Struggling For Bookings? Try These 4 Tips!

If you are struggling for bookings, you need to watch this video because I'm going to share with you four tips that you can put into practice right now with immediate results. Every tip that you are going to get from this video has been taken from my best selling book, the book Direct Playbook. You can go and get the print, the Audible or the Kindle version as soon as you watch this video and I'll put the link in the description below. Tip number one comes straight from the book and it is actually chapter number one. And this is about your customer avatar. Now, customer avatar is fancy marketing talk for knowing your ideal guest. The biggest problem that I see everybody make in the world of hospitality is trying to appeal to everybody. So by appealing to everybody, you appeal to nobody. So the first thing that you can do is you can identify who your ideal guest is. Who is the common type of traveler that is coming to your town, city, village. But also as well, you then need to identify who your property is ideally suited for. For example, my family farm stay business, we appealed to younger families who are looking to escape from the cities to the quiet countryside. We tapped into that market. We knew exactly where they were hanging out online, we knew how to get in front of them. We weren't trying to appeal to people who wanted to go to the city to go, you know, on a night out, nightclub in, etc, because that wasn't our vibe and that is our property was ideally suited for. So by instantly identifying who our ideal avatar was, it made everything super simple. Our listings on Airbnb spoke to our ideal guest. Our direct booking website spoke to our ideal guest. Any Facebook group or any social media marketing that we did spoke to our ideal guest avatar. And if you want a deep dive on this tip, and if you want to get a behind the scenes look on how you can implement into your business, go and pick up a copy of the book Direct Playbook. Tip number two is it's not what you know, it's who you know. And a big part of the book is focused around this tip. It's actually on page 113, so in the second half of the book here. And this tip is all about working within your network. If you try and go it alone in business where you won't reach out and network with other peers or people in your industry, then it's going to be a lot harder than those that do. And if you go and look at any YouTube video, listen to any podcast where they're interviewing with people that you deemed a guru or somebody that you deem to have made it. One of the main things that they talk about is being in the right place at the right time and they attribute a lot of their success to hard work, but also luck. And that is because of the network that they build around them. It's the contacts, it's the relationships that they built. Now for you, it could be reaching out to another short stay accommodation owner in your area. Now you could have say two properties, they could have two properties, very similar in terms of layout, very similar in terms of who they appeal to and their avatar. And instead of you just having two properties, you've now got four properties. Now, it doesn't mean that you're going to take over his two properties, but you will work together. So for example, if you're fully booked this weekend and that person has got two spots available, if you get an inquiry or a social media message about renting out your two spots, instead of you just turning around and going, ah, sorry, I'm full, you can then introduce them to your friend and your peer and they can go and stay with them. It's a win, win, win. It's a win for the guest because they've got a place to stay. It's a win for your friend because that's a free lead that you've passed them your way. But the ultimate win is that in the future you, if you've got accommodation, if you've got availability on your calendar but your friend is full, then they will repeat the benefit and they will repeat that for you. By building your network, by building your reach, it'll mean that you will go further. So again, it's not what you know, it's who you know. Tip number three, which is 131 in the book if you're playing along. This is about getting corporate bookings now. Vacation bookings, tourist bookings, they're the bread and butter for most people when it comes to summer or winter. Depends on your market and your destination. But what do you do when it's the off peak? What do you do when it's called the shoulder season and you know, it doesn't matter whether you've got a hotel, a bed and breakfast, one short term rental or 100 shirt tucks, short term rentals inside your portfolio, having corporate bookings, business bookings where guests come and stay with you that are traveling for work events or anything in between, they can really help top up your profits over the course of a calendar year. And the biggest mistake that I see short term rental owners make is that they disregard These bookings because they think that they can't get them. Not only can you get them, you are actually going to be more preferred by pas of people that are looking to home their staff or by people that are booking accommodation for themselves. Because if they're looking to home, let's just say four contractors over a course of a month in a city or a town or a big project that's coming up, it would make more financial sense for them to put their contractors in, in a short term rental location that's got private parking, that can sleep everybody with a kitchen than having to put them in say a big chain hotel where they would then have to be buying food and bar meals and whatever else a contractor likes to put on the tab. Okay, so when you can tap into the contractor market, when you can tap into the corporate bookings world, not only can you get more bigger bookings, that is filling your property up for one month to six months, but you can actually again, not only fill up your calendar, but we go back to tip number two, your network is your net worth. You can actually help fill up not only your properties, but your peers properties as well with corporate bookings. And tip number four, and this one is the one that you can instantly implement today to get bookings tomorrow is tap into email marketing. Now email marketing is one that so many people don't do because they get overwhelmed from it. They look into their inbox and they go, well, you know, how can I get in front of somebody when there's so much spam inside my inbox? But the cool thing about email is that it has, it is, and it will always be number one when it comes to marketing your business. And a tip that you can do right now is to get a booking tomorrow. Go through the last 12 months of your bookings. You can export from Airbnb or you can export from booking.com or you can export from your PMS, your property management software tool, and go and export all of those 12 months worth of bookings, Put it into a Google sheet and what you will find is even if you've got just 10 bookings or if you've got hundreds of bookings, you'll have all your guests details in front of you. And you're not going to send a sales email to those guests. What you're going to do is you're going to send a email to your guests that have stayed with you over the last year and you're going to ask them a very simple question. Do you know anyone? Those four words are going to be so powerful and they're going to make you a lot of money. And here's as to why. What you're going to do is you're going to open up an email and you can utilize ChatGPT or Claude or any LLM. Any AI machine will help you here. You can craft an email where you're going to reach out to your guests that have stayed with you in the last year and you're going to thank them for staying with you. You can use AI to personalize and to customize this message, but the general gist is you're going to thank them for staying with you and you're going to ask them if they know anybody that is just like them who would like to come and stay with you. You, for example, if you're based in Scarborough in the United Kingdom, you can say to your person that you're emailing, thank you very much for coming to stay at insert property name. Do you know anybody who is looking to come to Scarborough this year? You can even say this summer it's winter, depending on when you've got your most availability. And you finish the email by saying, if you know anybody, please, you know, introduce, introduce us via email or via text or WhatsApp. And if anybody books a stay based on your recommendation, then we will send you X. X could be Amazon vouchers, bottle of wine, bottle of beer, theme park tickets for the football. Whatever the incentive you want to put in there, go ahead and do so now. The reason why this framework works is that number one is not a sales email. So as soon as the person opens it, they know that they're not being sold to, so they're going to be more likely to read it. And because they stayed with you in the last calendar year, then they recognize the name, they recognize the property, they recognize the business. The second part of the email is about asking for a referral. So again it's not a sales, but it's saying, hey, do you know anybody who as cool as you? Okay, so goes back to the first tip that I shared with you of Customer Avatar, who is somebody like you that we like but would like to come and stay our property or properties. And the final thing is you dangle in the carrot. So it's all, well, asking, but when you ask, you've got to give an incentive. And by following this framework, not only does it grab the attention, not only is it a simple case of an ask, but they have the incentive to do so as well. And I don't care if you've got 10 emails, 10 bookings, or if you've got hundreds or even thousands, this works. And an example and a story for you here is that I was working with a client.

In 2024. We looked at their booking system and we saw that they had 7,000 emails and they were based in a city in the uk. Now, their guests were a mixture of tourist and corporate bookings. Again, going back to the other tip that I shared with you, we sent out that email to 7,000 people, and from those 7,000 people, 90% of the people ignored it, which is fine. But there was that 10% of it, which again, is 700 people that acted, they referred, they recommended, and the one booking that came out of it, or the one contact, sorry, I should say that came out of it. This lady was in charge of booking accommodation for her company and her company had just signed off a huge contract in and around the city where they were located. Not only did they get one booking, but they had to home hundreds of contractors. And again, going back to the second tip that I shared with you, network is your net worth. This chap that I was working with, he was, you know, had 40 properties, but his network was vast. He was able to not only home all of his properties for this contract, he was also able to home hundreds of these contractors. Now, the beauty of it is, yes, his properties were full, his P and L looked lovely. But for every booking he passed on, he made his own commission. He worked out a referral rate with the people that he was passing the bookings to. So he was able to earn extra revenue just off the power of his network. So if you can take on board these four tips and implement them into your business tomorrow, you will skyrocket your bookings, not just on Airbnb, but Direct as well. If you would like a deep dive on all of these tips and more, go and check out the book Direct playbook. There are 101 tips just like these that I've shared with you in there. And you can get the audible, you can get the written word, you can also get Kindle as well. And if you like this tip and you would like more, go and check out this video because YouTube has recommended that you should go and watch this next.