This forum is dedicated to connecting hosts with other hosts. Sign up to get the latest updates and news just for AirBnb hosts! Note that we are not affiliated with Airbnb - we are just passionate hosts!
I suspect a lot of new hosts don’t have the confidence to stick to their pricing.
I won’t forget the host who was on here who got booked at a rate of $12 per night. I still don’t understand why you would even put a rate that low into smart pricing. It seemed obvious to me that the lowest number should be your personal minimum in order to make hosting worthwhile not some random basement number suggested by Airbnb. $12 per night is plain ridiculous.
My lowest rate is my actual room rate and the highest I’ve put is three times my normal rate. Smart pricing frequently comes in a bit higher for me than it I would usually charge so I’m pretty happy with it but then I would be as I totally ignored the pricing suggestions from Airbnb.
I had my room as low as $19 during construction last year. It didn’t help my booking rate at all. Lowering a price might get you booked faster but I don’t know if it gets you booked more. I’m willing to take same day requests so everyone else with lower rates is booked already when people look last minute. I can’t be sure of my competition’s booking rate but based on the rate of our growth in reviews I’m matching pace with them on booking.
Airbnb is obviously more concerned about maximizing their total bookings than helping hosts make money.
My booking rate is currently 0.5% with 1,218 views in the past 30 days. I’m already 2/3rds booked for the next three months (including all but a few days in April), and have higher rates than most of the competition who are mostly unbooked. I still get those stupid emails telling me about “lost bookings” for dates that I’m already booked!
Of course they’ve also changed the search results over time to make listings appear more similar - removed host photos, made superhost status less obvious, and for awhile removed the description altogether. The most recent annoying thing is that when you search for a city it doesn’t bring up the map automatically, so far-flung listings are more likely to clutter up the search results than before. They also knocked me down 5-20 places in the search listing a few days ago in favor of new or less reviewed places for no apparent reason.
Yes, I agree that’s really irritating. Also, the Filters option doesn’t appear straightaway either. In fact the whole Search process is horrible, frankly. It’s just occurred to me that this could be the explanation for the sudden spike in enquiries asking me how far I am from xyz when it’s clearly stated in my listing intro. Wish they would stop fiddling with things that worked perfectly well.
When I posted on this thread back in April 2017 it was 7.5% with an average of five views a day. Now we’re averaging just over four views a day but the booking rate is 8.4% - nine bookings in the past 30 days. Just as we were last April we’ve enough bookings to keep us happy!
