Earn $1000/night by Mastering Airbnb Booking Windows

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I'm happy you're here again. I'm excited. At the time of this recording, I'm heading to another conference, the STR wealth conference in Nashville. So I'm actually recording this a little bit ahead of time at one of my properties here in Tennessee. I'll be heading over there soon and one of the things that I'm sure are going is going to come up at the conference is pricing. It's massive. But also booking windows. And so today we're going to talk about booking windows, the differences between some of them and why they're different and just a couple five top takeaways, things that you should be doing with your short term rental. Making sure you're not leaving any money on the table. So the first thing is our book in window. Let's just describe that real quickly. That is the amount of time that one of your guests has in between the moment they make their reservation and the date they check in. So if today I was going to check in, if I one month from now and I made my reservation today, that would mean that my, my booking window for that specific reservation was a month. And now a lot of times we look at the average booking window for a property. Actually, sadly, I think a lot of people don't even know the average. So we're gonna. If you're not using a dynamic pricing tool yet, please make sure you're using one or working with someone that has one and can help you with it. We use price labs, but there's other ones like beyond pricing or Wheelhouse. So just make sure grab one of those. I swear it's one of the best pieces of technology for a short term rental and they have tons and tons of tools. This booking window is just one of those. So in that example, that booking window was one month. A lot of times we just look at the average booking window across the year. But the booking window changes. And so some of the reasons it might change, first of all is because of some seasonality. So one of the top reasons why your booking window might be changing is because of a big event. So let's say Taylor Swift was coming to town and everyone knew it, it was public. You better believe that your property is going to rent up a lot faster than it normally would, which means that that booking window would be bigger or longer for that specific event. For Taylor Swift coming to town, let's say she's coming to town in six months get and everyone just found out, well, you're probably going to sell out a lot further out in advance than you normally would. So that's one thing we need to be wary of. And if we're using a price tool like Price Labs, we can go back historically and look at the average booking times before these big events. So a lot of common ones, New Year's, Christmas, you know, these things we can go back and we can see when people were booking these reservations. And so that is one other difference. Aside from having our average booking window, we have different booking windows for top events. We also have different booking windows for days of the week, really. So if we have weekend dates, those are probably going to book up a little sooner than weekday dates most of the time. Of course, we have to understand our actual market, right? If we're a very business friendly sort of short term rental, well, maybe a lot of our midweek dates get filled up sooner. And so those are just things that we need to check out. One other example that's really easy to see is that the longer the reservation, typically the further out someone's going to book that reservation. So if you have a medium term rental, for example, and you have it on Airbnb, someone booking a month long stay is usually going to put a little more thought and ask a few more questions on that and book it further out in advance than a weekend stay. So the length of our reservation also attributes a lot to that booking window. So lots of different booking windows going on here. I think a good place to start is just knowing the average booking window across the year. That's at least going to help you set up some of your discounts and prices without being too, too far off. So another really cool tool that we have available in Price Labs, I'm sure this is available in the other software programs too, is the ability to actually set a minimum exp price. So what I mean by that, let's say Taylor Swift's coming to town and you think your property is going to rent for $2,000 for that night or $5,000 or whatever it happens to be, or maybe for multiple nights. So the whole weekend you think you can get those rates, but you don't want to risk not getting a reservation at all and wait too long holding out to get those prices. So what you could do is say, well, I think most people going to a Taylor Swift concert, they're probably going to plan that out, get their flights, do all that ahead of time. I think they're probably going to have that all figured out within three weeks of the actual concert. And so I'm going to set my minimum expiring prices these really high thousand dollar night stays to expire after that three weeks. So I'm going to hope to get those prices, but if I haven't gotten them by that time, then that price is gonna expire and my price will go back to being priced dynamically. So based off market occupancy, seasonality, all those other types of things, you of course always have a minimum rate for your property, but this is a little different. This is a minimum rate specifically for.

A date out in the future. So hopefully that didn't confuse you too much. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, well, make sure that jump online and you look for one of these programs or that you're working with someone that knows how to use these tools. Okay. So we talked about a few of the reasons why we might have different booking windows throughout the year. So we have the events, we have some seasonality, we have the length of a reservation. So the longer the reservation is, that's going to impact the booking window as well. But there's also another one that's sort of a little bit more subtle and that's when we launch a new property. So let's say you have a brand new property that you're looking and we know that we get a little bit of boost from the OTAs. So OTA, like Airbnb or booking.com, they want us to rent our property so that we continue to rent it and we continue to stay on their platform where they're earning money as well. So we get a little boost. It could be that our booking window for those first three or five reservations that you get from that higher visibility is like three days or four days or something. But once some of that visibility goes away, your booking window's going to change too. It's probably not going to get booked so quickly. So there is something to say about the length of time your property's been listed online and how visible it really is. So if you have a ton of reviews and they're really good reviews, you're much more visible on the platforms. When you have open dates, you're probably going to get booked a little faster than a property that doesn't have that. So the booking window can actually change based on property, which is a little, a little confusing too, you know. In other words, the things that are high in demand go first. Right. So the best restaurants, the tables get reserved first. But a good way to understand this is just to look at our competition. We can do that with these pricing tools and we can see occupancies in our neighborhood, around our property at any given time in real time. So book and windows are also sort of like, they're very similar to pacing. We've talked a little bit about pacing before. So pacing is basically how the current state of our property compares to this same time last year. So if right now your property is 50% booked for the next month, we can compare that with last year at the same time. And if it was only 40% booked, then you know you're doing a little better than last year. Right. So it's sort of some of the same metrics going in there. Also something that's very important that we want to know, but a little different than our booking windows. So there are also some trends that are happening with booking windows. Right. And these booking windows don't stay the same all the time. They change. They change all the time. And one of those big trends, as you know, was Covid, people were booking very last minute because they didn't know if they were going to be able to fly, if they were going to be able to get a flight, or if the rules in that city were going to change or lock things down or whatever it happens to be. So we have to consider some of the things happening in our economy too. If regulations changed overnight and that limited the supply of short term rentals in an area, well, with less properties, the booking window for those properties, if they still have the same amount of demand, is probably going to go down. Right. So we need to look at all of our numbers and make sure that if we had discounts set up, for example, that started 30 days out, that if our booking window changes and everyone is booking 15 days out, that we're leaving money on the table. Right. We're discounting too soon, in other words. So trends in the economy, trends in your particular city or neighborhood can affect your booking window too. Remember, travel is easier than it's ever been. If you missed last week's episode, go back and check it out. I talked about being on a cruise ship for 15 days. I had Internet out in the middle of nowhere. And so people can work from wherever they want. They're booking last minute. I actually did a whole episode, a separate episode on this, that was episode 206, talking about how it's easier to travel than ever and that's affecting the booking window. So because it's easier to travel, people are booking later on, more last minute. This is a nationwide trend. I think it's going to continue down this route. I mean someone can literally pull up their phone, book a flight, book a hotel and book a short term rental. All which Google has ability to do now in very, very little time. And so I think this is going to continue, but it's really important. I've got some just takeaways for you, some actionable tips for you to implement with your property if you're not already doing so. So I have five tips for you here real quick just to sort of sum things up and also make sure you're not leaving money on the table. Number one, make sure you're using a dynamic pricing tool. So if you're not, head over to restmethods.com you can see our recommended resources there. You can see the one that we use, but there's also several others. Just make sure that you're using one of them so you have access to this data. The second thing is understand your booking windows. So understanding your average booking window throughout the year is a great start. Remember last year's performance isn't going to predict the future. Things are changing so we need to look into it a little further and understand the booking window based on events, based on the length of stay, based on the day a week. So just make sure you dig into that a little bit more. So make sure you have a pricing tool, make sure that you understand your booking windows. Remember this is the third thing. Remember that these things are changing and so trends like Covid, like the whole remote work possibilities, those are changing our booking windows. Number four, experiment with those minimum expiring prices. So if you really want to lock in a super high price for New Year's, but you, you don't want to wait till the very last minute to lower your prices, you can set this out a month, two months out in advance to try to capture that. But also make sure that you still secure bookings. So experiment with that. And the last one, and this one's really important is make sure that your last minute discounts are not starting too far out in the future. So if your average booking window is seven days, someone's booking your property usually last minute, within seven days. You don't want to start discounts 20 days into the future because no one's even looking at your property then yet. Right? And so make sure you take a look at those again. These are all tools that you can find available in a dynamic pricing tool. You can also look at the booking windows and historic averages. I know this is a little, a little more detailed this week. Hopefully I didn't lose you anywhere there. So until next week, I hope that gave you a little bit of insight. I hope your pricing is optimized, your property staying booked at the highest rates possible, and I hope you have a fabulous week. Talk to you soon.

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