Mark Simpson (YouTube, 2018) demonstrates a practical Airbnb "hack" for independent hospitality owners (guest houses/small hotels): instead of creating separate Instant Book-enabled listings for every room, bundle similar rooms into a single listing and do NOT enable calendar sync/Instant Book. He explains why Instant Book is discouraged for multi-room properties, shows the host dashboard and calendar sync options, and gives examples (e.g., group doubles together, separate family rooms). The aim is to increase visibility, consolidate reviews, reduce admin complexity, and avoid low-price whole-property bookings due to incorrect listing configuration.
Chapters
I want to show you a really cool hack that I have discovered that has helped me get around Airbnb. Now, this is ideal if you've got a guest house which has got over a certain amount of rooms, or a small hotel, and it's basically all around the calendar. Now, what I'm going to do, I'm going to show you my dashboard. I'm going to show you exactly what I mean, and I'm going to also show you how it looks and how you can work around it. So, basically, what I'm going to show you is how you can list your property on Airbnb and where you don't have to list each individual room. Now, Airbnb, for those who know, was started about 10 years ago now by three friends in San Francisco. They had a spare room. Well, we didn't have a spare room. They just had a floor that had airbeds put up for a special conference. Hence why it's called Airbnb. And it's grown and grown and grown from them where it's now a massive travel player in the market. You know, booking.com, expedia, all these big chains are worried about the popularity of Airbnb. Now, a lot of guest house owners blame Airbnb, Airbnb for basically get taking rooms away from them, where if we were clever and came at a different angle, you've now got a new website which ranks so highly in Google, which has millions of people going onto their website looking for properties just like yours. But you can also get amongst it and you're not going to potentially miss out on bookings as well. Now, one of the key things I'm going to show you today is, number one, what, why you should never turn on Instant Book. Number two, how to list your property on Airbnb. And number three, how it will look and how it will compare to a rental, as in a cottage or an apartment. Okay, so let me go in and show you. So this is what I've got. Now, I look after a lot of listings on Airbnb, so don't get worried by the amount of listings you see here. Now, when I talk Instant Book, this is it. Basically, Airbnb have always been just like many other rental sites where you have to have a reservation, go into the host. The host will then accept or deny it. Airbnb are trying to shift away from that method as much as they possibly can. And they would love everybody to have Instant Book. When you do create your listing on Airbnb, they shove Instant Book down Your throat. Like you have to, have to, have to have this. Everybody looks for it. But don't worry about it. We don't have instant book on any of our listings and we still get a lot of bookings from there. Yes, it's a little bit more admin. You've got to actually check the email or check your phone, check your availability. But for a case of a couple of minutes, it can mean all the difference between filling that room or not. So let me just quickly show you the, the different types of listings that we have. So right now what you're looking at is our, the granaries bed and breakfast room. So one of the many, we've got 14 rooms. Out of those 14, eight of them are double rooms. We've also got cottages. So we've got here and that's why we're two totally separate listings. So by basically and if I can come in and preview it. There we go. So instead of listing each of these individually, what I've done is I've just done one room. Now where I see a lot of people fall down on Airbnb is where when they're creating their listing, they put everything in here. So for example, if you're a five bedroom guest house, what they'll do is they'll have five beds, 10 guests, all the baths, all the beds, showers and everything. Now if some and it'll be the price of £80. Now someone comes onto there, they can book out your whole property for 80 pounds, which is an error, a schoolboy error. But you, I see so many people doing this, it is crazy. So here's what you got to do. You list it as one. Okay. And when it comes to the back end and you've got the calendar which is here availability, you've got the chance to sync it to one of your calendars. When you've got here the sync calendar, you've got the option to sync it to home away, to Google, to free, to book with your iCal. Ignore all of that because if you were to sync one of your rooms to match up this room, then when, so say room one is rented out, then this listing will not show. But then you know that you've got four other rooms that are available and you don't want to have to list five different rooms because it becomes a bar lake. So instead you just list one room. Don't sync the calendar up on here. Now obviously if you've got a 10 bed hotel, say or a 10 bed guest house and you've got five double rooms, you've got four single rooms and you've got one twin room. For an example, you would do one listing for all your double rooms and one listing for your single rooms and then one listing for your triple rooms. In fact, you know, if you really were clever, you could if you say from a 10 bed hotel, if you've got nine rooms which are double or singles, which you can do, or twins with your zipper links and you've got one which is a family room, then I would have one listing for your nine beds and then have one totally separate one for your family room. That way when somebody comes onto this listing, they will click on request to book, you'll get the notification and then you could just see what is available and put them in there. Because you manually putting it into free to book, you're manually putting it into Vevo or high level software or beds 24 or whoever you use. Okay, so when it comes to Airbnb, my biggest hack that I can give you, especially if you've got a property of say seven or more rooms, don't sync up your calendar, bulk the rooms together and have it as one listing. That way all your reviews will be sat in here, you'll become a lot more visible and it's a lot easier to manage. Now obviously, if you are a cottage or a rental property, yes, you got to be listing out your rooms and syncing up to your calendars individually, but you'd be doing this anyway because you're already on homeaware, you're already on the other big rental markets. But this is what I was trying to get out when I'm saying that you don't have to just ignore Airbnb if you're, if you're a, you know, a hotel or a guest house, you can still get plenty of bookings from there. So this has been my hack. I hope you all can take action on this. If you've got any further follow up questions, please get in touch. But if not, have a great day and I'll speak to you soon.
