Had our best December ever this year, with all 31 nights booked for $17.5k in total revenue. This is in the Disney market, the most saturated market in the country, and #1 on almost every guru list of "worst markets to invest in".
Airbnb friends, the problem here, like most markets, is supply (in both quantity and quality), not demand. If you can operate at the top, there is still money to be made. And you don't have to have a tippy top property necessarily to operate at the top. It has to be marketable, but there are much better properties than mine in this neighborhood.
It comes down to 3 basic pillars, and I'll give one example of each here, and will go into more depth on each when I have a bit more time.
1) Listing Optimization - Bullet points, color. Ditch the superfluous wording (yes I'm aware of the irony) and skip to the important parts in bullet points. If you don't have color in your house, add it in your images (example in comments). Did you know you can use colorful emoticons in your Airbnb listing?
2) Revenue management - TURNING ON PRICELABS OR HOSP DYNAMIC PRICING IS NOT REVENUE MANAGEMENT. You need to actually learn it. How did you pick your base price? Did you just guess?
80/20 rule is a good starting point. Create a comp set of at least 10 properties. In high season, set your base price in the 80th percentile of your comp set. In low season, set it to 20th percentile.
3) You need a website, and an off-platform marketing plan. Sorry, it's 2026. It's time. Start by focusing around compression events. For example on a different property I manage that is mid-tier (very lightly themed, just some wall murals etc) we booked the holidays at $875/nt this year while comps were booking in the $400/nt range. |
How? After the teams were announced for the Pop Tarts bowl I created a custom landing page for the game and the property. I called it "Pigskins and Pixie Dust", and put the Hospitable calendar widget on it. Then I advertised that in BYU and Georgia Tech Facebook groups.
We booked Passover at all of our properties for higher than Christmas rates via Hospitable direct with custom Passover landing pages that we pushed in FB groups for Passover travel.
The key is to catch the guest attention before they get to Airbnb and see that there are 1000 similar properties at half the price. Airbnb is saturated. Your website is not.
