Mark Simpson explains how to move Airbnb guests to direct bookings. He covers guest behavior patterns and marketing tactics that encourage people to book straight from you instead of through the platform.
How do we get people to go to. So I guess this is from a host perspective. How do they get people to transition from booking from Airbnb over to direct?
Yeah, so there's a couple of ways and I think again, and I stress this enough, that a lot of the times, if you are not well known, if you are not already known as the go to person and you haven't established your brand, you are going to have to suck that first booking from the guest up and take it on Airbnb. Now what do I say that? Why do I mean by that? Well, the reason being is that if you think about the guest behaviors and what they do when they start their guest booking process. And I did a full podcast, 90 minute episode with Mike and E from Straight Secrets podcast. If you just go type in Google search str secrets, Mark Simpson, Boost Lee booking process. It's a 90 minute deep dive into this whole process. I walked it through them for free on their podcast. To sum it up, what they do is they first start their search a lot of the times on Google. Now if you type in a search in your area. So properties to stay in Vancouver, you know, apartments to stay in Vancouver, like holiday rentals to stay in Vancouver, you know, you could have the best website and will in the world. Unless you're spending millions, and I mean millions with a meh on on ads or SEO, you are never ever, ever, ever, ever going to compete with the likes of booking.com and Airbnb because that very, very high ranked keyword is, is like gold dust. Okay? So you got to suck up the fact that for a lot of the times for a first booking, you, you may have to have that guest book with you via an ota. Now this is where I come in. Now I've got a talk. I'm going to be in London in two weeks time and I'm talking on stage at the Book Direct show all about email marketing. And my second slide, it's going to say it is your fault in big words. So it's to grab attention. And what I mean by that is that if you ever have a guest rebook with you via an OTA is 100% your fault. Because as soon as that guest walks through your door, that should be your guest for life, you know, that should be your guest. Everything that you do when it, whenever that guest leaves your property, you should have all of the details, you should be contacting them. So if they ever do rebook and they rebook with you, they should always be booking with you. Direct. Okay. And the OTAs aren't naive to this. Well, maybe Airbnb booking.com aren't because they know as well as soon as they walk through your door, you're going to do everything in your power to get their real email address, their phone number, so you can then communicate and keep in touch with them after this day. So again, so that's the first scenario and that's quite a common one. So if they don't know about you, then they don't know about you. So they're going to have to discover you via an OTA and then the second time you're going to get that booking. Now, what may happen, and this is for those that are really good and everybody who's watching this now or in the future is a really good host and you're an amazing job. Now again, if you're doing it properly and if you're asking your guests for referrals, as I like to call it, excuse me, do you know anyone? Then what will happen is you'll have people refer you, your guests will tell their family, your guests that your guests will tell your friends, etc, about you. Now that's the brilliant scenario because then they'll just come to you direct. So again, that's a great scenario where referrals and friends and family, like word of mouth will drive people, will drive people towards you. Now there is a way to convert an OTA booking to a direct booking before they've arrived. I can't explain this in like a couple of minutes that we have. So if you go to the Boostly YouTube channel, I've got a video which shows you how to convert an OTA booking into a diary booking. It's a little cheeky. And I told, I told, I did explain this whole process on a podcast and I could see that the hosts who were very like favorable of Airbnb looked at me like, ooh, that's a bit icky. But it is cheeky. But it works. And again, it does work really, really well. So if you, if you Google, Google search Boostly how to convert an OTA book into a direct one, there's a like a 20 minute YouTube video showing you exactly how to do it. Go check it out. B O O S T L Y How to convert an OTA book into a direct one. If you do it well and if you set it right, it could make a four or five figure difference to your end of year revenue, which is always nice.
Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee because it's so hard. And the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
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