Mark Simpson (creator) advises short-term rental hosts to pursue direct bookings by moving guests off OTAs and onto one-to-one messaging channels (WhatsApp or Telegram). He notes booking lead times are shrinking—often days or even 24–48 hours—and recommends contacting guests immediately after they book to establish direct communication and reduce reliance on platforms like Airbnb or Booking.com.
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Why? Now more than ever, we have to be super realistic in how we are going to increase our direct bookings. From the point of making a booking to arriving at your front door is getting shorter and shorter and shorter, and it's only going to get shorter. What that means is that you're going to be witnessing, if you haven't already, you're going to be noticing a lot of really short booking spans. Pretty much maybe one or two days out. If you have got a guest who has never been to your area before and through, whatever the motives may be, whether they are going to go on a staycation, maybe they're just going to pop 45 minutes up the road, maybe they're just like, I really want a break and they just want to just go somewhere. What you'll find is that they may start their booking process 72 hours out, or four days out or five days out, which is really, really rare. So what I would be doing to every single guest that's booking between now and definitely, you know, the next couple of months would be sending them a WhatsApp or inviting them onto Telegram, whatever your preferred messenger platform of choice is. I'd be looking to do that straight away, getting them on a WhatsApp message straight away and start that communication. Now, what you're doing then is you're taking them off platform, you're taking them off Airbnb, you're taking them off booking.com and you're getting them on your one on one communication.
