Mark Simpson argues short-term rental hosts should charge guest service fees on direct bookings to fund marketing. Reallocating roughly 8% per reservation for advertising and websites can grow bookings, and guests already accept these fees on Airbnb anyway.
8%
Um, and. And I've suggested to many clients recently, even Mark, some clients don't charge any sort of guest service fee at all when you book directly on their website. And what it turns out what happens to their business is they have no budget for marketing. Even like a larger, more professional host, it's far less than what you see typically on the listing sites. But that's your. That can be your marketing budget. You can take that 8% off every reservation and put that into funding your advertising and funding your marketing goals and so on and so forth. And there's ample evidence at this point that the guest is not that bothered by the service fee. Otherwise, Airbnb wouldn't grow. If. If the guest hated the service fee and really disliked it, then Airbnb would be flatlining, and that's obviously not the case. Airbnb is growing and they're taking more reservations in outside of seasonality. So, you know, there's some data there to kind of back up what my thesis is. I think many people just aren't doing it, and then they leave themselves making a direct booking actually too cheap. So cheap that they're actually not making as much money as they could to then go invest into buying a website through Mark and taking, you know, advertising dollars and working with us to deploy it and things like that. So, yeah, cost is one thing, but I think we did a decent job there covering some of the other things.
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