“Airbnb Experiences” Explained: How it impacts Your Property

While not directly related to your Airbnb business, Airbnb guest experiences can have a huge impact on your review scores. If someone has a great experience outside of your property, they're more likely to leave you and your property a good review. But the opposite is also true. I've signed up for my fair share of guest experiences in the past through Airbnb's platform. I want to break down all the details today and how you as a host could be benefiting. So what exactly are Airbnb these experiences? Well, if you've been using their platform for some time, you've undoubtedly seen this. Actually, it's the first screen that's going to pull up when you open their app. And this is actually not related, it's not associated with your property. But there are a lot of synergies and there are a lot of opportunities. Airbnb's experiences offer all kinds of tours and food courses. You name it, whatever you can think of pretty much can go under their experiences. It's definitely impacted the way that I've reviewed the properties was staying at. Even though the tours and the experiences have nothing to do with the actual property, they do have everything to do with your experience as a guest. So I've done a whole bunch of these, but a couple that come to mind, one in Douro are on the Douro river in Porto, Portugal, which was amazing. We did this wine cruise down the river and stopped at different vineyards. It was really amazing. A cooking class in Thailand where I learned how to make pad Thai. And spoiler alert, if you love pad thai and don't exactly know what it is that you love so much about it, they actually put sugar in the pad thai. I know I was a little bummed myself, but I still indulge. So boat tours, hikes, cooking classes, wine tours, art classes, photography, you name it, pretty much anything can go on as an experience on their platform. And there are a range of prices as well. So there is a lot of potential for experiences. And last year alone There was over 81 billion spent on Airbnb's platform. They are no dummy. They know that the experiences outside of your property really drive those review scores and bring people back to their platform. So they've put a lot of time and a lot of effort into building out this part of their app of their company. You've also probably noticed that when you sign up as a host, they ask you for a lot more information. Your likes, your dislikes, where you went to school. All of this is building information on the back end so that they can do a better job of matching experiences and hosts with the right guests and the right people signing up for those experiences. So there is a lot of opportunity for you out there as a host. We're going to break down all the details, but one of the big things is that people just enjoy human interaction. So in a world full of AI, where robots are taking over what seems to be everything, people still really value a human connection. So let's break down the benefits real quick. Well, a first obvious one is that it's another stream of income for you outside of your property. You name your price, if people are willing to pay it, you will have people booking. So this allows you to monetize either some skills that you have or some local experience in the area. And this doesn't have to be you. Remember, you can curate these experiences and you can create a business out of this, just like we do with our short term rentals and just like we've been teaching on this show for the last six years. If you're new to the channel, you can go to Strom. You'll find all of our prior episodes. We have tons and tons of free ebooks and guides that my team and I have put together from our real world experience. Managing over 50,000 guests with properties in over 40 cities now. So you can take advantage of your skills, you can build another revenue center, but you can also build deeper connections with your guests. And we know that the experiences they have outside of your property really affect the review that they're going to leave you. If someone shows up to your property, for example, and they miss their flight, their Uber didn't show up, or their Uber broke down on the freeway and they show up to your property exhausted without their luggage, that's not a great experience, right? And if that's a short stay, that's 100% going to impact the review that they leave. Now imagine that same guest waking up the next day and they go out on a five hour tour with you as the host. Something that you've curated, something that you've created, and they have an excellent time. Well, all those troubles traveling will be a thing of the past. And they're much, much more likely to leave you a glowing review. And also a much longer review, right? Explaining how they really loved your property, but also what they were able to do around your property. So a couple quick tips for creating a great experience. First of all, you want to check the experiences that are already available around your area. So if there's a hundred different boat tours you creating another boat tour is probably not going to be that successful. I mean, this comes back to supply and demand, right? It's the same way it is for short term rentals. And if you are one of a thousand identical short term rentals and there's only 500 people that want to book them, well, that's not a great situation in terms of revenue, more supply than there is demand, right? So that's the first thing. You want to find something unique, something that's not already extremely competitive. And then you can test your pricing with this, right? If you put your tour, whatever it is, out there for 200 and no one's booking, and then you lower it to $150 and all of a sudden you're getting lots of people booking. Well, you know, you are offering competitive pricing. Of course, you do need to make sure that you're available as well. And that comes back to creating a bit of a business out of this, right? Let's say you are doing the boat tour because there's not a whole lot of those around or maybe, you know, some unique part of the lake that people don't usually go to. Well, you can find people just like we find housekeepers and maintenance people to help with our properties, to help with these experiences and you can build a business out of it. Okay, so you have an idea, you've checked the market, you know it's unique, you've identified what you think is competitive pricing. How do you actually market this experience effectively? Well, a lot of the way you're going to market your experience is the same way that you market your short term rental, right? You want it to stand out. So coming back to the boat tour example, again, if there's 100 boat tours and everyone's got a picture of their boat and you have a picture of a sloth that you know stays in the same location, off the river, in the jungle, you're going to stand out. More people are probably going to be clicking on your experience. The more clicks we get, the more potential for bookings. So of course, the better your photos are and the more unique they are, the more visibility you'll get. But you want to make sure that you craft a really good description, right? Quick tip. Take some reviews that you've already received and find out exactly what people loved most about your experience. Use AI like ChatGPT or Claude to craft a description and, and put that right in with your experience. It's going to attract more of the same guests that loved your experience. How do you ensure you Always get five star ratings with your experience. Well, that comes back to expectations again, the same as our short term rental properties. If we're advertising a two car garage, but we only actually have one spot, that is setting the wrong expectations. If we're offering a five hour tour, but you cut it short of three hours, those are not the right expectations. The best thing to do is just to always exceed whatever expectations you've put in your experience. That'll guarantee that you continue to get five star reviews. One other note is that you're going to be interacting with the people in your experience, right? So you have a lot more opportunity to just hear directly from them. When you finish the tour or you finish the class, whatever it happens to be, ask them for their feedback. Ask them what they think you could do better. You should of course, be doing this with your short term rentals as well. And so part of our checkout message after someone's left our property is asking exactly this, what do you think we could be doing better? Is there anything we can improve? We'd love to hear your feedback. We truly value it and we'll make sure to incorporate it for future guests. To sum things up real quickly, we know that there's a huge potential for experiences. There's a lot of ways to do it. I mean, sky is the limit. You don't have to do it yourself. We know that it can truly add to your property reviews, even though it's something outside of your property. And if all goes well with your experiences on Airbnb, well, you can take it off the platform as well. We talk about lots of different software tools on this channel. Some of those have to do with guidebooks like Hostfully or Touchstay. And those are platforms that you could use to easily sell tours and classes and all these types of things. So it doesn't have to be just through Airbnb. Of course, you want to be really careful that you're not trying to get someone outside of Airbnb before they've booked your experience. They will quickly take you down from the platform, just like they will if you're trying to book your property directly on Airbnb. Airbnb. And you're sending messages and you're being really blatant about it. So be careful with that. I hope that gave you a little bit more insight. It's really important for us to understand what our guests want to do when they're in our area. And so you may just use this as an opportunity to look up all of the available experiences around your property and see what people are actually doing. You can see how many reviews are left by experience. That gives you really good insight into how you can better craft a guest experience at your property. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.