If You Only Watch 1 Airbnb Video, Make It This One

Vacation rental properties have been in my family for over 30 years. Over that time, we've grown and sold that business for multiple 7 figures and helped over 2,000 hosts achieve over $1 billion in bookings. But it hasn't always been this easy. So in this video, I want to go through 7 lies people believe about Airbnb and vacation rentals and short-term properties to give you all the wins, losses, and advice I wish someone had given me when I first started. And let's kick off with lie number 1. There's something I've been doing every single day for the last 16 years, and I reckon it's the one reason why our properties have been fully booked and why Boostly has thrived. But I still find it crazy how few of us actually do this. What is it? Well, that mistake that I see 95% of all of you make is that they hit a moment where bookings are flowing, so they think to themselves, okay, I can stop the hustle right now. That phase is the most dangerous one, hosts say, in their entire career, because whilst they are busy, hosts are taking their foot off the gas. I spend 30 to 60 minutes every single day sending emails, firing out WhatsApp messages. Heck, I even try ringing people up to network and do business with them. Even though I'm 16 years into this game, I'm looking for new business every single day. But this means that my bookings and our revenue always stays running and flowing into the business. We've built up multiple revenue streams, not just one. So when these quiet seasons come, and trust me, they always do, I'm already covered and don't need to worry and have to feel like I got to start from square one all over again. So lie number 1 is believing that once you get busy, you can stop selling. The busy periods don't last forever, and when the quiet time hits, it's too late because you end up starting to have to scratch over and over again and have to go out to try and find more guests. So here's what I want for you to do instead. Just simply block out 30 minutes on your calendar every single day to find new business. This is a non-negotiable. It can be anything from emails to DMs to making content. But if you don't have a reliable way to find new business, you're running on borrowed time. Which brings me to number 2, and it's the most expensive moment in everyone's business career. So this one lie I see that 99% of you all believe, even I fell for this in the early days. Let me tell you a story that taught me what hospitality really is. I came back to our family short-term rental business and my mum and dad were running around absolutely frantic. Turns out that because my parents were using pen and paper to manage their bookings, remember this was in the '90s in rural England, mind you, my dad had managed to double book a regular guest. So what did they do? We couldn't just turn away a paying guest. Well, my parents spent the next 30 minutes and they stripped out their own bedroom, took everything out of it, and slept on the couch for 2 nights so that guest had room at our property. But this regular never forgot this act of kindness and continued to come back to our property year after year after year. And that's when I realised that the lie that hospitality is only about providing a place to stay is completely false. It's not. Hospitality is more than that. It's a just-get-it-done attitude, and it's the small thoughtful details and the willingness to do things that are unscalable. And there's not really an action step that I can give you here apart from just adopting this attitude. If something goes wrong, just take ownership and take responsibility. Which brings me to the third lie. There's a moment every new host experiences that when they get the keys to their first property and think to themselves, okay, the hard part's over now. But most of them don't know that they're about to make the most expensive mistake of their entire career. And how do I know this? Well, I made this exact mistake at The Granary, our family business. For years, we essentially made our pricing up. We'd raise prices by a few pounds every season or just keep the increases small because we didn't want to upset our customers. We thought we were being loyal, but what we were actually doing was leaving thousands of pounds on the table every single year. When I think about it now, I can confidently say that we left high 5 figures in revenue every single year. That's when I realised it's not just buying the property that's the hard part. It's the 12 months after you get the keys when you've got nobody telling you how to actually manage this business. The cleaning, the reviews, and yes, the pricing. You don't know what you don't know. But here's the one thing that I want you to do from day one, not year 3 like we managed to do. Go and get dynamic pricing set up within your business. You've got tools like PriceLabs and AirDNA. There's so many of them out there. You'll be charging what you're worth from day one. Which brings me to the fourth lie, and it's the one that built Brian Chesky's whole empire. I speak to hundreds of hosts every single month.. And there's a really weird difference between them and the hosts in every other part of the world. Most of the US short-term rental hosts have built their entire business on Airbnb and are really bullish on the platform. A lot of them don't even realize there are alternatives out there. So when Airbnb does finally hurt them through either a fee hike or an algorithm change or siding with the guests in a dispute, that is when they realize that they might have made a mistake. And when this day happens,. It's what I call the aha moment, and it's the day every host stopped working for Airbnb and realised they need to make Chesky work for them and not the other way around. So here's the lie: just be on Airbnb and bookings will come. Every booking that comes from a platform is a customer you don't own. And I've always said this: if more than 90% of your bookings come from Airbnb, you don't have a business, you have a job, and Brian Chesky is your boss. And if that sounds like you, there's two things that I need for you to do. Number 1, go out and build your own direct booking system. After you've done that, let's aim to get you to 65% of your total property bookings coming from your own website. The remaining 35% can come from Airbnb, it can come from Booking.com, and it can come from Expedia and the other OTAs. Referrals and in-person events come as well. The remaining 35%, yes, they can come from Airbnb, but also spread it out to Booking.com, Expedia, and the other OTAs as well.. This is a much safer way to build a proper business. Which brings me to the 5th lie, which is the one metric that most hosts obsess over, but that's actually misleading them. Over the last few years, I've been speaking and attending quite a lot of these short-term rental events, and one thing has always confused me. Time from time, hosts will come to me and brag about their revenue and the nights they've booked, but then when I ask them to show me their actual P&L, the picture changes completely. So lie number 5 is that revenue is the most important metric in your Airbnb journey. But the truth is, revenue is vanity, but the profit is your sanity. The moment you start to think like that, you start building a sustainable property business. So how do you know if you've fallen into this trap? Well, the best thing you can do here is to calculate your true OTA fee bill for the last 12 months. Most hosts have never done this, and if this is the first time you're doing this, I bet you that the number is much bigger than what you would have expected. Then you need to work out your costs and start tracking your profit per booking each day. You can basically ignore the revenue, which brings me to lie number 6. There's a number every host stares at each morning. They take it personally and get defensive when it dips, and almost none of them realise that the number is actually the most valuable business tool if they changed the way they looked at reviews. Because for years at The Granary, we kept getting the odd complaint about hot water, and it was always on the guests who were staying on the top floor. We used to do what we always did. We apologise and move on and put it down to the occasional grumpy guest. But after we finally installed a property management software tool that captured every single review, the pattern was sitting there for us to see. Turns out that out of every 10 guests staying on that top floor, 7 would complain about the same thing. So we eventually spent a good chunk of cash to fix the water pipes during the off-season, and the bad reviews, they dropped overnight. The time that we spent firefighting complaints and bad reviews actually went down, even though we fixed fewer things, not more. So lie number 6 is that reviews are just negative feedback from grumpy guests. Can this sometimes be true? 100%. But oftentimes, reviews are the feedback loop that tells you what to fix. And as a rule, I've always said this, for every 10 reviews, if one person mentions something negative, that could simply be a personal preference and you could probably write it off. But if 4 or more people mention the same thing, that's a real problem and you have to fix it. So here's what I want for you to do this month. Set aside 30 minutes and go onto your PMS and download every single review that you've had over the last 90 days. Try and look for that 4 outta 10 pattern. You can even simply load it all into Claude or ChatGPT and it will tell you exactly what you need to know. And if something does show up as a pattern, that is what you fix next. Which brings me to the final lie, and that's the most dangerous one of all, because most of you don't even realize they're falling for it. There's a phrase I hear from hosts more often than ever, but it's the exact same phrase that's getting them eaten alive by professional property businesses in 2026. The truth is, when I was at The Granary in the early days, me and my wife were like ships passing in the night. 12 to 13-hour split shifts. And the worst thing is, on our days off, none of our friends were off because they were always Mondays and Tuesdays. After a few years of this chaos, I then realized the problem was we were treating the whole Airbnb game like extra income. We were running it like a hobby, and it wasn't a fun one. So we rebuilt it like a proper business with SOPs, outsourcing to proper cleaners. And nowadays you can use AI agents that cost $20 a month. Doing the same work we used to pay thousands for. That's when our business actually started working, and it's how we eventually exited the family business in 2021. So the final lie is that Airbnb is just that extra income. Listen, it can be, but without any systems to run your business, you're just running an expensive, tiring hobby. So watch this next video and I'll show you exactly how we systematized our business to blow up our bookings.