New Airbnb Commission Changes – The Final Nail in the Coffin for Hosts? 🚀

So this is interesting. Airbnb have always been a OTA that has charged very low in the Commission, 2, 3, 4% as an example. And what they were doing is they were charging the guest a service charge, which was about 13, 14, 15% of the booking, sorry, 12, 13, 14% of the booking. Now, as Airbnb has grown and as it has tried now to steal a match on booking.com, vrbo, et cetera. And because now they are connecting to more PMSs, and obviously with the acquisition of HotelTonight, they are having to change their commission structure because the service charge is being a sticky subject because what they do by connecting to the pms, they have got those live rates going backwards and forwards, which in turn will mean that hosts who are predominantly, maybe listing on Expedia, vrbo, booking.com where they don't have a service charge in there, the rates and the connection is being skewed because of this on Airbnb. So the way that it is working, as this is being confirmed by one of the head account managers in the island and the UK office of Airbnb, is that if you are a host and you connect your listing to a PMS property management software, you are being changed from the 3% model to the 14% model commission structure. Now, for the guest, there is zero service charge. Now, what I'm trying to work out and what Airbnb haven't confirmed or denied to me, is that by switching to this new commission structure, are you getting a preferred boost in the ranking or not? And again, there's been nothing to suggest to me that this has been the case for a lot of people. This is going to be something that'll be a big put off. As in hosts that were used to paying just 3% commission, now they're paying 14%. For some, this might be a nice boost because what it means, and I'm thinking from a converting an OTA book into a direct booking, is that one of the sticking points for us? Because we contact every guest after booking to have a chat with them. We explain the benefits of booking direct and we also mention about our incentives to guests that book direct. And one of the big incentives that we always have is that you get an earlier check in, you get free WI fi. We also do a welcome hamper as well. Now, when a guest hears about this, they want to switch to a direct booking. The problem is that service charge, because they go, oh, we would like to switch. And we go, okay, just cancel your booking. But then they go, oh, well, we're going to get stung with this service charge, which sometimes can be a couple of hundreds. So by not having that service charge now, it makes to convert in an OTA book into a direct booking really easy. So I would love to know your opinion. I would love to see and hear of your impact on this. Have you been impacted by the changes with Airbnb? Has your property gone from the 3% model to the 14% model? Are you new to Airbnb and you know you're now charging the 14% and if we compare it to say booking.com which is 15% minimum commission, or Expedia Group which is 15 rising up to 20 plus. How are your thoughts? How are you using it? How are utilizing in this? I would love for you to let me know. Just drop a comment below, contact me, you can email market.co.uk how are you using Airbnb to convert OTA bookings into direct bookings? I would love to find out more. So this video is all about the change in the commission structure of Airbnb going from 3% up to 14% and where no service charge is to the guests. If this is the first time you've tuned into one of these daily episodes, all I need for you to do is go to boostly.co.uk podcast and you'll be able to get our full back catalog. We've got nearly 250 episodes for you to get caught up on. And also as well make sure you check out the YouTube channel, hit the thumbs up, subscribe, tell a friend, tell a host about the work that we're doing here. So. And then also as well go and check out the blog. Uh, this blog that I wrote around this commission structure brings in over a thousand people to the Boostly website every single day, which is crazy. So it's obviously a very topical thing at the moment. So please let me know how you find it and then we'll go from there. Speak to you soon. Thank you very much for tuning in to the Boostly podcast. My name is Mark Simpson. I give host just like you to tools, the tactics of training and the confidence to go and get more Dara bookings.