Oh Fred…you’ve got me smiling from ear-to-ear. : )
So dreams DO come true!
…de plane, de plane!
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Ah well, this thread has been destroyed anyways… 
My guests have requested if I could get some of these as cleaningladies:
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My goodness. You have raised the benchmark when it comes to fantasies. 
It is not a fantasy, if a guest is willing to pay, anything can be arranged.
I think they would be very happy to be send to some tropical Island for some cleaning. 
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More agreement here, we went with their price tips for a few months and when we crunched the numbers we realized we were barely breaking even and spending most of our time servicing the listings. We have two listings and between the two of them, at AirBnB’s rates, we were doing two loads of laundry a day, greeting guests every day, putting in $30 worth of breakfast food every day and so on.
I decided enough was enough. We talked it over and realized we can do just as well by renting long-term. The issue there is, however, that we live in a state where landlord tenant law favors tenants and we have put a lot of work into the house - we don’t want to have it wasted and we don’t want to be stiffed on rent.
That means we have to keep our tenancies under 30 days.
Anyway, we changed our prices to something more competitive with the #1 listing in our area, (we are #3 and #5) they’ve been in business for a really long time and they haven’t changed anything since they started.
We charge a flat rate Sunday through Thursday and more on weekends.
I checked our stats today and we’re making as much with my system as we did with all those bargain nights. The difference is we’re getting better guests most of the time and we’re spending two days a week on Airbnb instead of seven.
I think it’s a good idea to read what everyone in your area is doing and make sure you are competing where you want to compete. The #2 and #4 listings in our area are priced at under $50 a night. We are never going to be in the same market as that and I’m okay about it. We don’t want bargain hunters.
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Very smart of you @Stephanie_Borns. Every single starting business goes through this cycle, or should. They start out low, get their foot in the door, see where they really do fit, adjust their prices and work less oftentimes for even more. The algorithm of Price Tips cannot take into consideration such concepts.
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Hello I’m new to this forum. I’m a fellow host. I was supposed to have a guest for 3 nights checking in at 3pm today. He contacted me saying that Airbnb made a mistake with his booking and didn’t apply his discount code so Airbnb have cancelled the reservation due to their mistake. The listing has gone. No expected earnings due. £309 out of pocket now. As this is Airbnbs mistake and doesn’t fall within the extenuating circumstances rule surely airbnb should be paying me. I’ve the strict cancellation policy - Am I missing something.
They have cancelled a reservation because they didn’t properly calculate a discount? Which they could have easily issued after the fact. Indeed, something is missing, maybe the truth… Perhaps the guest pressured them to use the failure to discount to get his money back, because he changed his mind, and Airbnb (the particular rep) gave you a story.
Spoken to Airbnb and they said why should we pay you if the guest isn’t staying me as the host hasn’t lost anything. It was a blip in the Airbnb system. A mistake. Not our problem. Cocky arrogant person I spoke to. I said so why do you make the guest pay if they cancel. Seems incomsistant and that they are only looking after their own interests- Waiting for a reply.
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That was strict cancelation policy is for: even if guest is not staying you are still getting paid. Try to call again and get someone who knows this time.
Federal pensions for those hired since 1984 are (for most) not nearly so attractive as older hires: the change put federal employees into a 401(k)-type system, the TSP (tsp.gov), in part to reduce the loss of rights by those retiring early. Many state and local governments followed suit and reduced or “privatized” their pension systems too. A few states (RI, IL) have pension systems that are hopelessly underfunded. For federal workers, even new hires, the FEHBP offers excellent health insurance that (usually, there are conditions) can be taken into retirement. In our case the Government pays around $1,000 a month and I pay around $300 and (oversimplifying) the insurance pays 90% of costs after the initial qualifying co-pay. This makes Medicare Parts B & D largely redundant, and is valid for care worldwide. (In-network restrictions apply only in the US.)
So yes, federal employment is good, especially in areas of the USA that have poor private-sector prospects. There are several different retirement plans beyond CSR (pre-1984) and FERS for specific agencies (CIA, FBI, Foreign Service, etc.) so your mileage may vary. See narfe.org
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Many people commenting on this post are indicating an interest in setting up their own website for their property rentals. Something I’ve thought that would be very useful to those doing short term renting, is if one or more such folks could create a website that would be essentially a bulletin board, like Craigslist, but focused on people doing either short term or middle term length rentals – that is to say, everything other than offering permanent long term housing. This would not be yet another “STR platform”, but rather more like Craigslist, but focused on short term rentals.
I think many posting on this thread get the point that we dont’ want to be overly dependent on STR platforms. They always require some sort of fee, and they often make rules which are not advantageous to us as property owners. Airbnb’s policies are quite biased towards guests, and are becoming ever more so. So I dont’ see the point of simply replicating more STR platforms which hosts eventually sour on and want to leave.
Thus, rather than creating yet another STR platform that would be a third party between host and guest, collecting the money, I would like to see a website which simply lets hosts list either for free or for a relatively low flat fee – eg less than $100 a year. In your listing you could put description, photos, as well as a link to your vacation rental/short term rental website. Interested guests would contact you directly. They would pay you directly, just like on CL. The advantage to hosts getting together to do this, to list all our websites on one bulletin board site, would be that such a site would be a lot easier for guests to find, than trying to search to find individual property owner’s private websites. Another benefit to hosts, is that the more places you can post your website online, the more you enhance your SEO or Search Engine Optimization, and this enhances your searchability on Google and other search engines. So it helps to post your website URL on a variety of websites.
If such a site were started and it eventually got big enough, and well enough known, it could really function to empower short term rental hosts to collectively be able to be pretty independent of all third party STR platforms, and could pressure such platforms to have policies and fees which are more favorable for hosts. Short term rental hosts lack collective power, and while it’s fine to go off in your own direction with your own site, we could accomplish so much more collectively, on a site that allowed us to list our websites and do direct business with guests, and had the mission of unifying and empowering the host community rather than simply being yet another business seeking to profit from hosts.
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Check lodgify. It s what you are Talking about. Contact Me in private if you want more info and referral
Home Escape is doing exactly what you describe above. Totally free, and they need more listings.
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I have such a site that I started just a few weeks ago. It is not exclusively for STRs because at the moment, I need general travel articles, tips and recommendations in order to keep search engines happy.
But I am happy (keen in fact) to feature rentals from hosts who post here. Hosts can either link to their Airbnb listings, their own website or simply show their contact details if they’d prefer guests to get in touch directly.
Creative hosts can also write articles featuring their rental with, for example, ‘top places to eat in xxx’ or ‘sports facilities in xxx’ and so on.
Sure, it’s only a tiny site now but we (hosts here at the forum) can make it grow.
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In fact, as an answer to the many points you and others mentioned in this post, the market is reacting and offer new solutions that are doing exactly what you are saying. Slowly but consistently the market is moving from a Guest-VR-Host relationship to one that is more simple in where the Guest interacts directly with the Host (no middleman). What the market now needs is a centralized site/app that could gather all these personal vacation websites nice and properly and put them all together to give you easiness to find them. We have seen Pay-per-listing first with Homeway and others, Pay-per-booking with Airbnb and in the future I believe that the business will be just advertising for promoting these personal websites. In the world of advertising, there is no biggest player than google and it didn’t come to my surprise what they have released yesterday with the new Google Trips app. It isn’t a vacation rental website but the goal is to be the gate to anyone that wants to plan their trip so I believe they want to put their foot on this plate too.
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I’d like to add that the point of this post wasn’t to blame Airbnb for anything but to remind people that there are a lot of potential threats to STR income that are out of your control. Do I think it’s riskier than a 9 to 5 job? Yes, I do. I realize that many of the risks aren’t unique to STR, some are the same risks someone with long term tenants face. I just hope people consider the risks carefully before they buy another property or “quit their day jobs.” My post was particularly directed towards new hosts who start in April, get the new host boost, get excited by the amount of money they make and then are crushed when they don’t have enough bookings in October to pay the mortgage.
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Thanks for letting us know about your site, Jaquo. I’m glad you’re doing that! The images are beautiful —the site is quite attractive. Do you think your site could handle listing dozens if not hundreds of destinations,though? It seems that the places you list, under “destinations” are on a page you need to scroll down to view all. So theoretically when you got 200 hosts on there in 200 different cities, it would become difficult for guests to use the site to find something because they would have to scroll down for a long time…maybe there is a way to put a navigation map or chart in so that someone could search by map? Or by a list of city name?
Thank you! I’m signing up with them today!!
Thanks for checking it out! Yes, I think that when we get more rentals on the site, we can divide them (at first) by state and eventually by city. The ‘where to stay’ section can also have drop down navigation so that people can drill down by state or city. (And country, of course!)
There is already a search function on the site but I think it would be an idea to make a search function more prominent on the home page, plus maybe add a page that is specifically for search. Having a map showing all the locations is a great idea too.
Could I feature your rental? If so, PM me 