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As I said in my post, I and many other hosts certainly do have hundreds of previous guests and they are not dormant. It’s a bit smug of you to assume that a host’s former customers aren’t recommending the rental to others. In other words, are ‘dormant’. For many of us, they are not.
You also assume that hosts with only one property aren’t promoting their businesses. There have been times in the past when I’ve only had one rental and it was just as important to promote that.
It sounds to me that you’re not very experienced in this business?
But YOU don’t control this forum. We can say anything we want. And someone who pops in here without reading posts to see what’s going on, and then pontificates to the experienced hosts here about how we should run our businesses the way YOU see it, is even more hubris.
@Johan_Horak The nature of online forums is that they often wander in regards to the original post. There are interesting conversations that arise from this. Just because a user started a topic doesn’t mean they get to dictate the content of the responses.
Hey,
I’ve been toying with the idea of making one-page websites for hosts looking to do direct bookings. Considering you already encourage direct bookings do you think this is something you’d be interested in? It would allow you to take deposits upfront and create your own TOS.
I’d stop toying with it if I were you. Making a website is a pretty simple thing to do and these days, someone doesn’t even have to understand coding in order to do it. There are also plenty of those ‘for dummies’ services like Wix.
Creating a one page website would take a couple of hours tops, but it’s promoting it that counts and driving targeted traffic to it. So before you even start to consider creating one page websites, you’ll need to tell potential clients, in detail, how you would create targeted traffic and what sort of page-view numbers they could expect per day.
Thanks @jaquo - That’s a much better way of looking at it. I’m sure it’ll be easy for me to optimize the SEO, I’m a former CTO of a YC backed company and I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing multiple websites. However, I think what’s hard for me to estimate is what proportion of guests see a place advertised on Airbnb or Booking . com and then search on Google or elsewhere for a direct booking website. If it’s a very small proportion then I imagine the benefits of direct bookings are only for repeat business.
Out of interest do you have a direct booking website for your listing(s)? Do you find the bookings are mainly repeat customers or do you get a lot of new customers through your website too?
I am doing my taxes and 27% of my gross income for 2020 were direct bookings. 3 years of google PPC undoubtedly has helped. A few return guests and I do think that some google my listing name / town and find my website
It is smug. And should have qualified my assumption.