Have you had a look at Airbnb Help Centre? It has a really useful Q&A that covers most of the basics around how Airbnb works and there is also a forum on Airbnb Community with tutorials and guides that are especially useful for new users.
no matter if you have just 4 rules. before every guests comes I send them a list of rules. I try to make it bullet point list and as short as possible to make sure they read it. that acts as you contract, I think. I had a questionable dispute with VRBO CS one time, when a guest left and didnāt close the door behind her. It was the dead of winter - january - and when I got to the house 8 hrs later, after work, the entrance door was wide open, the lights on and the furnace on too.
I was furious not only that thieves and squatters and anyone from the street could have entered, but they could have killed my furnace. So I decided to retain $80 out of the $250 I usually ask as security deposit.
What followed was a furious response from the guest claiming that they closed and locked the door (?!) and then questions from the customer service asking how I calculated that amount and asking for the contract. So, I sent them the message with the house rules I usually send to all my guests (Airbnb and VRBO etc). One of the rules says that the guest are required to do a final walk before checking out and turn off the light and ceiling fans and also make sure both entrance doors are closed and locked. As for calculation, I kind of estimated it based on the previous month bill and the meter reading taken by me at that time. They seemed to be OK with it and I got the money.
the other question: I couldnāt care less if a guest gets his own protection and I have no means to verify. I ask for a 250$ security deposit and it worked out well for me last year.
this year I lost my partner status due to a bad review and the fact that very few guests actually left me reviews to begin with, so this year I got very few bookings from VRBO to the point I am not going to renew my listing with them. the 500$ fee I paid for them is not worth it for the amount of business I got from them this year. I much rather go to booking.com next year.
I donāt really pay much attention to what the guest is charged in terms of the specific % but I know that the service charges to the guest are a lot higher on VRBO. And I make less money on VRBO. Because I pay per booking, itās 8% to VRBO off of my reservation total, vs 3% on AirBnB.
As @PitonView says, you can use your own contract and many sources suggest that you do on AirBnB. I agree with her that it is just prone to annoy the guest because unlike on VRBO itās not what they expect from the platform. (Maybe you donāt care, and thatās OK too.)
I donāt have a āseparateā contract, I have all the same things in my VRBO contract built into my āhouse rulesā and manual on Air. They have to accept that as part of the booking terms. I am getting it via DocuSign on the other platform, I reason that itās a digital āsignatureā either way but Iām sure someone could argue against that.
I find Airās interface way easier. VRBO frustrates me and I do almost nothing on the app. I prefer the browser. I like Airās app.
I find VRBOās support head and shoulders above Airās. That said, Iāve gotten some really great support at Air, usually when calling the San Francisco number during regular business hours. I feel that VRBO is more host-centric as a company but thatās just an opinion from a new-timer.
I require the damage protection, no deposit, on VRBO. The damage protection is $1500, my insurance deductible is $1000. I wouldnāt make a claim unless it was well over that anyway. On Air, $499 ādepositā.
I paid the subscription fee. Yes, itās $500 but then only āpayā 3% for the credit card processing and donāt pay Vrbo another fee per transaction. We get enough business (over 80%) from Vrbo that we are far better off paying the subscription fee than the pay-per-booking fee.
We get higher prices on Vrbo than AirBnB most of the time - although I set them pretty much the same, the AirBnB guests usually only book the low season/low priced dates. Maybe thatās because the Vrbo guests plan further ahead in most cases and get the high season dates before the AirBnB folks even start lookingā¦
2 Likes
I spent some time putting together a table that compares AirB&B, VRBO and Direct Booking with respect to several aspects (fees, cancellation, etc.), based on your responses to my initial questions. Most of you who were kind enough to respond to my initial questions as a newbie probably already know most of this stuff backwards and forwards. But it might be helpful for newbies like me to have it in one place. Some of the items could still use some input from the experts out there, and Iām sure that some of what I write will need corrections. It is in table form, so I canāt just paste the text in. How do I upload a PDF in this forum? Thanks, Tom
I canāt answer your question on uploading, but the most important part of the comparison is how well each site works for your market and your property, not the other aspects. But itās useful to know the rest when setting rates or rules.
Do you find guests less likely to leave reviews on VRBO? My review rate on Air is 100% and itās 50% on VRBO with an equivalent number of bookings on each platform.
1 Like
yes, same here. giving reviews is not mandatory, so they wont
Nearly all my Air guests leave reviews; probably 70-80% of my HA ones do.
Hi and welcome. When I first began with Airbnb, I bookmarked this link as it has most of the basics spelled out. Highly recommend you read it. https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/Community-Help-Guides/m-p/23100#U23100
I wanted to put this info hereā¦ I use instant book on both platforms. I have read various places to not do this with all sorts of dire warnings about double booking. Since we only have one property and it isnāt in extremely high demand, I ignored this advice.
I just took an Air IB for this weekend. I got done sending all the post-booking messages, rules, and house manual. Went to my VRBO calendar to block the dates and it had already synched and blocked it for me. (I triple check anyway.)
Unless you are getting bookings several times per hour, I canāt see not having IB on both places. It syncs faster than I can manually block it on most occasions.
(Edited to finish my thought as it was interrupted midstream by my day job.)
VRBOās MarketMaker really āgets meā. AirBnBās price tips always suggest I slash my rates to ridiculous levels. Looks like VRBO actually wants me to make money! What a concept. (Raising my weekday base rate right nowā¦)
1 Like
The current status of VRBO. I canāt log into the app or the browser site.
Edit: A couple of hours later ā¦ A change. Not an improvement. Now itās with the VRBO logo, not HomeAway. (From the same URL.) They broke it good!
Definitely not going to be making bookings like this.
works for me 9/4/2019 @ 11am
Airbnb is periodically down too, as is everything on the internet from time to time.
I have yet to experience a multiple hours long outage on AirBnB. What fun. The app has been really glitchy, though, consistently. For about two months this spring I couldnāt update my guidebook then one day I tried it and it worked again. Same with the check-in instructions, come to think of it.
Edited to add: The HomeAway family is a tech nightmare. They had one senior person assigned to lord over about 30 people to get our listing distributed properly to all their global partners. It took them about 6 weeks to get it all right.
We just deactivated one of our properties on there due to poor quality of guests. He gave us a 2/5 stars because he couldnāt figure out how to work the AC. The previous VRBO guest also nearly broke our AC because he didnāt understand how zoned cooling works. This is in Northern California.
We donāt have any issues with our vacation destination home listed. But for some markets I find that the quality of VRBO guests are not bright. Not savvy. Not nice. We are Pay Per Booking even though we did enough business on there to justify the annual for both listings. I just donāt like the guests.
2 Likes
The longest Iāve been aware of was probably 2-3 hrs at most. However, after that I started making sure I had the contact info for the guest