Industry Conversations

I manage $1.3 million in bookings  and 2200 reservations a year and I’m on many platforms. Booking.com is by far the absolute worst. I do everything you’re supposed to do, we require a deposit, we require ID verification all that kind of stuff through charge automation but somehow we still just get absolute nightmare guests. Anytime I have to interact with Booking.com‘s customer support. It is a joke. Case in point, a guest recently Booked for six people at my house, paid the damage deposit, gave the names and ages of the guests, and then 30 people showed up at my house. When I contacted Booking.com about this, they said that they cannot cancel this guests reservation without their consent, which is just incredible. Does anyone have any contact with people that actually work in Booking.com like some kind of higher level rep or someone in the PR team or something? I just don’t understand how their service offerings can be so bad.

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

Hi everyone, I’m curious — what is currently your biggest challenge when it comes to managing turnovers? Is it:• Finding reliable cleaners• Timing issues• Quality consistency• Communication I’ve seen all of these come up in different properties. Would love to hear your experience.

Hi.  Does anyone know how to get pet fees to be findable on VRBO?  We have two pet friendly rentals, but there is no clear way when guests are booking to select the pet reservation, and then I am stuck pestering guests for a pet fee.   It is noted in the property description, and is set as a fee on the listing, it just never seems to pop up as an option when people book.   

Has anyone ever gone to the trouble of asking Vrbo to turn OFF the syndication of your Vrbo listings to Google Vacation Rentals (GVR)? Any luck in doing that?The reasoning is that when multiple booking sites syndicate to GVR, it can cause duplicates if GVR isn’t able to match and merge the listing from its various sources. Another reason would be to give guests fewer choices when looking at your listing on GVR, to steer them toward your Direct site rather than Vrbo. I’ve wasted a couple hours so far trying to get support from Vrbo on this. They keep telling me random things such as I need to turn off Instant Book (bogus), or that GVR is picking up my Vrbo listings organically (also bogus). 

Our apps are out!! Hospitable hosts can list for only $5 per property for the first year on Inndirectly.com! Use coupon HOSPINN45 at check out.Inndirectly was created to make direct booking sites searchable alongside all other booking options. It's free to join and for guests to use and only $50 per property per year (just over $4 per month) for hosts to list. Here's our explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhivu88Zrjo and read through our FAQ's.Our Apple App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/inndirectly-vacation-rentals/id6759907294Our Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inndirectly.app(Don't forget the double NN's in Inndirectly when Googling us! Inn+Directly = ❤️)

What are the Pros and Cons of working with these 3 platforms? Should I play with the 3 of them? 2 of them or only Airbnb? 

📣 Co-Hosts: Let’s Share Best Practices (Billing, Cleanings, Fees, & Cash Flow)Hi everyone — I’d love to start a collaborative thread so we can learn what’s working (and what isn’t) as our co-hosting businesses grow and evolve — especially with recent platform changes like Airbnb’s host-only service fee updates.I’ll start by sharing how we currently run our operation, and I’m hoping other co-hosts can chime in with their own systems.💼 How we currently operateBilling & Bookkeeping Our bookkeeper invoices owners once per month via QuickBooks. We charge our management commission on: Gross booking amount Pet fees Extra guest fees We do not subtract host platform service fees in our commission calculations. Cleaning Fees Cleaning fees are based directly on what we pay our cleaners. We’re currently increasing cleaning fees by 18.34% so owners are no longer paying cleaners out of pocket. However should it actually be 15.5%? AIRBNB What are your current markups f

Hosts and property managers, we'd love to have you list your properties on Inndirectly.com! Even before officially going live last fall, Hospitable believed in what we were building and supported us early on, so we wanted to give something back to the Hospitable community.If you’re a Hospitable host, we’re offering 90% off your first year’s listings which are normally only $50 per property per year ($4.17/month.) Join for free then use coupon HOSPINN45 at check out to list for just $5 per property for the whole first year.Our purpose is to help small businesses hosts regain ownership of their bookings by making direct booking sites searchable, encouraging direct guest/host connections, and helping hosts break free from total reliance on OTAs without the review games and algorithm stress. Since Inndirectly is a listing site (not a booking platform), there are no commissions, algorithms, or micromanagement.Here’s our quick explainer video:Common questions:Integrations? Yes, via iCal (tho

Anyone has suggestions on advertising on social media thats pretty much hands free ?I can’t remember to post and would love to automate that task

Hello!   I am looking for platforms to market my hospitable account.   I would like to do this on TT, IG, FB and other sites.   Is there anyone who can help me with this? Lisa

Hey all,we signed up for Crew yesterday to get a handle on trash collection at one of our properties. The setup is very quick and easy, you provide address, when trash day is and where the bins are located.If you sign up through Hospitable you get one month free, BUT Crew gets access to your full calendar INCLUDING financials and guest data. Why? A guest stay doesn’t change the trash pickup day and an expensive stay doesn’t make it a higher priority pickup. I also don’t think a crowd sourced tasker will knock on the door and greet our guest by name. To me this seems like a data grab for Crew to resell your booking and property information.Am I missing something vital? Some benefit I am not seeing? I signed up without the integration as I cannot see anything I’d get from it but am curious what your take is on this? Cheers!

We have a conversation TODAY with our local cleaner and I would love to summarize comments from the year. I seem to remember something presented on one of the Town Halls but I can’t find anything when looking through help or the community on how.

My abnb and VRBO calendar not synced as of yesterday and i was double booked by abnb. i have resolved the issue now but i need to know hoe to prevent this from happening again?

Fun fact, but not funny...I just got a guest's change request for a date. Confirmed at Booking.com. I assumed that booking was clever enough, not to forgive my holiday home twice as Airbnb and Hospitable does when changing requests.But that was not the case. Booking.com does not check whether the period is busy or free, when a change request comes.What a nonsense-bug 😥 a world leading booking system cannot check if something has already been booked and offers me to move the guest purely to this booked period.So with every change request from a guest at Booking.com, you would have to see if the requested period is available.Greetings from GermanyStefan

I would love to make the jump to Hospitable but one of the major concerns I currently have is the owner portal… primarily how the financial data is displayed. We use GetClearing for booking <> bank deposit reconciliation, owner statements and utilize trust accounting with a bookkeeping team.When my owners login to their portal and view their dashboard my understanding is that the portal would only reflect gross booking revenue and maybe a reservation breakdown for each booking?Are there any customizations available that I am missing or improvements coming to how financial data is displayed to owners? I would really love the ability to create custom owner dashboards that reflect more data like what we see in the Metrics Tab. I would potentially be interested in the ability to run owner statements & payouts in Hospitable as well but again, lack of customization with how the statements are built & commission structures makes this a dealbreaker for me.Thanks!

Curious-  i accept payments directly today but considering making the switchWhen do guests get charged for their holiday when booking charges them?We take payment in full at the time of booking but would like to get out of the fraudulent charge back rish (we have had  few problems) and the hassle of processing refunds Any pros/cons on making the switch?of course i like the postive cash flow part with the current model

I’m extremely frustrated with Google vacation listings. My Cabin is being advertised incorrectly by multiple listing companies that I have no agreements with and the information that they have is incorrect and trying to get in touch with somebody to get the information fixed is impossible. Expedia and others has anybody these issues and how did you fix the problem

Hey Fellow Hosts and Property Managers If you are in a World Cup city, it appears that Airbnb will pay you a referral bonus (and/or a corresponding host account bonus in some cases if you are a property manager) for all new properties brought on board in specific Zips (and postal codes here in Canada) between now and the end of February.  You might be wondering “how is this different than the normal referral program from Airbnb?”. In this case, API-connected hosts (a la you on Hospitable) are ALSO eligible. Under the regular referral program, API hosts are specifically EXCLUDED (BTW - you can ask me how we generally get around that requirement and get rewarded EVERY time we bring on a new account - but that’s a separate tale). Anyway, if you are in Toronto, Vancouver, Boston, Atlanta, LA, Mexico City, etc (World Cup host cities) check out this referral program from Airbnb.https://www.airbnb.ca/e/fifa-host-referrals

In my market of Ocean City, MD, where condominiums are the norm, most smaller condo units have heat and A/C that’s controlled on a room-by room basis.The typical 1 BR condo has two through-the-wall air conditioners (functionally identical to window ACs, except that there’s a dedicated sleeve for them on the outer walls). And for heat, there’s typically 4 electric baseboard radiators, each with its own thermostat.Mysa is the main player in this space for “smart thermostats” that can control electric radiators.Mysa also makes thermostats for controlling “dumb” A/C units (it’s a glorified IR emitter that simulates the handheld remote). Those don’t work tremendously well for A/C units, so whenever I need to replace an A/C unit, I make sure to get an EQK or TCL brand, because those have apps that let you control the A/C remotely. There’s also a third-party app called SmartLife that can generically control wi-fi enabled air conditioners. I bring this up because there are two feature requests

Has anyone else noticed pricing differences between the 3? What i have set on pricelabs isn't what is showing on hospitable & then not correct on abb. Some days are correct then others are off $5-$10. ???

If you put in an amendment does the software automatically factor in the weekly discount on airbnb? I think we set it at 10% but I forget. The guest wants to know the extra cost for the extra few nights including the weekly discount.

Hi. I was wondering if you guys had a system to automate garbage day pickup. For example, every Tuesday morning, the garbage trucks come and empty out the cans. For example, I could send an automated message every Monday evening and recommend the guests to pull the cans to the front, but the garbage pickup schedule is dynamic depending if there's a holiday in the week. Maybe I don't ask the guests to pull the garbage can? Thoughts?

Hi community,I have been working with upsells and I would love to offer some really amazing wines from a local property.  I am hesitant to do it though because in my state, Pennsylvania, my understanding is that you need a license to sell alcohol. Would upselling a bottle of wine that I leave for guests upon arrival be considered ¨selling alcohol¨?Thanks for any help!Jennifer

I would like to harvest all of the names, phone numbers and email addresses from all prior reservations to send special offers and marketing by text and email. Does anyone have any ideas to do that? Thank you very much.