One Mistake Cost This Host $1000s

We've all heard enough from the Airbnb gurus shouting, this is how you can make seven figures with one property. Or just use this one hack to triple your bookings. It's all telling very actually show you. So in this video, I'm reviewing a real Airbnb business by a host who wanted honest, no fluff feedback. And I'm going to show them and you how to fix their marketing with easy tactics that nearly every business owner misses. But if you sort them, your listing stands out instantly. If you're a host and you want me to roast your marketing in a future video, there's a link in the description below. Just send it in and I'll give you a once over photos, bio title, even your Instagram if you've got one. All right, let's jump in. Okay, we are back again for another market. And roast. I've got my new tonic as I did last time. I've got my Ray Bans, my meta Ray Bans for the blue blockers and we're here with another row. So again, as last time, we've done with Tina and the Dreas and everybody else, we've done Rose for. I do not know anything about Stuart's business. I've literally just pulled his report, I've plugged it into chat GPT. I said, hey, create me a nice little image. Make sure you put in the website, make sure you put in the Instagram, make sure you put in the website. And the pain point. And the pain point is haven't started any marketing reliant on Airbnb. I'm looking forward to digging, digging into this one. I don't even know where this is in the world otherwise. I just known it's known as little pilgrims retreat. So if you would like your business to be roasted on a future video, go and click on the link in the description below. If you can't find it, go to Instagram, go to Boostly uk. B O O S T O Y uk. Send me a message. It says one word and one word only that says roast and I will get you the information. It will take you to this page here, fill in your details and you may be on a future roast video. Again, the goal of this is a bit of light hearted fun, obviously here to critique. I'm not saying anything in here that Stuart is doing wrong that you know he shouldn't be doing. But hopefully this will then help him and by helping him, hopefully it will help you watching as well. So let's get kicking in, shall we? So All I ask for the roast is website, Instagram, favorite Airbnb listing in your pain point. And that's what we're going to dig into. So let's go and start off at our normal place and obviously we are going to tap into our friend chat GPT while doing this. The model that I'm using is the 4.0. It's the easiest, it's the cheapest, it's the quickest one. Everybody can get this for free. Go and do it. This will help you with your marketing. So we're going to go in to the Airbnb listing to start with and again, let's have a little look. Where is this? This is in Canterbury in the United Kingdom. So Canterbury, for those who don't know, another one of these lovely British towns, it's over in the sort of the southeast of the United Kingdom, very close to Dover. So people will obviously go into, into Calais, into France, etc. It's not exactly by the beach, but again, it has got a ton of history around it. So it's been around since the Middle Ages. So again, very touristy area. That's where we are based out of. Stuart, he's got 4.92. He's got that lovely guest favorite badge, 132 reviews. And let me just have a little quick look here. I want to go there. I assume we've just got the one property, but we never want to assume on this one availability. So hasn't got much dates left in May and has got about 30 availability in June. July is looking all right. August, there's a lot of availability. September, apart from these two dates in here, which looks like one big booking. And then obviously in the winter months, we've got more available, which is very, very common, which is good. So very good. So obviously bookings isn't a problem as of yet. I feel like I already know what your problem is going to be from what I've said here is that you haven't started any marketing and you are super reliant on Airbnb, which is why you're in the right place. So first thing we're going to do, we're going to grab this. I'm just going to put this into our chat GPT. Okay, so what I want for you to do is I want for you to become a marketing expert. I'm going to give you some Airbnb details, some Instagram details of a host in Canterbury. His name is Simon and he wants to get more bookings. All I want for you to do for the first part is just read and do nothing. Okay. I always like to dictate into chat GPT. All right, so I'm going to do this, pop in the information. So the chat GPT is just going to read. Let's go and have a look at the host profile. So Stuart and Stuart's partner, My partner and I have put a lot of work in and around our full time work commitments to renovate this cute little college cottage in the heart of Canterbury. We love walks in the countryside, good food and enjoy quality time together from our busy lives. Contact us through Airbnb or you can look up the little pilgrims retreat on any Internet search engine. Stuart, a little tip of the cap. Well done, sir. All right, let me do that very quickly. So little programs retreat, see what comes up. Can see you're on booking dot com. There's something here. Little pilgrimage retreat, Facebook, Instagram. Okay, can see we've got listed on a little bit a couple of places. So let's just go and check. So first and foremost, well done. I will definitely come back to something landed on your homepage. We've obviously got your homepage here of your website. I'm going to grab that information super quick and going to boom, do that little pilgrimage retreat. So this looks like Canterbury.co.uk has got your details so I assume that you pay to get listed on here. If not fantastic. Little bit of free, bit of advertising and linking back to your, your website which is always good. Little pilgrims retreat, again we've got the Facebook page. The last time that you posted on Facebook was June 2024. Just grab all that information. I'm going to put that into our trusty GPT and let's go to the Instagram. So we've got the Instagram account here as well. I'm going to just put this in to here. Okay, so what can we gather? So you are a beautiful cute pilgrims retreat located in the heart of Canterbury. You said cute a few times. So I imagine cute means small. You have can have two guests, one bedroom. Obviously you mentioned that you have got both got full time jobs so this isn't like your biggest priority. But again this is obviously something that you want to start getting more bookings that aren't always through an OTA like, like Airbnb and I assume Airbnb is your number one place. Okay, so we've got nice pictures of Canterbury on here. We've got the, the listing on here, we've got the Instagram on here. And there's definitely some things that I That I have noted. All right, so first and foremost, Stuart, fantastic work. I've loaded everything into our GPT, so let's begin this roast. So first and foremost, I love, love, love, love that you met. You've given it a name, Little Pilgrims Retreat Canterbury. Okay? So you're instantly doing work by making your business instagrammable and Googleable, all right? So people can come and find you, they can google your name and obviously when they do so you don't it. And you're not only doing that, but you are telling them to do it as well. I love that you've got this here. What I would do is I would go into the back end of your Airbnb account, I would go into your profile section, and I would definitely fill this out a bit more. I would in all honestly start this off by saying, my, my name is Stuart, my partner is whatever your partner name is, and I'm the owner of Little Programs Retreat in Canterbury. Then have my partner and I have put a lot of hard work in around our full time's commitment to renovate this cute little cottage in the heart of Canterbury. We love walks in the countryside, good food and enjoying time together. So what I would first and foremost do on here, seeing you've got it really well, is I want for you to rewrite my bio on Airbnb, but make it more speak to my ideal guest who's coming to Canterbury. So again, I think this would work better. We created Little Programs Retreat as a kind of place we wanted to stay ourselves. Full of character, charm and comfort between work and everyday life. We've always valued time away to slow down, explore something beautiful, enjoy the little things like a long walk, great food and cozy evening in front of the fire. That's exactly what we tried to build here in Canterbury. A peaceful base to unwind, recharge and make last lasting memories. Just a short walk from the city's historic sites, Riverside gardens, pubs and theater. If you have any questions, just messages here on Airbnb or feel free to search for Little Programs Retreat online to learn more. Again, that would fill this out. Because you've only got one property, your marketing is so much easier. You can speak to Little Pilgrims Retreat. Obviously, if you ever, for whatever reason, decide to have a add a Little Retreat number two, call it Little Stuart's Retreat, so to speak, then you will then have to start to think about your overriding business name. But right now, your marketing is super simple. You just talk about Little Programs Retreat. And again, the. Your bio is very important because people do go and they do check it out. Now let's go back and have a little super quick look at the word in here. Now this to me again, there's a lot of words in here. Let's take this the about us, this space. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to put it back in here and say I'm about to paste in the information from the about us page on the Airbnb listing. What I want for you to do is to turn into an Airbnb listing guru and I want for you to take some of the best advice that's out there on the Internet and rewrite this. Again, speaking to ideal guests, what we want to do is we want to make sure that people know that Little Pilgrims Retreat is the brand and the business name. And we want for them to go and search online without specifically saying to search online. Okay, so we've given our GPT, our little LLM model here, some instructions. I'm going to paste that in and I'm going to let that change that there. Now, one of the things that the wording will do is it will make it a bit more broken up, bit more in bullet points because people don't read, they skim read. What they really, what we really want for you to do is I want for you to be looking at here and amending the pictures. So this, right now, this is what you're saying is your unique selling photo. This is the main picture that comes up. And I don't think a sofa is, is, is that to be perfectly honest with you, you've got to go through your pictures and find the one that is inviting. Now for me, I feel like this can do with a bit of a spruce up this image, I feel like it's a little bit too dark. But for the summer, this might not be the one. But for winter, this picture here with the wine bottle open, I would retake this shot and just put fill the wine glasses up. I would maybe even as well put some biscuits on here or a book that's overturned so that the person can truly envision them staying there. I would also as well get some proper pictures redone and on here. You could also as well get the Netflix logo up here or the Disney logo appear or whatever in here just to show it's being on. And then you've got the fire in the background. But this would be the one that I would be putting on for September. October, November, December, January. And then for the summer, you want to be looking at maybe your Outdoor space. So outdoor space doesn't look like a lot and maybe it's not the best, but again, you might need to just have a little play around. Again, it is snug. It is lovely. Again, Airbnb are looking to sort of try and steer clear of things like this, where you've got a watermark image. You may have bypassed the. The AI bots that are checking this at the moment, but until you get flagged again, I always say beg for permission, and so I never asked for permission, but beg, beg for forgiveness. I would maybe try using this as your hero image, your first image at the very, very top here, instead of this, because this is not the one. I would then let me have a quick look here for images. 2, 3, 4, 5. Yep, you've got a very unique bathroom set up. It's a nice bath. I normally I would steer clear of doing bathroom shots and you've got a nice little shot there. So I would think for number one, the first image that I would like for you to be using would be this. Until Airbnb tell you to take it down, I don't think there's anything else extraordinary with your property for the summer that you could get away with showcasing. Again, I think one of the things that you're missing, which is becoming a common thread amongst these listings, is that you could really benefit from a super solid 3D map, a 3D photo map. So again, you may be able to get. Get away with. Let's have a little cheeky look, see if I can do this. Now, this may work. This potentially won't work, but let's see if it works. I'm going to see if I can get an AI image bot to turn us into a map. All right, What I want for you to do is I want to take these pictures of my Airbnb in Canterbury and I want for you to turn it into a 3D photo plan that I can then upload as an image on my Airbnb listing. If you've got any questions, let me know. But I think this layout gives it pretty perfect. Now, again, this probably won't work. There's 99% it won't work, but there's a chance it could work, which is obviously what we love about AI. Now, while it's doing that, if you do have some plans, some floor plans that you have, you can upload those floor plans to AI and it will turn it into a nice image for you. The reason being is that people will be intrigued to know what their layout is. Okay? Even if it is small and cozy, they will still be intrigued to know what the actual layout would be of the property. And if you've got the ability to actually show them again, it avoids any confusion. Now, let me just check something here. One thing that I would definitely be looking to do, because it doesn't look like you do do it is I will be looking to go pet friendly again with, with two bedded properties, with two person properties, one bed properties. Obviously you said here you can put a cotton for a baby, which is, which is fair. But I, I feel like seeing that you're in the central of Canterbury and again, from, from what I know of Canterbury, again, it's a tourist destination. People love to come and check it out. I would assume. Let me just see here. Do some research on Canterbury and go and find me the user demographics. The typical type of traveler that comes to Canterbury in the United Kingdom from 2023 and 2024. Let me know of demographic that people will come and then what I want you to do is to build out a customer avatar for this property. All right? So it's going to go and do that little bit of research for me. But what I would assume, and again, without really knowing too much about your, your avatar, because I don't know who's been coming to stay with you, I feel like if you were in Canterbury to start to offer in Canterbury pets, I feel like you would get more, more bookings and this would help you become more of the go to. So let me just do this. Two peoples. So on canter breathers, over a thousand places. I'm gonna put one bedroom, one bed. It's the entire home. Let me go, let me find pets. Allow pets. There you are. 194. So you instantly then knock it down to 100, 190. Let me go straight into Canterbury because I only want to see Canterbury 13. So there's only 13 homes in Canterbury that allow pets. So again, it would instantly put you into that, into that extra bracket. Now, you may be not allowing pets for a number of reasons, but I would be thinking that because you haven't got a large place to deal with, I'm just thinking of what you can do that will make you stand out more. And again it says free beds. I only wanted one bed, but that is interesting. Let me just go back for a wee second. Come out of here. Come back into your listing. And you also as well means that you may be able to charge more. And obviously with the new things coming in, like Airbnb services, And experiences. You could tie that nicely in with, you know, teaming up with somebody in the local area. But offers like pet photography, all those things, people will go for it, people will pay for it, pet sitting, etc. So let's just see a standard charge for two nights. I assume two nights is about average. Two people, 99 pounds. Let me see what your prices are coming into August here for two nights. £99. Let me see what's going on in December for two nights. 85. So it looks to me, It looks to me. Well, we are may got a little too thing two night minimum. 99. You haven't got dynamic pricing turned on. I would be definitely looking at using Price Labs or a dynamic pricing software tool because it looks like you're losing and leaving a lot of money on the table here. Put with pets in as well, you can basically charge more because from what I can see here, for those that do charge pets, they're charging 130. So there's a chance that you could be making a little bit more money here. A little bit more money, which obviously means. And again, if we come back to it, you've only got one bed, right? You've only got certain amount available, you've only got 52 weeks in the year that you can sell. So any way that you can be tweaking more money, so an extra 20 quid, 30 quid per booking. And again, with dynamic pricing being able to push that up to be able to get it more in the peak times, it could be the difference between you getting a booking or not. Now, obviously we don't want to just focus on Airbnb. We want to basically start to promote this property and we want to be able to get bookings off Airbnb, which obviously what we want to do. I assume you've been going for a while now and the time is now to remarket to your previous guests, etc. So if you haven't done so already, please do start building up an email list. There's a fantastic tool called Stay Fi, which means that you can start to collect your guest data from people staying in the property. If you want to do it for free, there's loads of other ways. Go and grab a copy of the book direct playbook. There's 101 tips in there. Let's now instead crack on to the socials because 70% of all direct bookings happen on the back of finding you on social media. I say on the back of finding you on an online travel agent. All right. And seeing that you are Smart and savvy. And you are promoting yourself the right way by saying, hey, this is little pilgrims retreat. Search for us online, we're really good. People are going to be searching. So they come here, they find your website. Bingo. You've done the hardware. You've got your Google business listing, you've got your website. It's ranking above booking dot com. The only reason why Airbnb are above you is because they're paying for that spot. They land on your website. This is where we go down. All right, number one, I land on here. Looks great, looks fantastic. What is the problem that you see here? There's nowhere to book. Above the fold is the most important place on your website. And what above the fold is that when somebody lands on your site, it's got to be able to say who you are, what you do, how I can give you money. And it's not here what. What I'm greeted with when I'm load this up with a load of extra stuff that I don't need here. Social media accounts that you're trying to get me to click off to, which I don't want to do, because as soon as they click off your website from above the fold, they'll never come back. This is what we're going to do instead, right? I'm going to take this image, I'm going to pop this into here. I'm going to come back to this in a second. I want for you to create for me a better headline tagline for my homepage. Also, how would you suggest I improve my website? Okay, while it's doing that, let's just go back to this, for example. So what the Airbnb I asked it to do was to go and find the demographic of the people that travel to Canterbury. So the ideal guest portfolio is the heritage weekender. Heritage is like people who like to travel around the UK looking for historic shit. You've got Emily and James, between 35 and 55, are from London and southeast England, professionals, 60 to 90k combined income. They like to travel for weekends. Cultural exploration, boutique accommodation, family status, couples occasionally with. With a. A young child. Authentic experiences, comfort, history and local culture. Now, again, seeing that you. You haven't really got the room to have a second bedroom in there, which I'm not advising you to do. So you've then got to go for the third babies and not the actual babies here. I know you can add a cot, which is all well and good, but again, we want to be appealing to this sort of demographic. They've Got the money. They like to get away, they like to travel, which is interesting. And I wouldn't rule out the baby boomers here in the Generation X. There'll also be people that want to be put in front of because you've got local arts, theater festivals, peaceful retreat amenities, log burner. You've got eager to explore local eateries, pubs and markets. So there's, there's data to back up that trend. Booking behavior key takeaways emphasize the property's historical charm, such as it being a grade two listed building. We'll come back to that in a second. Local experiences, direct booking incentives. Okay, so here's some reworked website headlines bearing in mind now that we're sort of bringing up together our demographic here and who, who's our ideal guest. A place where memories have made it's warm, romantic. The headline is Escape to Cantonbury's most charming city retreat. Heritage, comfort and calm. All wrapped in a grade two listed cottage just minutes from the cathedral. Boom. That will hit a lot to changes. Just like your Airbnb picture, this is your unique selling picture. In the summer, this maybe isn't as appealing as what it would do in the winter. So from now, definitely not your sofa. As lovely as that sofa looks. And it needs to be a wide angle shot. So a wide angle shot is like, like that. Instead of being a vertical, which is more social media. I would be tempting to use this one here and then have the headline and tagline here. Now it looks like you're using Smubu and a free website from Smooth, which we all know. You know, Smooth, fantastic, pms. But the websites are not the best. So it may just. I'm not even sure if it's a smooth site, to be honest, because they haven't branded it. Normally they do. It looks like you put together something and it's just been thrown in here. The second thing that what I would be doing is I would be getting rid of all of this. This should go in your drunk jaw. So basically you take this here, you put it all the way in the bottom here. So if they want to click, they can click, but it's at the bottom. This should be just your home logo where they click to come to your home page. And the main thing that you're missing here is the Book now button. Now you will go to me, Stuart, and you'll go, oh, but my Book now button is, is on the website, but it's there, it's hidden, it has to be at the top of the fold. This is the first Thing when people load up your website, it's the first thing they're going to see. And if you confuse them, you lose them. So get that book now button, make it a different color, make it bright green, bright red, whatever you want it to be. And have it up now up here. Book now. Even though your book now button just goes straight off to Shmubu. I can see that again, it's fine because you need to have it something that's better than where it is right now as I scroll down. You've got this and then you've got that and you've got this and you've got that. Which is. Which is good home safety. Bathroom, houseware, smart tv. But the colors make it look very black and white. The colors make it look cold. The colors don't speak to me. Cozy. The colors don't speak to me. Warm. The colors don't speak to me. You know, grade two listed building. Now, I do like this, the contact us, but which will obviously go to your WhatsApp. This is, this is great. Hi, I'm currently roasting you. That's going over to WhatsApp. But that didn't even work when I pressed it. So it didn't even work. I've got it. I've got WhatsApp. I don't need to do that. So that's an error on your site there because that should go straight to you. So the way that it should work, if I show you a boostly example and then this is with our built in CRM, when you hit the little chat button here and you go and do all this, this goes straight through to. Them. Then you can chat here live and this goes straight through. And they will contact me where this. It's. It's broken. When I click that, it doesn't work. So that needs to fix. Okay, so that's the website. Website needs a lot of changes. I would be. I mean, it's better than most. I would say that. But still it's not. It's not right because it's not help. It's not giving me the confidence to book with you directly. Okay, first things first. Number one, what I love is your listing encourages me to find you direct. Number two, when I do find you direct, it is not sticky, it's not a mousetrap. And if anything is pushing me away and that's broken. So let's go look at your social media, your Instagram. Okay, so you've got posts, but it's not the right ones, right? Yes. You've done a Nice little carousel, which is. Which is lovely. But this was 97 weeks ago. 97 weeks ago, you've got this. 97 weeks ago. You've got this. 97 weeks ago, a review. 97 weeks ago, a picture. 96 weeks ago, a review. 94 weeks ago, 97 weeks ago, a TikTok. You even had a little dabble on TikTok and you did a video, which is cool, but then you've downloaded it from TikTok and uploaded it to Instagram 97 weeks ago. And the worst thing is this, is that you are doing the marketing, but you are sending people to your Airbnb listing. So you are doing the marketing. You want people to book with you direct, but when they find you direct, they will find you because they will come and find your social media because it is literally ranking here on the first page. They come here and you're sending them back to Airbnb. So it looks like you had a go in 2023 and you gave up. So this is where we need to improve. I would get rid of all of these photos, I would get rid of all of these posts and start again. I would change this bio right here. So let's come on back into our little chat GPT and rewrite our Instagram bio. Let's see what it says. The Instagram bio would be chic Cottage day in Canterbury, period charm, modern comfort, walkable to cathedral for our best rates book of us Direct. And it sends them to your. Into your website. Love it. And again, we're getting a theme here. This was actually less than 2024, so not as bad as 2023. And at least you're doing a little bit here. But again, the Instagram, it just needs to be better, Stuart. Okay. Okay, so let's get a little report done. So I'm going to come back into here, I'm going to send this to Stuart to action. I want for you to give me a three step action plan ranking from 1 being lowest, 10 being the most, 10 being the highest priority of what he needs to be doing for the action plan to get more bookings direct. Give me a three step plan based on everything that I have told you. I want for you to become a marketing specialist and a business advisor. If you were to get people more bookable, I want for you to give more advice, including some pet research. So how many. What? How many people travel to Canterbury with pets and how much extra revenue do you think that he could charge by adding pets and a pet stay in to his Airbnb Business in Canterbury. All right, Stuart, I'm going to send this copy to you. You're going to get it in full and then this roast video will become a whole lot more making sense for you when we do come through. So like I said, you've got your Instagram, you've got your Airbnb, you've got your website and you know, if you haven't started marketing and if you are heavily reliant on Airbnb, now is the time to start. And again, if you would like me to roast your business, in the link below there is a link to a form you can go and fill in. If you can't find that form for whatever reason, go to Instagram Boostly UK DME one word roast R O A S T. Stuart, you've obviously got a solid business. I know it's a full, full time job and this is like a thing that you're doing on the side, but if you truly want to start generating bookings off Airbnb and stop being so reliant on Airbnb, then there's definitely a few tweaks that, that you need to make. Number one 10 out of 10 priority website optimization. Ensure the website is mobile friendly, fast loading, include clear calls to actions you need to. Well, you've got your online booking engine with Smooth, but I don't, I feel like if you have a conversation with other boostly, we can definitely help. And if anybody wants help on their website, click on the link that's in the bio below because again, you can come and work with us. Leverage social media proof and local partnerships. So again I would be looking highlight the positive reviews from platforms and the socials like Airbnb look to work with local operators. So people that are doing historical walks for example, I would really tap into. But you are a grade 2 listed building. People will love that. People will come and stay with that. I would definitely go back and amend your Airbnb listing. I would definitely 100 be coming in and changing your picture in August, September, go and put the log fire here for the summer months and the spring months be using this one right here. I would be changing this to grade 2 listed building roll top bath, walk to the cathedral. I love all of that. I, I would definitely be looking to go pet friendly 110% obviously get your things in places, but once you do that again, I feel like there's a massive growing trend for pet friendly accommodations and it means that you can, you can charge more as well. It's, it's definitely, it's a low hanging fruit for me there. Obviously make sure that your cleaning costs are built into it and whatnot. But I feel like causes a definite need. I think there's a definite need and there's a definite shortage and you can take advantage of that. 110 I'd be going down the pet friendly route more than offering babies up, especially with that log fire. You don't want to have babies crawling around there in any way, shape or form. All right, we're giving you some actual tips and advice there. I feel like you've got plenty to be working on, Stuart. Do keep in touch and do let me know how you do get on again. I know you've got a full time job, but everything here you can implement really quickly. And if you want to have a chat with us at Bruce Lee, you know where to go. Boostly.co.uk Click on the link below. That is another marketing roast. If you have enjoyed it, then if you click on this video that's on the screen now, YouTube is recommending that you go and check out this other roast where we help somebody in America get more bookings. We ripped apart their Instagram. We ripped apart. We gave them a whole new business name, Amber above, and they've had results on the back of it. It's been amazing to see. So go and click out that one and I'll be back with another video.