Hosting tips

Hi everyone,I’m looking for some advice on how you handle theft prevention in your properties. From time to time, I notice that smaller items — especially towels and similar things — go missing. I know that having a proper security deposit is usually a game changer, but unfortunately deposits aren’t available yet for the Euro zone in Hospitable. Until deposits are supported, I’d like to put a temporary workaround in place.How do you deal with this in the meantime? ➤ Do you use item or inventory checklists for each stay?➤ Do you enforce any specific policy or send reminders to guests?➤ Any proven methods to minimize loss or prevent items from “disappearing”? I’d really appreciate hearing how you manage this and what has worked best for you. Thanks!

Hi community There’s been a lot of discussion on changes impacting hosts this year by Airbnb, has anyone looked into the impact to hosts on liability for chargebacks? We’re thinking of amending our rental agreement to add some level of protection but would appreciate any guidance from hospitable or other hosts. If it’s not already started, it would be good to kick off the discussion.thanksclaire

How my client has been approached by someone who can remove Airbnb reviews has anyone had any experience with this.

Hey all! Just curious what Zapier Zaps you all use for your vacation rental management businesses (if any)?I’m just getting started with it and doing the following:Tracking the number of guest messages sent by property per day. Tracking the number of confirmed bookings each day. Thanks!Scott

Hello to anyone using VRBO!This is my first booking for VRBO and I need to manually invoice the owner for my 25% Co-Host commission rate. I do not need to do this for AirBnB, because I am already set-up as a Co-Host on that platform to received my 25% commission rate plus the cleaning fee.Is anyone able to help me mirror AirBnB’s fee split for VRBO, so I can explain to the owner how I got to the 25% commission for this VRBO booking? I know AirBnB deducts the Host Service Fee (3%) and the Cleaning Fee, prior to the split and they do this off of the Host’s Payout (not what the Guest paid), and AirBnB does leave in the pet fee, for the Owner and Co-Host to split, but luckily no pet fee here.I guess my last questions other than calculating the 25% Co-Host percentage + Cleaning Fee, is if there is any way for this invoice split to happen automatically?

We are new to the market and have listed cross platform. Upon going live we received two bookings through VRBO immediately but haven’t seen anything recently come through even with the upcoming holidays. It’s been silent on AIRBNB and BDC. Airbnb removed our “new listing” promo as they stated our listing was getting adequate traffic. I’ve since added some other promotions manually but doesn’t seem to have helped. We are also utilizing the Pricelabs tool as well. Any insights to help our listing would be appreciated. We are new to this and would love some advice from some of you experts! Thank you! airbnb.com/h/thevinny

Hi there,Has anyone done a detailed comparison between PriceLabs and Hospitable’s dynamic pricing?Also, I’m wondering why don’t Legacy plan users have the option to simply pay extra to add dynamic pricing? Forcing a full plan upgrade seems unfair, especially considering the major differences between the Legacy and newer plans. Switching plans would be a big downgrade for me in terms of features, so that doesn’t feel like a reasonable solution.Thanks in advance for any insight!

HelloI am struggling with what direction to take with Vrbo to eliminate a Charge back and Damages.I have always trusted the guest (8 yrs) up until recently.Do I require a security deposit? Rental Agreement or require them to purchase Insurance.Do they shy away from booking for these reasons?Looking for options that have worked best for others.Thank You 

I just had to verify my contact, bank account and email address with my AIrbnb account. Are any other “mogul” users also seeing this event in their Hospitable business? Also, I was updating my direct stay pricing url, but Airbnb “backup door code” keeps auto-populating the wrong August Lock door codes, so my guests get “locked out” every time before entry! Has anyone else had this issue with the “back-up” Airbnb door codes? thanks:Marie (Mary-Barbie) 

So now that Hostpitable supports booking.com I am finally ready to put my listing on it. I thought it would be easier to set up and get paid than when I looked at the booking site previously. I am so lost with setting up the details on booking.com. I have called booking a couple times and they keep saying they will have to call me back and never do. Can anyone answer these questions for me?will they collect payment and remit?will they remit the VAT or I have to remit after they collect?what is their commission fee?how does their cancellation policy work?what about any guest damages?I don’t want to make the listing live until I completely understand how their system works  Help anyone with booking.com experience?Thank you in advance  

I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence but ever since Airbnb enacted their policy on fees, my net new bookings have gone to zero.  I’ve not even received an inquiry.  I’ve lowered my pricing. I’ve looked in all of the insights and changes that I can make. This weekend I will be making adjustments to my listing photos to be more complementary to the winter season. I’m curious if there’s anyone else  experiencing this since the change with Airbnb.  Searched on my property and it still comes up as one of the top as a guest favorite. This is my only second year going into the season and it was quiet last year, but I was still getting bookings for holidays and weekends.Thanks for any insight anyone can provide I’m just wondering if Airbnb is somewhat influencing this in the background.  But then again I’m also not seeing any VRBO bookings eitherThanks in advance for any feedback you can provide if you’re in a similar situation.  

Hey there,Would you be interested in joining a video call to chat about best practices for optimizing listings and revenue?I recently joined this community and thought it would be valuable to trade notes with others on the strategies you use to maximize revenue. I’m an owner (not a property manager, and not selling anything). My STRs are in the Outer Banks, NC, with one in Denver. I tend to outperform my competitors and use some creative approaches to boost revenue and ranking, but I always pick up new ideas from others.If you also feel like you’ve found effective strategies—and are open to learning and sharing “secrets”—I’d love to connect.Reply if you’re interested! I’m hoping to keep it to a small group (5–6 people max).All the best,Scott

What cancellation policy does everyone use on Airbnb? Just curious since they have recently made some changes to their policies 

Has anyone tried offering this option?  10% seems high, but there might be a tweak to raise your price some to offset a portion?  Any thoughts or experience with this?  Copy n paste from Airbnb:  How a non-refundable option works You set your discount, which is typically 10% off the base price in everywhere but China Your discounted rate appears in search At checkout, guests either select your standard rate—subject to your cancellation policy—or the discounted, non-refundable rate If they cancel, you keep your entire payout for all nights booked, minus the cleaning fee if they cancel before check-in A reservation would be eligible if the check-out date is within 60 days The discount is applicable if the reservation is not booked with a pre-approval or special offer

hey Folks, I’ve been hosting for over a decade now — 8 active properties, 1,400+ reviews, Superhost for years. I got my first AirBNB-dedicated house in 2019 while working full time at Google, got a few more, and after getting laid off in 2023 I started growing. As an early user I’ve clearly seen a lot of change since airbnb was for friends crashing on mattresses at SXSW… and it’s mostly been good. But now something wild is happening. I started on low budget and even so my places performed well. Always hovered around 80%+ occupancy with nice but nothing special houses. I was doing well - FMV for my units would be about $1200/mo, but I was making avg $3k/mo on AirbNB. Totally worth it.Now it feels like guest demands and expectations have shot through the roof, but rates are staying the same or dropping, and fees are getting hire so payouts are reduced. And even though my rates are roughly the same (or even a bit lower) than they were a few years ago, occupa

I fired my property manager and found out that her listing of my property was suspended by Airbnb. I found out after listing the property myself after the change and received a message from Airbnb informing me they were taking down my listing saying I was circumventing their suspension. I contacted Airbnb for an appeal letting them know that I didn’t know the listing was suspended because she never told me. The customer service team didn’t really understand and would not escalate to a manager. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

There have been so many changes rolling out to the Airbnb platform with this latest batch of updates that I figured one centralized location for all of the updates would be a good idea. 💡

We’ve gotten dinged lately on our air conditioning limits.  We allow guests to adjust the thermostat within the range 72°-80°.  Most of the time, since we’re in MS, it’s in cooling mode.  Some guests, if allowed, would and have set the thermostat down into the 60s, and neither of the two units would ever cool to those temperatures.  So, we include the following everywhere we can in the listing:Because the air conditioning units are residential and not commercial, we protect them by limiting the minimum cooling temperature.  Past guests have set the temperature far below generally accepted norms, well below 70º.  The units would never achieve those temperatures in the Mississippi heat and they've frozen up, resulting in no further air conditioning for days and costly repairs.  Thanks for understanding.  If you prefer inside temperatures lower than this, please do not book with us. What else can we do to protect our A/C units?  They’ve frozen up before, which rend

Hello,I am relatively new to Hospitable and am excited to see that there is a guest verification feature.  It seems like a great option for cases where Airbnb or VRBO guests come through unverified, or for Booking.com guests.  However, I am wondering how it actually works in practice.  Let’s say the verification identifies a risky guest and I want to cancel.  Wouldn’t I be penalized for initiating the cancellation?  I know there are ¨waivers¨ for host initiated cancellation, but in my experince the OTAs really really don’t want you to cancel as a host.  Has anyone had success not being penalized for a cancellation that resulted from a guest verification that came back risky? Thanks for your help, lots to learn.

Within Airbnb how many people utilize MULTIPLE discounts like Trip Length, Last Minute and/or Early Bird discounts? Tell me which ones do you have setup or use in Airbnb?  

Hello everyone, co-hosts, do you provide monthly metrics to your hosts or investors? If so, what details do you share and in what format? I’m considering building a monthly deck to share, and I’d like to include:Revenue comparison: actual monthly revenue vs. prior to us co-hosting Cost savings: money saved through troubleshooting and minor repairs (e.g., recessed lights, hot water release valve replacement, toilet fill valve replacement, etc.) ROI clarity: ensuring hosts clearly see the return on their investmentI want to make sure investors/hosts understand not only what they’re earning, but also how we’re saving them time and money.  How do you all structure and present this type of information?

With Airbnb switching soon to fake phone numbers for guests and us how can we capture phones and emails so we can continue to communicate with our guests going forward? 

The co-host vernacular seems to have sprung up relatively quickly and seems to mean something not far from traditional STR property management, but with a bit more versatility. For those in the Hospitable community who have co-hosted,:What’re you seeing in the space?    What works well? What has been challenging?   If you were starting over right now what would you do differently?

Switched from Evolve to managing our own listings recently.  just found out that VRBO rejected most, but not all, of the pix we uploaded.  These were the exact same professionally taken pix that Evolve used.  We bought the pic files from Evolve and I uploaded the same original files they used, which VRBO had no problem with.  Now they are rejected on our listings, and probably the reason we have almost zero traction on VRBO so far.  I have a feeling its the fact that we still have listings with Evolve until we work thru the remaining reservations we had with them.  The listings are no longer public, but they probably exist through the Evolve/VRBO integration, even though none of our remaining bookings are with VRBO.  How do we get this fixed?  Evolve and VRBO both point fingers at each other.  I don’t want to wait another 2 months until we’ve finished all Evolve bookings to delete the account.

Do you charge a cleaning fee?Or do you increase your nightly rate to offset?  Or do you put it under management fees so it is “hidden”?  Thanks!