Why Airbnb Hosts Are Losing Income

Airbnb's reputation is in decline. And in this video I'm going to walk you through exactly what's been happening at Airbnb. But most importantly, if you are a host and you are looking to break free from your over reliance on Airbnb, how you can fix it. So if you were to look at Airbnb from a purely financial point of view, they're on the increase, their profits are growing year over year. But there's an underlining issue that nobody is talking about and this is their reputation, not only with guests and travelers, but also with hosts and their partners. My name is Mark Simpson and I founded a company called Boostly nine years ago. And over these past years I've been giving hosts the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly, the confidence on how they can increase their direct bookings and grow their short term rental business. If you are a host who has over five properties and is wanting to break free, get a custom built website, get a CRM, get all the tools that you could possibly need to grow your business, then check out the description below. So let's look at the traveler, let's look at the guests. You can just go online onto Reddit, onto Twitter, go onto any forum and you will see guests complaining about service fees, about cleaning fees, about demands that their host is putting upon them. And this isn't so much the host's fault, this is what they are being taught to to put into their listings from Airbnb and Airbnb gurus that are out there online now. This is a problem because with cleaning fees, all it takes is for a little Twitter uproar for Brian Chesky and for Airbnb to change their stance. There was a Twitter storm at the end of 2023 and without any more further being said, in their next update, Brian Chesky and Airbnb announced that they were removing cleaning freeze from their platform. This instantly got hosts in an uproar themselves because for a lot of people who are specifically doing management companies, it's things like cleaning fees where they make their money. Because obviously if you are a management company and you will know this, you are working with a homeowner or you are working with a host to look after their property and you will take a profit from from whatever revenue they bring in. And a way for you to make extra revenue is from the cleaning fees and any other little fees that you can add in. And when that got taken away again, it may make the guest happy, the traveler happy, it may make the social reputation of Airbnb happy, but it impacts so many people around it. And now again, if we look at hosts, so many people at the moment. Again, if you go onto forums for Airbnb, they are complaining about how support to them is on the decline. And if you look from behind the scenes, you can see why. As a company grows, you need to have more and more staff, more and more support as they grow. The quality of staff that they are bringing in, you can easily argue is not up to par at what it was when the company was first founded, which again, is not unusual. This happens with every big business that is out there. And from somebody like myself who is growing a business and bringing in people to help with the demand, you, you realize how important this is. But the way that Airbnb is going and the support that is out there, it's starting to make you even doubt that it's actually a human that is dealing with your issue. Responses feel a little bit more automated. You don't know if you're speaking to a human or a robot. And now the way that a guest can complain about the littlest of things, it's resulting in listings being shut down, suspended or even deleted. There was a host that I know really well over in America. He had a ring camera and a ring camera outside your door is totally allowed. But the guest took advantage of that and complained that there was a camera inside the property. Now, without any evidence, without asking for the host to respond, Airbnb suspended the listing, shut it down, and it was shut down for six weeks because the host could not get in contact with anybody and with any sense of common sense at Airbnb to discuss it. It was only when they reached out and went around social channels complaining did anybody get back to them and eventually it was resolved. But that was after six weeks of their listing being shut down. Now, when your business can't be bookable for six weeks and you can't bring money in for six weeks and all of your reservations are canceled, then that is not very good. Especially if you're doing the management model where you've got a homeowner who is asking questions upon why is their listing shut down? Why are they not bringing any money in? And also as well, there are hundreds of other management companies out there that are trying to get your business. Now, how do you fix that? Well, from a guest point of view, it's simple. Luckily, over the last year, there's been some viral TikToks and some viral reels go out from influencers from travel content creators who are showing Other travelers, how they can get around from paying the fees and how they can save money by booking directly. These videos have been seen millions of time and lots of travel content creators are creating these videos. And the good thing from a host point of view and from somebody like myself who helps hosts how to increase their direct bookings. Guests are being more savvy, there are new tools and new apps and obviously the rise of AI is helping a traveler not only find a place to stay, but it's giving them the best rates all over the Internet and those hosts that are savvy but up price their Property on Airbnb, booking.com and VRBO where they've got the best price when they do book direct hosts and guests are being a lot more savvy and are finding them directly from a host point of view. How can you fix this? Well, if you do not want your whole business to be dictated by Airbnb, if you do not want to be scared of a booking that where a guest has complained about a little thing, and if that problem shuts down your listing for six to eight weeks and your listing disappears off their algorithm, this is a nice wake up call for you to make sure that you go multi platform but also as well you start to bring in direct bookings into your business. At Boostly we've seen a massive uptake in calls being booked by hosts just like you that may be over reliant because they have been in this situation and we are now putting them through our process for our projects, getting them a direct booking website, introducing them to the Boostly academy and also plugging them into our new CRM which helps with emails and social media. And then they're on track to get into being more multi platform but more importantly getting getting more direct bookings into their business. So even though the Airbnb reputation is on the decline, the good news is there is a solution for the traveler and for the host and hopefully with this video you'll get more inspiration on what you need to do. Now if you're watching this and you feel like you want to delve in more into this topic, then YouTube has recommended that you watch this video.