Increasing Airbnb Bookings is HARD, Until Hosts Do This

Are you finding it impossible to get consistent Airbnb bookings and don't know why? Because after 10 years of managing STR properties and helping over 2,000 hosts generate more than $1 billion in bookings, I've seen many of these so-called hacks come and go and not actually increase bookings. But I've seen the same 3 things consistently appear and separate the hosts who are constantly booked from the hosts who are consistently chasing. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through what these 3 booking secrets are that that I like to call the PRO system, and it will take you from struggling to get a booking a week to having a fully booked calendar in next to no time. The best part, the first part of this system, the P, takes less than 24 hours to do so, and it works like this. Think about the last time that you booked an Airbnb or a short-term rental yourself. You scrolled, looked at the first photo, and I bet that in about 3 seconds you decided whether you were going to book it or keep on scrolling. That's the entire window of attention most have to play with, and about 99% of hosts have no idea that this is the case. The principle at Level 1 is simple: the people shop with their eyes. And the mistake that I see most of you making out there is that you treat listing photos like a property inventory. Wide-angle shots of empty rooms, 3 different pictures of just the bathroom alone for no reason, a close-up of the toaster. The truth is, guests aren't booking your property, they're booking a story that they're telling other people about their trip. Remember, you're in the business of selling memories, not mattresses. And your first image has to sell that story to your ideal buyer, not everyone. If you try and appeal to everybody, you appeal to nobody. Because if you've got a property near the beach and you're targeting summer, your first image has to be the beach. But if you're going after that Christmas getaway and the Christmas markets, your first image is that snug living room with an open fire and a mug of hot chocolate on the table. So the P stands for picking the right pictures. And how do you know if you have the right ones? Well, here's exactly what you want to do in the next 24 hours. First, you're going to open up your listing and look at that first photo. Ask yourself one question: is it obvious what type of guest you are selling to? Next, you're going to totally reshoot that shot, or you're going to use AI to enhance the picture to match your ideal buyer for the next 90 days. If you can't afford these pro photographers, then use AI's latest image generation model that will just spruce up a little bit. You can take a phone picture in minutes for literally the fraction of the cost, throw it into ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever, and it will make it into something a lot better than what you currently got. Finally, set a reminder to update your photos again before the next season starts. Obviously, the best photo that works in the winter isn't going to be the one that works in July. The fully booked hosts out there, they know that you can't just set and forget with your pictures. You have to actively update them at least every few months, if not every couple of weeks. Which brings us on to the next part of the BRO booking system, which is where everything really starts to compound. I see 99% of hosts make this booking mistake. They build the listing, they hit publish, they sit back, and they wait for bookings to roll in. And when those bookings don't come, they simply blame the algorithm or they blame something else. Listen, it's not the algorithm. Nobody ever told them what bookings actually require. The principle at level 2 is this set and forget kills your listing. Most hosts treat Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, even their own direct booking website like a magic wand. They set it up, they hit publish, and they wait. Literally just yesterday I had somebody email me to say that they've not had any bookings on their Boostly website. When I digged a little deeper and I looked at what they were doing proactively, they had not sent one email in their Boostly CRM, they'd not done any social media posts, and they haven't even updated their Boostly website in the last 4 months, yet they were blaming somebody else. So here's what happens to those listings. The algorithm stops showing them, and Airbnb's algorithm works exactly like Google. Fresh content gets ranked first, stale content disappears, which means the number one thing that actually affects your bookings is doing nothing. The hosts that are constantly fully booked, they aren't lucky, they're not in better locations, they're not even doing anything fancy, and they're not doing anything better than you, but apart from this one thing, that they're updating their listings every single month, and the algorithm rewards them for it. I see it almost all the time. The host updates a photo, refreshes the copy, tweaks the headline. Within days, the bookings pick up. So here's what to do, just 3 steps. Set a recurring monthly reminder in your calendar, 30 minutes, the last day of the month. That is all it takes. Use these AI tools to make it easy. There's AutoRank, RankBreeze, Claude, ChatGPT, OpenClaw. They'll literally rewrite your headline, amenity descriptions, and seasonal copy in minutes. And try this: treat every season of the year as a relaunch with a new hero photo, new copy, new angle. And that's level 2. It's the renewal. Most hosts who reach this start seeing real consistency. But the ones that I see fully booked year-round and the ones that are truly smashing it, they all do level 3. And that's— oh, and it works like this. This is the move that most hosts will refuse to make. It's not glamorous, it doesn't scale easy, but it's the single fastest way I've ever seen a host go from overlooked to fully booked. The principle My goal at Level 3 is this: the old-school way of marketing is going to be the new-school way of marketing, and it's the hosts that do it that will win in 2026. Every other host out there is sending the same digital outreach. The signal-to-noise ratio is dead. Half of the time, the person on the receiving end of the outreach can't even tell if it's a human that sent this or if it's a robot. But picking up the phone, even sending physical mail out, cuts straight through all of that. It's harder. It takes much time. It feels uncomfortable, which is exactly why almost no one does it. But when you do, it works almost instantly. The best version of this move is corporate. There's a wide open midweek market for those short-term rental operators that nobody really taps into. And it's the contractors, it's the business travellers, it's those sports teams, it's those hospital visitors. And they don't all just book through Airbnb or Booking.com. Most of them book through their company's accommodation specialist, and that person is on the other end of a phone call. So here's the specific move. It's 3 steps. First one, go and pull up all of your bookings from the last 12 months. Go and look at every single guest who came on a business trip. The best way to find them is look at the domain of their email address. So if their email address is a Gmail, that's personal. If it's, uh, looks like a business domain, that could be a business trip. Every single one of them has got their phone number. So you can call them this week. Pick up the phone, have a real conversation, and just simply ask how they discovered you. Some really easy questions that you can ask: does anyone else from your company travel to your area? If yes, ask them to be put through to the company's accommodation specialist if there is one. This single call can land you a corporate contract that fills 3 months of midweek bookings in one go. And if you want to try and stand out from all of the noise, before you put that call in Try and send something in the post to the accommodation specialist. It could be donuts, it could be a, a postcard, it could be a gift in the post. Because when you do it properly and you track it so you know when it's arrived at the office, and when you put that call in, you'll go from just being a cold call to somebody that they already recognize the name from. So those are the 3 levels: photos, refresh, outreach. That is the pro method. You get photos in 24 hours. Refresh every month. Outreach every single day. And the hosts who consistently do all three, they never ever struggle for bookings again. If you want more proactive moves like these, way more than I could ever fit into just one video, go to boostlead.co.uk/ai. It's a totally free tool that I've built and it's trained solely on the two books that I've put out. It's trained on over 1,000 YouTube videos and over 1,000 hours of podcast content. It is trained on everything that you need to know to help you in this journey. You can ask it a question, you can give it a call, and everything that you will do, it will help you on this journey. I'll leave a link in the description below. And if you want to go even further on how to get more bookings, watch this video next where I'll show you exactly what you need to do to get more direct bookings.