Hi all!
Does anyone have any tips for how to price a 30 night stay? I apply a 10% discount for a minimum 7 night stay. But I feel like a guaranteed 30 night booking requires a slightly better deal.
Look forward to your thoughts.
Thank you!
It depends- a month long booking can actually cost you more in expenses than a short one, depending on why the guest is booking. For instance, short term vacationers may be out and about all day, whereas a digital nomad who stays home most of the time is going to probably run up a bigger electric bill.
Many hosts who do long term bookings only provide a starter pack of consumables, like toilet paper, soap, coffee, etc., to offset the discount given for a long term booking.
It also depends on your nightly rate to start with. If you are on the high end, then a discount is probably in order. If you are budget priced to start with, you might not have much wiggle room. I have a 2 week maximum stay, but donāt offer any discounts at all because I have one of the most affordable listings in my category to start with.
You also have to decide whether 30 day bookings are something you want to encourage, by having a discount, or not. A lot of hosts donāt want more than 28 day bookings because of the issue of guests becoming tenants in the eyes of the law. (But I know in some places local regs require hosts to take only 30day+ bookings)
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Something else to consider is how much you are likely to be booked if you take multiple bookings in that 30-day window. For instance, we normally have around a 75% occupancy rate in the low season and 95% in the high season. So I would not discount for a long high-season stay and I might discount 15% in the low season.
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I offer between 20 and 25% for a 28 day stay, and 30% for 12 weeks
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Seriously!?
How about the electricity during changeover for laundry (bedding, towels), dishes (we always wash everything) and ā if you want to add up every penny ā vacuum cleaner and buckets of hot water?
A lot of hosts who do long term bookings do a quick weekly clean and and towel change, to ensure the place doesnāt become filthy if the guest is a slob, so one doesnāt necessarily save any cleaning expenses on a long term booking.
And I have read plenty of posts over the years from hosts whose long term guest, who got a big discount, ran up a huge electric bill because they were home almost all the time with the heat or AC cranked. ( Iām not talking about counting pennies, but utility bills that end up twice what they normally are)
Or the guest never changed or washed the bedding for 6 weeks, leaving it so badly stained it had to be tossed. Or if the host never cleaned during the stay, the place required 2 days of cleaning and damage mitigation before being able to host more guests.
I guess weāve just been lucky for the past ten years. Although our median stay is three weeks, we do not go into the guest suite unless there is an emergency or the guest invites us in. No weekly cleanup by us. We also find there is very little difference between short term (our minimum is one week) and long term in terms of how much time is spent āat homeā ā so I do not accept the premise that longstay = homebody.
Judging by the traffic in the shared laundry room long-term guests wash sheets and towels as often as we do, most guests keep the suite almost as clean as we do, and weāve never been confronted with a horror show of filth when guests check out ā the worst is a bit of hoarding of used pop bottles and paper shopping bags (fixed by us in five minutes).
Fortunately we live in a climate where AC is rarely needed and is rarely installed in residential buildings, so thatās not an issue. The central heat is controlled by us (upstairs), and the natural-gas fireplace in the suite throws off so much heat that it gets unbearably hot after 15 minutes. Weāve only had one guest ask for warmer, and we discovered a previous guest had closed the grates on most of the hot-air vents.
Perhaps the mix of guests is a factor. Very few of out guests are from societies with a reputation for people having an exaggerated sense of personal self-entitlement.
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This is a false dichotomy.
The ādigital nomadā is no different from any other guest in that they are home when they are home and away when they are away - staying at an airbnb does not predispose a guest to occupy 24/7 - unless that is what they want. I have had many guests who use a stay to āsleep inā for days; I have had DNs who simply use the airbnb to change clothes and sleep, preferring to laptop-it on a park bench or coffee shop all day.
Honestly, if āusing more electricityā will bankrupt you, you need to raise your rates. Those hosts who fret about a laptop and a lightbulb causing more electrical usage need to chill lol!
The easy solution to guests using extremes of climate control is to limit that use, either with āguardrailsā of limited high and low temps on a thermostat, or spending money to insulate. and, once you have had a good amount of guests, you will note that it all āevens outā eventually - that guest who stays in 24/7 contrasts with the āout at 6am, back at 10pmā guest.
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Iāve never discounted for a thirty-day stay. My usual stay length is three days so Iād rather have ten guests in a month than one.
If you have ten guests, that means ten reviews. Out of those ten guests, at least two might become repeat guests meaning that you donāt have to worry about not getting the occupancy you want.
Similarly, Iād expect at least one guest in ten to refer another guest, again taking away the concern about filling the rental.
If a guest stays with me for thirty days, my costs arenāt any lower than for ten 3-day guests and in fact, 10 guests might equal ten tips which is nice too. 
All hosts are different; all guests are different but a discount for guests staying for a month wouldnāt work for me.
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Ahhhā¦ but I look at every minute I spend doing a deep clean between guests as a cost.
Your market is quite different from ours. Weāve never had one referral in a decade, and only three guests who came back again.
I donāt care about accumulating dozens of reviews ā If the score is high and the first few reviews are monotonously positive, the āshoppersā wonāt read through a hundred reviews.
The interface puts the six most recent reviews on display at the bottom of the (web browser) listing. Right now two of those six say ābest Airbnb ever.ā With short-term stays, those effusive reviews will disappear pretty quickly.
Hmmmmm, I know you are aware that airbnb lets you charge a CLEANING FEE, yes?
Our cleaning fee paid my wife and I less than minimum wage. When the market research showed that add-on fees were very unpopular with the travelling public, we upped our rate and eliminated the add-on cleaning fee.
In any case, even if I could get $50/hr for cleaning toilets, Iād still hate the work.
Every cleaning is a cost. It doesnāt matter whether cleaners are employed or whether the host does the cleaning - the cost should be factored in when hosts (and their accountant) studies the annual costs to determine the nightly rate.
Your market is quite different from ours. Weāve never had one referral in a decade, and only three guests who came back again.
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As I said, everyone is different.
I actively encourage repeat business and referral trade. For me, it just makes life easier when I donāt necessarily have to think about the Airbnb fees.
That isnāt my experience. I imagine it may be location dependent, but I live in a beach town and guests who come purely for a vacation are out at the beach, in town, or taking in various activities offered here most of the day. The digital nomads stay home working online at least half the day.
And I wasnāt talking about " lights and laptops" as big energy sucks- they arenāt, but heat and AC and some other appliances are. Where I live, utilities are not expensive, nor do I have AC, which would indeed up my electric bill by at least $100-$200/month if guests left it on all the time. So for me personally, it isnāt a major concern.
In any case, I was just trying to point out that when a host is considering discounts for long term bookings, they should be aware that there may be costs involved that they may not have considered. I have certainly read posts by hosts who found they made virtually no profit after having a month+ guest to whom they gave a sizable discount, who was wasteful with energy and left a big mess behind.
So do weā¦ it just never (hardly ever) works out! Ha!
Iāve gotten referrals, but not through past guests, except once- all the rest through friends and family.
Only had one repeat guest- she booked the first time through Airbnb and 2 more times directly.