Hi everybody,
I am a fairly new Airbnb host in a suburb outside Houston. The Super Bowl is coming in about 7 months and already I am seeing listings for ridiculous amounts like $10,000 a night.
Clearly I would like to get the best bookings for this event, but I’m not sure about the right price and options. For the last 6 months I’ve had a single room with private bath and semi-private sitting area / kitchenette, which has been bringing in some decent bookings. In the next month I will be opening a new room with private bath that will share the sitting area. Both these rooms are upstairs.
For the Super Bowl only I want to rent out the master bedroom with private bath downstairs, with possible access to the downstairs living area and maybe kitchen. There is another room in the house where my husband and I can sleep that has its own bathroom, so we can provide private spaces to all guests.
All these rooms are separate listings - how I can combine them to accommodate a large party of maybe 6-8 people? If I make the listing “whole house” does that mean that we can’t be there during the booking? It’s not really the whole house - the office and the extra bedroom are off limits and we do live here.
Also, does anyone have suggestions for pricing? We are about 30 miles from the stadium, but I hear that the hotels in town are already fully booked so people will get desperate.
Should there be a minimum booking of 3 days? Longer?
When should I open the dates? Now, or wait until it’s 3 months away?
Has anyone been in a Super Bowl city before and have any experiences they’d like to share?
Thanks!
Personally, I would turn off my regular bookings for that time frame, right now so nobody asks to book it. I would create a new listing, and it will have to be private room, but you can pick number of beds (I just tried it creating a new listing) so you can accurately describe the accommodations being offered for the super bowl. Price it according to how you see fit. I’d probably open it now. If you don’t get any bites in a month, consider deleting the listing and doing another one a few months prior to the super bowl.
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Thanks, that’s a good idea about a totally new listing. I had wanted to preserve my reviews, but users should be able to see my other listings on my profile page.
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We had the Superbowl in NJ a few years ago, about 4 miles from my places. We had absolutely NO business from the Superbowl. Hosts all around us put their places up for outrageous sums, and I don’t think very much money was made.
Consider that 50% of the capacity will be locals who will drive in, and that 20% will be guests who book at local hotels where they can all get together and go mental in the lobby. So now you are left with maybe 15k people who might use an airbnb? Some groups might book , but in a city the size of Houston an upsurge of 15k people isn’t that much…all the media and press will stay in hotels with maybe a few exceptions. Airbnb will create some sort of awesome listing as a showcase and plunk someone famous in it, and use that as marketing.
Sorry if I sound like a wet rag, but for the last few years people have posted on this forum about how much of a dissapointment the Superbowl bookings have been.
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Wow, that is a disappointment. I’ve just been hearing so much buzz about the lack of hotel rooms, and of course this year there were a few very famous people who got fabulous mansions on Airbnb so I was hoping that this would increase bookings.
EXACTLY the same thing happend here in SF during Super Bowl 2016. EVERYONE and their brother put the their place on Air for ridiculous prices, and I don’t think many were booked. We checked the week before and weekend and there were still tons of ABB available, plus hotels started lowering there prices and actually were pretty ‘normal’ on Super Bowl weekend.
@Artemis We are in SF about 1.5 miles from where Super Bowl City was and about 1hr car ride from Santa Clara where the actual Super Bowl was held, even thought it was called SF Super Bowl. Levi’s Stadium is brand new and built 4 hotels literally on the premises, and of course those were booked well in advance for lots of $$. However, all the other media hype, was exactly that HYPE. We saw a little bump in price bump nothing compared to some of the larger corporate conferences we have here annually.
To answer your question, mark your house as private room if you will be living there. If you plan to go out of town that weekend, then mark as whole house. As for price since its far away make the price what you think is approps for a 6 month out booking, someone booking now for Feb does not really car about price, so set it high, but be prepared to lower as the event gets closer.
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