Whether you’re a beginner and new to hosting or a seasoned Superhost, here are my top Airbnb hosting tips. These will help you master the guest experience and make your hosting life so much easier.
1. Master Communication
Guests hate to feel neglected when they have an issue. I’d strongly recommend downloading the Airbnb app so you can be available 24/7 for guests during their stay. This way, you’ll get notifications immediately when a guest contacts you.
Be available promptly
When I’m hosting, I have my phone on loud and am reachable at any point during their booking to assist. I regularly get 5 star ratings for communication.
I try and aim to respond to guest queries within 10 minutes. And from this, my communication has been well received and praised by guests. Your communication score and overall guest experience will greatly benefit as will your reviews.
Keep it in the app
I encourage guests to contact me via the Airbnb app for messaging rather than contacting me directly. This way, all communication is kept visible to Airbnb should you ever need to raise an issue with host support.
2. Automate as much as possible
Making automation your best friend when hosting is the perfect way to increase your profit margin. Plus it helps ease the stresses of hosting – it’s a win-win.
Don’t think that automating parts of your hosting is cold and faceless either. You can still offer a warm and hospitable stay whilst taking your hands off the wheel slightly.
Use Pre-saved messages
Following on from the communication point above, you’ll notice when hosting that your different guests will tend to ask many of the same questions.
Using saved Airbnb message templates means you can fire back a pre-written response. This way you can answer common guest questions without having to re-write a message over and over again.
Leave a guest information pack
Second to this, Leaving a visible guest information book with common questions and information can help guests. They’ll be grateful that they don’t have to reach out to you.
Guests prefer to have an immediate answer to their issue and don’t want to have to wait for a response. Guest information books that you’ve made for bookings will help alleviate this.
Accept longer bookings
Lots of short bookings makes more work for yourself as you’ve got more turnaround days to get your property ready. You’ll find longer bookings can allow you to be more hands-off while the guest settles into their trip.
Think about it, 4 week long bookings a month is a lot less work for you than 10 short stays.
Longer trips can often mean a greater profit margin for you, even if you provide an automated weekly discount to your nightly rate.
Utilise Instant Book
The instant book setting allows you to accept bookings right away, rather than having to screen guests via messages first.
Guests prefer instant book listings as they can make their plans immediately and don’t have to wait for a response from you to approve.
By turning this setting on you’ll not only notice an increase in bookings but it allows you to take a step back.
It can be a bit daunting letting anyone book in this way, but Airbnb allows you to set the minimum requirements that a guest must meet before they can instant book your property. This means you can be slightly stricter for auto-approval of guests.
Offer Self Check In
Lastly, you can incorporate automation into other aspects of your hosting, such as by offering self check in. By leaving a key safe outside your property, guests can be provided a code and let themselves in.
This not only saves you a heap of time by relieving you of the duty of handing over keys, but it also allows guests the freedom to turn up at their leisure.
This works great if their travel incurs delays and provides them with a more of a stress free travel arrangement.
3. Race to Superhost
Superhost status is awarded to hosts who have consistently positive bookings and that meet a certain criteria. The requirements to meet it are actually quite simple to hit. Despite this, it does require a little bit of initial effort on your part to start with.
Superhost’s properties are pushed by Airbnb and favoured in the search algorithm because they’re reliable for Airbnb. These properties ensure guests have good experiences of the platform and are good for the brand.
Superhosting is where the real money is
I noticed a significant jump in bookings when I qualified as a Superhost. It was at this point my earning potential and success as a renter was starting to become very clear.
My property is frequently listed as either the top property in search results. This applies to most searches and is at the very least on the first page. It is almost always listed within the top 5 results.
How to get there
When you first start out, it can be hard to get your first booking. Guests are more likely to book a property with a great reputation rather than a brand new property.
A new property can be a bit of a gamble for travelers. Somebody needs to be the first one to bite the bullet and test it out.
In the beginning, you may need to slightly undersell your nightly price just to get those first bookings under your belt.
By all means, don’t operate at a loss. However, dropping your price against the competition allows you to appear higher in the search results.
Also, don’t feel pressured to drop the price even further when a guest asks. When you start out, you’ll be targeted by opportunistic guest. These guests will ask for further discounts as they can see your property is new.
If you’ve already discounted the nightly rate, don’t feel obliged to do more, even out of desperation for a booking. Often guests who ask for further price reductions can be more trouble than they are worth.
Once you’ve had those few bookings in with guests you’ll start getting (hopefully) positive feedback. These reviews confirm to others that your place is nice and because of this, you can bump up the price.
As the platform gets more and more competitive, it’s imperative to reach this status. Your property will then be featured higher in the search results.
Leave special touches
Every host has a different style of hosting and there is no right or wrong way to do it.
Some hosts provide ample amenities and cute touches, other hosts won’t even supply towels or toilet roll.
If you don’t see yourself leaving sprigs of lavender on the bed or writing a personalised welcome message on a chalkboard, that’s perfectly okay.
But I recommend the small, low cost finishing touches which make the booking extra special and make the stay functional.
Provide the basics
One word of advise is to think like a guest – what would I really need when I first arrive?
Basic amenities makes a guests stay easier. For example, you don’t have to leave a multi-pack of toilet roll for your booking. But providing them with at least one roll to get them started is advisable,
Towels are another thing that you should leave. Travelers won’t be filling their precious suitcase space with a bulky towel. It’s unpractical for a guest to carry this with them and it makes sense for the host to supply this.
Tidy Room, Tidy Mind
Declutter
Quite simply, declutter. Extra knick-knacks and decor on side units might look nice to you, but it’s simply a dust collector. This additional dust collecting slows down your cleaning time and as a result, affects your profit bottom line.
Not to mention more areas to clean means more chances to miss cleaning properly and can affect your guests experience of cleanliness.
That’s not to say you should go completely minimalist and devoid of personality. You can still leave the key pieces of decor that add character – just don’t overdo it.
Ban fake plants
I despise fake plants. They add nothing to a room and just collect dust. Don’t be put off from using real plants because you can’t keep them alive. Instead, if you don’t have a green thumb go for some simple and hardly plant species.
IKEA for example has a great range of incredibly cheap and resilient real indoor plants available. You can add a pop of green colour and fresh plant life to a room. Plus, real plants have actual indoor air filtration benefits.
Snake plants for example are solid, can survive the odd missed water and actually benefit the air in the room.
A clean property can never fail
Well, almost never. No matter what your property looks like, whatever it’s location and however poor your guests experience is, one thing they cannot deny is a clean property. Out of all the criteria guests can review, if they have a bad experience they are much less likely to down rate your cleaning if it’s immaculate.
Travelling can be a risky business. Nothing is more discomforting and unrelaxing as a dirty place to rest your head for the night.
Guests can dislike your decor, they can dislike your location but never allow them to call into question your cleanliness.
I guarantee you that those looking for properties will check the reviews for the most important factor – cleanliness rating. If you aren’t regularly receiving 5 star ratings for cleanliness, reassess your cleaning routines and standards.
Summary
Over the years of hosting, I’ve found these are key points of Airbnb hosting tips that not only improve the guest experience but make your hosting life ten times easier.
My style of hosting has changed slightly from my very first bookings and now I’ve got the process down to a fine art. Much of this was from my experiences with guests and from trial and error.
Today, I’ve been able to increase my profit margin and take a step back from the big stresses of hosting. I’ve been able to do this without compromising the quality of my property or the guest’s experience. On top of this, my ratings are consistently high too!