How to get MORE REPEAT GUEST in AIRBNB | Tips & Tricks by Tim Hubbard

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches, where we'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals to help you build wealth faster with as little headache as possible.

I am happy you guys are here. As always, it's a lot of fun doing these and it's good to reinforce a lot of things that I'm learning and it's good to get your guys's feedback. I just found out recently that we have listeners in over 50, 50 countries. That's pretty awesome. It's great to get all the feedback. We love it. It's also cool to see that we have such a broad reach. And one of the reasons why, or at least one of the reasons I think why, is because the operations that we put in place to manage our short term rentals, we can use these same systems anywhere in the world, right? Pretty much the same set of systems. No matter whether our properties in South America, it's in Australia, or It's in the U.S. of course there's different regulations and the investment opportunities and the actual properties are going to be different, but the systems that we put in place are pretty much the same. So that makes it a lot easier for you to scale. Today I want to talk about repeat guests. Repeat guests are great because we already know that they're good guests, right? They've already stated our property, so it makes it easier. They're also more familiar with the property, which means they're going to have less questions. And now I don't do a whole bunch of direct marketing, but 13%, last time I checked, of all of our reservations are repeat guests. That's great news. That means that the guests can pay a slightly lower amount and we pay nothing to the ota, so we can make more money. At the same time, our guests are paying a little less for the reservation. And that's one of the upsides. That's one of the things we do to market to our repeat guests very subtly. I just want to talk a little bit about repeat guests. They are great to have, but how do we get them? How do we get more repeat guests? We've got to be a little careful here because we can't market to our guests directly on the OTAs. If Airbnb, for example, sees that we're trying to get our guests to book directly through us, that's going to be very risky. And they can straight up ban you from their channel from, from Airbnb or vrbo. You don't want to do this on any of them. Right? But we can Ask for their personal email and their personal contact info. So I'll talk about a couple ways we do that, but first I just want to tell you how we advertise for our repeat guests. And you're gonna think this is like the laziest approach known to man. But essentially all we do is put a magnet on our fridge. Everyone sees the fridge or the refrigerator in your property. We just have a magnet on there. It says, hey, book through Midtown stays next time. That's where you'll find the lowest price. We look forward to having you back. And then we've got our Instagram and stuff like that on there. But the reality is this is the only place that we market. And can you believe that we have 13% repeat guests. Now, repeat guests are more common in certain types of properties than other. I would say they can be very good in a vacation rental type property. But they might not be visiting. Your guests might not be visiting that property as frequently as they might, let's say an urban city property. And we've talked about this before, but the loyalty for a vacation rental type property is going to be a lot higher for a family or someone that wants to visit there once a year, perhaps, versus someone traveling for work. And they have a lot more options in the city where you have your rentals. So both options and really anywhere in between, we can get repeat guests with no matter what type of property we have. So our simple, lazy, you could say way is just to put a magnet on the fridge. But there are other ways, and there's other ways I'm exploring. We talk about having a digital guidebook a lot on this channel. We use Hostfully. One of the cool tools with Hostfully is that you can require that your guests enter their personal information and agree to your terms and conditions, which can be your house rules before they have access to your digital guidebook. So since we send out our guidebook to everyone, we collect a lot of emails this way, and that makes it really easy. So if you wanted to send out a bulk marketing email, for example, you could go to Hostfully. You could gather all those emails you have. You can send out a nice Thanksgiving Christmas holiday special or a slow season special or whatever it is to try to get a little more bookings directly. There are some additional tools available to get this. I know that there are some smart routers or Internet routers that will require someone to put in their email before they can use the Internet. So that's a good way too. Although I don't really like to put More steps in between our guests. Connecting the Internet, it's crucial and if there's one more step, then might be a little more complicated. But that is another way to retrieve emails. The third way to retrieve emails from your guests is just to ask them. So if you're on Airbnb, you're not gonna have their personal email, but all you have to do is ask for it and just say, hey, we like to have the email and the best contact number from all of our guests in case of emergency, in case we need to contact you for some reason or other. So ask them for it, but you gotta make sure that you record it on the back end. So I think hostfully is probably one of the best options for capturing guest emails and also providing a better service to the guests because they have our cool looking digital guidebook. So check those out. Now, there's some things that go along with taking direct bookings, right? We have to have a platform for them to be able to book directly with us and we have to take payment. So if you're using a property management software application like Hostfully or Guesty or there's a lot of other ones out there, most of those have a built in way to take direct bookings where you can have your own website. So that's an easy way. There's also some platforms like my VR, so check those out. That's the first step. Step. The second step is having a payment processor. And I highly recommend, if you're in the US that's using Stripe. Stripe is one of the biggest merchant processors in the world. It's what we use. It's what most people in the vacation short term rental industry are going to be using. So with those two things, you can really make it easy to take direct bookings. Of course we want a better guess. And if they're repeat, then hopefully they had a good experience and you know that they were good guests before. So keep those things in mind. But at the end of the day, having repeat guests not only allows them to pay a little less, but it allows us to make a little more. I usually split the difference between what an OTA would potentially charge. So Airbnb, for example, can charge anywhere from 13, 15, I think even up to 20% now, depending on depending on the length of the reservation. So let's just say it's 14, I might charge 7% less, but I'm not paying that other 7%. So I'm still making 7% more. It's nice to have repeat guests because it fills that calendar up a little more. But I would say maybe one of the best things about having repeat guests is decreasing your exposure or your vulnerability to being on one ota. Like if you're only on Airbnb, for example, what happens if they turn your account off? You're done, right? So hopefully that never happens to you, but it has happened to people before. And so if we can limit our exposure to any1 OTA, we can make sure that our business is going to be a little safer in the future. So if you don't have repeat guests yet, I highly encourage that you reach out to your great guests you've had before. Use some of these ways. Put a simple magnet on the fridge. You can go to vistaprint.com and have a cool one made up. And they're not expensive. Check out the Hostfully guidebook and capture some emails and think about doing some direct marketing. Until next time, I hope your rentals are staying booked. You're making a lot of money. And thanks for listening in, really, from all sides of the world now, from Hong Kong to Africa to Australia to the US To Canada. It's great to get your guys feedback and I look forward to seeing you next time. Have a fabulous week.