Pricing Hack that you can do right now on Booking.com

Before we start today's episode of the.

Boosted podcast, I have got some exciting news to share with you. For the month of July, I am giving away one month trial of the boostly content creator. Now, you may be asking and you may be thinking, well, what is the boostly content creator host that I have come into contact with in the five years of doing Boostly?

And when I say to them, you.

Need to be posting every single day on social media, you need to be emailing, emailing your guest and your list, they always say to me, I haven't got the time. And I can't think of a better month to promote the boostly content creator than July. Because right now everybody around the world is busy, busy, busy, busy. And they haven't got the time to think about the marketing or the social media or the emails, when in fact the best time to do marketing is when you're at your busiest because that means that you always have a pipeline coming through. So I created the boostly content creator for busy hosts. Now what do you get? Every single month you get 30 to 40 pieces of fresh social media content that you can use for your social media channels. LinkedIn, Instagram, et cetera. You also get video templates which are designed to stop the scroll on social media, which is really powerful. Email templates designed by expert copywriters that are working so well. Georgina Bearman messaged up in our Facebook.

Group to say that she used one.

Of the email templates and got free bookings, direct bookings instantly, which more than covered the cost. You also now get website headline generator tools. You get a money back guarantee and you can cancel anytime. The price is only five pound a month. And right now when you sign up, you go into the boostlycontentcreator.com you add to your basket in the coupon code section, you type in July and you get the first month free. Now that is only available for the month of July. After that it's five pound. If you don't want to continue, you can just cancel at any time. But please make sure that you go and you use the boostly content creator.

My goal is a month in the.

Month of July is to get 1,000 new hosts to register and sign up. This is how powerful I know this tool is because the email templates in itself are providing a massive return of investment and I would love for you to come and join.

This is for new members only.

Just go to boostlycontent creator.com add it to your basket, put in coupon code July and I'll see you on the other side.

Right now we've got that out of.

The way, let's get on with today's podcast episode.

So welcome back to the Boostly podcast, everybody. And for those of you that have been here for a while, you will know that I have been working with a local host here in Javier to help them try and get bookings for an apartment that they are finding it tricky to shift and get bookings for. So over the last couple of days, what I've been doing is we've been focusing on making sure that all the bases are in play. Now, the ideal goal here is to get bookings in directly. But as I've always said, you've got to make the OTAs work for you when you need them the most. This is a real benefit of being listed on there is you can take advantage of the millions of people that use their site on a daily basis. We started off by doing a search on Google first and foremost to make sure that they are listed on all of the websites that are coming up first and prominently. And the 8020 rule so that 80% of sites. Sorry, 20 of sites that come up 80% at a time. We boxed off that we found out more about their customer avatar. So we found out that again with their guests, they are predominantly Dutch. And a lot of the Dutch people use a website called Mikasa or Mikuzu, something like that. I apologize, apologize for my pronunciation.

But the other sites that are very.

Come up high up at airbnb and booking.com so we fixed the Airbnb listing, we optimized it so not only will it be more visible in the search rankings of Airbnb, but also as well, we emphasize right at the very start that this is a property management company and it's not just somebody doing it as a hobby. Now we're focusing on booking.com and we've optimized their listing. We did that a little bit yesterday with the 360 picture. And today I'm going to show you a nice little hack.

And this hack will mean that not.

Only will you become higher in the search rankings, but you can also make more money as well. Now, as we know booking.com, airbnb etc charge a commission. Normally the commission starts at 15. And what most hosts do to offset this is that they put the price up on these OTAs.

Now, something that you've got to bear.

In mind here is that people that use booking.com they are willing to spend more money because again, people think of booking.com as being a website that is more professional. Airbnb people are looking for bargains because again, they think it's just people doing this as a hobby or, you know, crashing in a spare room. A lot of the times they still don't realize that the property management companies are using their sites as well. So this is what we're going to do. And a real cool hack is that you can really put your prices up on books booking.com and there's a, a really nice thing that you can do to make sure that you come up high in the rankings. Now, for full context, you've got to check your local price parity rules. So for some countries in, in around the world this isn't an issue, but in some countries there still is a case. Price parity is something that is going to be going out very soon all over the world. But when you sign a contract with the likes of booking.com you are basically saying that the price that is visible on there is going to be the same price that's around the Internet. Now, again, this is going out in Spain. We don't have this problem, thankfully. So that's one part of the context. The second part of the context is that Casa4u, their channel manager right now is logify. So what we're able to do with part of the PMS and the channel manager is do this hack that I'm about to show you. It may be a case that your PMS won't allow this. It if so, find out how you can maybe do that by contacting them directly. So let's just dive in. So what I've done is I've shared my screen and right now we are on the logify extranet. So this is the back end. I've gone into the Channel Manager section. I've clicked on booking.com now what I want to show you right here is the markup. So what we're able to do is we're able to mark up the listing on booking.com and we can mark as much as you want. Now we've gone for 50% markup and we're just testing, we're testing and trialing this. Now. To give you an example, we tested 50% and a booking has already come in. So again, people don't mind spending more money. Now, again, another part of the context of this which is really important I want to share with you, is that the time of the year is important as well. We are right now end of June, early July, Spain is currently coming out of the pandemic borders are open and people are able to travel. Again there's a lot of pent up demand. Javier is a very popular tourist destination and people are now are trying to get here. The people that predominantly use booking.com will be Europeans. English people use it, Dutch people use it and Spanish people use it. Okay, so again you've got to bear in all the context around this, but what we're doing is we're, we're marking it up 50 as you can see now when you do the marker but 50, what you're able to then do is say for example the rate is a hundred pound a night base rate on your website. By marking it up 50% then what you're able to do then is you're able to go, right, well now we're able to look into the opportunity section. So let me just go quickly into the opportunity section of booking.com now. As we can see right here, booking.com love to throw opportunities at you to give them more money or more incentives. And a couple of the ones that they like to put in front of you will be getaway deals, mobile phone deals, etc. You know, you've got the genius program, etc.

Etc.

They're always looking to try and offer you something that you can get more visible. Now because you've upmarked it by 50%, you can actually get involved in these. Normally if it's your base rate, I say to steer clear of these every time. But this is where I talk about making the OTAs work for you when you need it most because you've now marked it up 50%. You've got some room here to work on an opportunity, the mobile phone one for example. A lot of the people will use their mobile phone when booking on booking.com first. And so what booking.com do is they give them a mobile phone discount. You can also put in a staycation discount. Now I wouldn't recommend in bulking all these in one go because it can get to a point where actually you're losing money. But if you can just choose one of them, have a look at the ones that make sense, the ones that are going to make you visible. And what I always recommend that you.

Do is you go on the front.

End of booking.com go and look in your local area. And what I would recommend that you do is to see, well, what are other hosts in the area, what advantages, what other options are they taking advantage of. So if I were to go on to booking.com right now, let Me go into the front end like I have done here. Okay, let me just see if what the popular filters and we've got the things to do and the deal. So I'm going to factor in all deals. So four properties. There are four deals out of all of the units that are in there. So if I go back one, there was how many options? 99 properties found. Okay. And bearing in mind what I've done is I've done a week long search around about the same amount of people that the property may attract. Now this can sleep up to six people. So let me just put five adults in like so. And I'm going to put in another filter for apartment because again I want to be around a similar niche. So let me just see, we've got 18 options found and there are no deals. So again, by simply doing one deal here, what it means is that my property will be able to be stand out right at the very top. So again, you've always got to bear in mind the context around anything that we're talking about here. Number one, we've upmarked it by 50%. Now we can utilize their boosters or their deals or their opportunities to be more visible. So instantly by doing so and doing a tiny little bit of research on the front end, I know that I can go to Jeanette and Tim and saying, right, let's add in this opportunity and we're going to be more visible and you can put a 15, 20, 25% discount on there and you still got a 25% upmark than what your normal base rate is, which is really beneficial to you to do so. And again, you've got to add in the context time of the year, people pay more on booking.com and the beauty of it is, is that if somebody sees that listing and they do a little bit of research on Google and they find our property directly and on the website we've got best rates when booked direct. Then what they're going to do, pick.

Up the phone and give you a call.

So that is a pricing hack for booking.com go feel free to use it.

As much as you want.

This is part of a little series that I'm running called Boostly Tune up. If you would like for me to do this for your business email market.co.uk. i haven't decided if I'm going to make it a thing or not. I just want to see what the response is like from you and document the sort of things that I can do. I haven't even put a price to it. So I want to see if it's popular. Email Market.co.uk, in the subject line. Put the word tune up and if enough people come back to me, then I will see what I can do potentially for you. Thank you so much for tuning. I will be back tomorrow.