How to convert a AIRBNB booking to a direct one

Welcome back everybody to the Boostie Podcast. We've got something special today. So I was recently interviewed on Instagram, an IG live by the amazing Tatiana. It was called Spilling the Tea and it was a as a chance to talk about direct booking tactics. She was so kind to share the recording with me and I said that we would put it on the podcast. So what you're going to get is a little segment of the chat. I had a lot of fun. Please do go check out Tatiana. I'll make sure that we've got links on the blog post, we've got links on the podcast, we'll make sure all the links is there. Amazing person to follow on Instagram and it's just another person who's bringing tons of knowledge into this industry on how to get started, how to scale, and she brings such a really cool interior design background to it. So the chat that you're about to listen to, the chat that you're about to see is my Spilling the Tea Instagram Live with Tiyana. All about the amazing direct bookings.

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 why do I, 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 STR 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. But 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 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 goldest, okay? So you got to suck up the fact that for a lot of the times, for a first booking, 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, 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, but 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 the stay.

Just going to take a very quick break from today's episode to talk about digital guidebooks. Now, I've always said that if you have a good digital guidebook, there will never need to be a question from your guest again before they check in. Now, one of the market leaders in digital guidebooks is Hostfully. And right now you can go to hostfully.com and get one free digital guidebook. So it's the perfect way to get stuck into this new technology that is impacting and influencing thousands of hosts all over the world. So all you need to do to.

Get that is go to Hostfully.

They are the main sponsors, the exclusive sponsors of the Boostly podcast. And I want everybody to go and say hi. Make sure you tell them that Boostly sent you. Thank you to Hostly for being an amazing sponsor. And let's get back on with today's show.

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 book in. 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 have 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, oh, 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 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 of 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 the.

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 are 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 O OTA book into a direct one. If you do it well and if you set it up right, it could make a four or five figure difference to your end of year revenue, which is always nice.