Tim and I have been Airbnb hosts for about a month now, and it’s been a truly awesome experience for us. So awesome, in fact, that I thought I would share a little bit about it.
I’ll admit that we got off to a bit of a rocky start. You see, I had been telling Tim for months that I wanted to open the Airbnb, and gave him a goal of December 1st to have it ready to be opened. I would be in charge of managing it and decorating it, and he would be in charge of ensuring the basement was secure, functioning, and ready for guests. Needless to say, December came and went and then January was almost over and our unit still wasn’t even close to ready, so I finally told him that on January 25th I was ‘officially’ listing the unit as available.
The weekend before that date, we were notified that our first guest was checking-in on that Friday. Awesome (we thought), we had a week to prepare.
Then, on Sunday night at 9pm, we received a notification that someone had ‘instant booked’ our unit for the next day. At 3pm. Yikes.
Since Tim had thought he had a week to prepare our Airbnb unit, he hadn’t gotten the space ready at all. This meant the door to the outside wasn’t working, the heat wasn’t working, there weren’t functioning locks for the unit, there were no kitchen appliances… you get the idea. It was a hot mess.
To make a long story short: We didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, and Tim was at Target at 10:45pm – shopping like a madman – but we did get the unit ready (enough) and our guests came and went with nothing but great comments. Phew.
I’m just glad our marriage survived our first guests.
Which brings me to a few things I’ve learned in our first month of being Airbnb hosts:
- Instant Booking is a great feature, but it’s also restricting (from a host’s perspective). I think guests really love knowing that when they click ‘book’, they will have a place to stay. The ‘normal’ Airbnb protocol involves the guests messaging the hosts about a reservation, then the host approving the stay. The extra time it takes for a host to respond can leave a guest in reservation limbo. However, from a host’s perspective, it is nice to be able to screen guests a little more carefully and to be able to turn down guests if they aren’t a good fit. Also, if your other settings allow, using the ‘Instant Booking’ feature can bring up the previous situation I described, in which a guest books the room at the last minute and you’re left scrambling to ensure it’s ready. (However, guests cannot ‘Instant Book’ a room for the very same day, thank goodness.)
- Lower prices will bring in more guests. Obvious, right?! We’ve been booked almost every single day since we opened, and it’s because we originally set our prices very low until we got some great reviews and could justify raising them. We’ve now raised our prices by $20 per night and will keep raising them every few weeks until we feel like we’re in a good/competitive range.
- No one likes being nickle and dimed. For now we don’t charge extra for cleaning fees, extra guests, we don’t require a security deposit, etc. I find it’s better to charge higher rates than it is for people to feel like there are hidden costs in their bookings.
- Communication is key. Guests love fast responses, so I attempt to really stay on the ball and respond as quickly as possible to any inquiries. It helps that Airbnb has an app for iPhone, so I get notifications for all messages and can respond back right away, even if I’m not at a computer.
- Allowing people to stay just one night increases weekday bookings. There is an option to set a minimum number of nights that guests can reserve the space for, but we’ve decided not to use this setting. We’ve found that it’s worth the quick turnover to keep the space occupied. We may change this system when the baby is born, though, because it is a lot of work to do the laundry and clean the space that often. Also, it’s very annoying when someone only books one night of the weekend, because we know that it would have likely be booked from Thursday-Sunday by someone else. Overall, though, to keep our space booked during the week, we allow next-day and one-night stay minimums, which has made us quite a few extra dollars over just the once month we’ve been open.
- You don’t need to have everything perfect in order to start hosting. Of course, you don’t want your unit to be a complete disaster, but our apartment is still a work-in-progress, as is our online listing. When we get private comments or suggestions about what would have made a guest’s stay more enjoyable, we make the necessary adjustments if it isn’t too expensive to do so. I’ve also done a lot of revising to our online listing to be as accurate and descriptive as possible. The most important thing to become a host on Airbnb (as with anything in life) is to put yourself out there and try to get some business, and then take your lessons learned to make your business bigger and better as time goes on! If you wait until everything is perfect, you may never get started, plus you may spend a lot of money on things that guests don’t actually care about.
- Cleanliness is important. One guest complained (privately, not publicly, thank goodness) that there was a bit of toothpaste residue on the mirror and she found it ‘off-putting’. Another guest told us there was a handprint in the shower (what does that even mean?!). Now we always make sure to clean the mirrors (and everything) super, super well.
- Everything gets less stressful as time goes on. Those first few guests were rough, because we were stressed out about whether they would like our unit and if they would treat our place well and whether they would leave us good reviews, etc. Now we feel confident in our place and our system, and we already have quite a few good reviews, so one negative one wouldn’t look THAT terrible. Although we still try to make each guest feel at home and we make it clear we feel honored to host them, we aren’t worried about the stays in the same way we were worried a month ago.
- The start-up costs are worth it. For us, it cost about $1000 to get the apartment ready for guests, and we recovered that cost within the first month of being open. I was originally afraid in investing in this little ‘side project’ of ours, but you need to spend money to make money, so we put down the cash and started raking it right back in. Now almost every dollar we make is pure profit.
Overall, we love being Airbnb hosts and when we travel next I’ll definitely be using Airbnb to find a place to stay! I’ve done a lot of ‘research’ looking at units to compare prices and amenities, and I’m completely convinced that Airbnb is a much better bargain than a hotel room.
(This post isn’t sponsored, but if you think you may want to use Airbnb to book accommodations in the future, I would love if you would sign up using one of my referral links in this post – You get $55, I get some money, everyone wins! Also, if you choose to host, I get an even bigger referral bonus – wooot!)
