worth it.
Also, in my city, we have a few random Saturdays that are super-high demand because of a recurring event. My Saturdays are 2-day minimums but on these Saturdays I’d prefer you book Friday/Saturday because I get a ton of $ for that but some people would book Saturday/Sunday to save money and then leave my Friday in a position where the price couldn’t stay as high, so for these Saturdays, I set a rule that if you were only booking 2 days you couldn’t check-in on Saturday forcing the Friday to go with the Saturday unless you were booking at least 4 days (then you could check-in on Saturday because now you’ve also booked my Mon and Tue and that helps me out in a different way).
Honestly, it turns into Algebra, which I really enjoy 
but ultimately you can use them to manipulate guests into booking the way you’d prefer without limiting bookings overall (e.g. setting a straight 4-day minimum at all times).
Anyways…sometime in late August something went awry. We stopped getting bookings and it didn’t make any sense (in late January it would have taken me a lot longer to notice ,) and it wasn’t any of the usual suspects (we were showing up in searches, there wasn’t a loss of a new-listing bump, no decease in ratings, location was correct, no new hotels, no new legislation, etc, etc). We were super-busy at the time so I only did some skimming in the Community Center but found some reports from other hosts (several, in different parts of the world) that were reporting a similar situation and someone showed that there was a possible bug in the mult-calendar rule sets, something to do with a “various rule sets” that you could find by searching. They removed their rule sets and everything seemed to be fixed for them. I also found this “various” message in my rule sets so deleted all my past and future rule-sets and got 3 bookings in the next hour and continued normally since. I never followed-up (still meaning to) but it seemed to fix my problem and I probably don’t really need them again until next summer anyways. I’ve also learned to use the few rules available in the regular settings to their max potential.
This is super-way-too-long and I’ve probably lost you but let me know if you have any specific questions, I’m happy to help!
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