Should You Use Instant Book on Airbnb? | Pros and Cons

There are so many little features in Airbnb and booking.com and Expedia and all these different booking sites. It's seriously a pain in the butt if you're trying to track them all at the same time. But there's one that's really important and the one that might actually be required and that's Instant Book, depending on which OTAs you're using. So I want to talk all things Instant Book this week. Some pros and cons, some tips if you are using Instant Book, which I recommend, but there are a few situations when I don't think you should be using Instant Books. We'll talk about all of those this week. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Happy you're here again. I made this podcast into short bite size episodes so that you can most benefit from the least amount of time. So I hope it's been working that way for you. We are just in a fast paced society, aren't we? Want everything like now or we want it yesterday. We want it really quickly and when we don't get it right away or we don't get a response right away, that impacts our experience. And one of the things that makes it much easier for us to book an Airbnb or book a Short term rental is Instant Book. You've seen it before, undoubtedly if you've used Airbnb. Most listings have Instant Book turned on and I do recommend it at the end of the day. But there are some cons to it. There's some things that we want to keep in mind. There's some settings we might want to put in place. We're going to talk about all those this week. Let's start off with the pros. First of all, it's going to maximize your bookings, right? If someone has to go through more steps to book your property, then less people are going to book it. That's just how it works. It's the same way if there's a checkout card online and you have to jump through 10 hoops to get to your payment method, the chances you actually completing that purchase are going to be a little less than if you just went straight to a checkout cart, right? The easier it is for someone to purchase or reserve our property, the more reservations we're going to get. And Airbnb appreciates this. Right. They want more bookings. So the side benefit to this, not only is it easier for our guests to make reservations, but Airbnb encourages us to have Instant Book turned on, and so they actually boost our search rankings. So just by turning that little button on, you're going to get more visibility if you are also on other platforms. Expedia, for example, requires you to have Instant Book. So you're going to be limiting yourself a little bit if you've got Instant Book turned off, not only on Airbnb, but because of the fact that you just can't go on some of these other listing sites. At the end of the day, this just. It just makes it easier for guests and it makes it easier for hosts. It also makes it easier for hosts to achieve super host status or premier host status from vrbo because we're getting faster response times, we're getting more bookings. All things that they require in their metrics for determining whether or not we should be a super host. There's always a flip side. There's always two sides to everything. Right. And what are the cons to Instant Book? Well, number one, I'd say probably gonna have a little more cancellations if it's easier to book. People don't think through it as far as they would if there was a reservation process where they actually had to communicate with someone. Sometimes they book wrong dates, sometimes they broke, you know, the wrong place, whatever it happens to be. So you're probably going to see a little more cancellations, but depending on how your cancellation policy is set up, hopefully you're not losing any money from that. So I think a very obvious con is that we have a little bit less control with who's booking our property. Right. If they can instantly book it and we don't have the chance to communicate with them, to find out why they're coming to town or all those things before they make the booking, then we lose a little bit of control. But. But that doesn't mean we lose all control. So I've got some tips for dealing with our Instant Book guests. I think the first one is just make sure you have good house rules set up and you can check the show notes in this episode. I've got my house rules there that are very complete. Make sure you take a look at them, and if you're missing any of those that are relevant to your property, put them in there. Because that is our chance. Right. That is one way to protect ourselves from a guest, maybe that we didn't want, but we can also set up some dialogue as soon as someone makes the booking and find out why they're coming to town, get a little more information on that. Another thing that we can do to help protect ourselves from maybe not an ideal instant book guests is just set some additional requirements so we can request their full name, all their contact information. Of course, we can also require a brief introductory message to. Now, of course, they can just send a message that says, hi, my name's John, I'm coming on Friday. But hopefully we get a little more information there at least to get the dialogue going. And then again, we got to make sure that we have our house rules in place and that they protect us in all scenarios. Now, the other thing we can do is if worse comes to worse and a guest books our property and we are just not comfortable, we actually can have their reservation canceled penalty free, as long as it's for a few specific reasons. Reasons. So the first one is if the guest is unreliable or they have bad reviews. So if they are not responding to any of our messages, you're going to want to involve Airbnb. And if you're uncomfortable with that guest's background, the reviews, and you're not getting communication, well, you can have that reservation canceled. Hopefully you have enough time to figure that out so that you can get your calendar booked back up afterwards. Another reason that we can use to have a reservation canceled penalty free is if we feel that a guest is likely to break our house rules for whatever reason that is. So again, it's better to have more house rules than less, right? So let's just say, for example, guest says, I'm coming in for a bachelor party with my six friends or something. Something like that. Real basic. But it breaks your house rules. Maybe your property is only set up for four guests. Or maybe your house rule says absolutely no parties and they have party written right in their message. Well, then that is a reason you can use to get that reservation canceled. So at the end of the day, Instant Book, I am all for it. I use it on all my properties. The only property that I don't actually is one in Brazil. And it's because it's got a little more difficult entry access and they actually have to meet with a manager down there and it's a little less seamless. So there are a couple scenarios where you might not want to use instant book, and I'll just give you a couple of those here. One is if you only offer long term stays, right? If your minimum stays 30 days or 60 days or 90 days. Then you want to vet that guest a little more. Right. And you want to find out why they're coming and go through all those processes and hopefully have them fill out a lease as well. Which we do for all my properties if the reservations 30 days or more. So that's one scenario where you only do long term reservations, 30 days or more as an example and you want to have a little more time to verify and communicate with that guest. And then the other reason is kind of similar to my Brazil property example, is that if there's some sort of challenge with the property or special feature or something like that that you're going to need to communicate with the guest or get across. Maybe it's a property that's just really hard to get to. If you listen to my episode on a property I stayed out in a jungle in Colomb. I mean if someone booked it today, I mean, good luck getting there today. That thing was so hard to get to. It was beautiful. If you want to check it out, it's episode 139. But that's another example where you wouldn't want to have someone instant booking at least for a same day reservation because it's just a challenge to get to that property. Or if they need more information that you can't give real quickly and just a quick message, then that might be a scenario where you wouldn't want to use Instant Book as well. So if you're not using Instant Book right now, I'd make sure that you check all your settings, do whatever you can to be able to use Instant Book because it's definitely going to help you. But there are a couple situations where maybe you don't want to. So I hope that shed a little bit of light on Instant Book. I hope your properties are saying very full and until next time, I hope you have a wonderful week.

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