Lay My Hat

Hello everyone, can anyone help please? Next month I am cancelling my subscription with OD as my bookings have fallen off a cliff. I am an offsite owner with a very large 4 bedroom house. Airbnb seems to be the " current place to go" so I am considering advertising there but I have limitations I have to set.

. Due to the high costs of each changeover I need to set a minimum of a week for each booking.
. Each booking MUST be a Saturday to Saturday
. Is it possible to set a 6 week cancellation policy, with no refund of initial deposit?

Can one use Airbnb with these limitations? Would appreciate any advice from those who know the Airbnb system. Many thanks in advance.

hi Giraffe,
For my holiday house i have a listing also on Airbnb and of course you could set a minimum stay, the changeover day and so on.
you could also set if you accept bookings for the same day or with 1-2 days notice, and for how many months in the future.
also the cancellation policy could be strict: 50% of total payment if the cancellation is made (by guest) within 30 days before booking, 5% as host.

there's no superstrict mode with no refund at all.

Maybe try to add your listing also on Wimdu, Bedycasa and 9flats.
Similar sites, almost the same conditions.

Sarah

AirBnb cancellation policy is not great for big expensive houses. A cancellation the day before means a 50% loss of rental and no chance to re-rent.

You can set minimum rental period no problem. And do set a cleaning fee - it's fixed and doesn't show up as the rental cost in the search.

Their commission + fees are high too.

I do sympathise with your OD/HA woes. Their new algorithm is just hopeless. And subscription listers are being crowded out by low quality commission listings.

Giraffe wrote:Hello everyone, can anyone help please? Next month I am cancelling my subscription with OD as my bookings have fallen off a cliff. I am an offsite owner with a very large 4 bedroom house.

From what has been the best couple of years ever for us on OD (with a 400% increase in bookings), we yesterday received an email (strangely from VRBO where we are on commission) stating that enquirer's phone numbers and email addresses are to be blocked on our account as well. We believed that this was actually referring to our subscription listing on OD, because today we checked our OD inbox and saw that all contact information has been blocked out on all our previous enquiries, excluding the few that went on to book through OD's system.

Due to this, we too expect our bookings to 'fall of the cliff'. Very few of our mostly German and Dutch guests coming through OD/HA are able to book online, because they don't have credit cards to pay the service fee.

It looks like we are going to have a lot of interesting communication along the lines of 'if you don't have a credit card, then you can't book'. Because, although guests can pay using PayPal (via linked bank transfer) and separate bank transfer for the rental amounts, the service fee has to be paid by card.

Quite ironic, that a company that is so set on milking as much money as possible from both guest and host, makes it impossible for so many guests from mainland Europe to actually book online.

Giraffe wrote:Airbnb seems to be the " current place to go" so I am considering advertising there but I have limitations I have to set.

. Due to the high costs of each changeover I need to set a minimum of a week for each booking.
. Each booking MUST be a Saturday to Saturday
. Is it possible to set a 6 week cancellation policy, with no refund of initial deposit?

Can one use Airbnb with these limitations? Would appreciate any advice from those who know the Airbnb system. Many thanks in advance.

We discovered a few days ago that you can set minimum stays per day of the week on ABB.

We had been getting a bit frustrated recently with enquiries for 2-night midweek stays (always for our maximum limit of 12 persons), where for example, our low season nightly tariff of €136 would mean we would be getting just €272 before ABB's fees were taken off (meaning we'd be making less than €100 after cleaning, energy and tourist tax!)

Most of our bookings through ABB are for 2 nights from Friday to Sunday night, so we had set a minimum stay of 2 nights. This works out fine for weekends (where we have much higher nightly rates) but a complete disaster when you have people looking for a midweek bargain. We have now changed our minimum stay to 3 nights for arrival days outside the weekend.

ABB is constantly updating the possibilities within their system and though they do send regular emails about this, you still need to regularly check your ABB listing to make sure that you are using their system most efficiently for your booking requirements and listing presentation.

Thanks to all of you who responded. I've definitely decided to switch from subscription to commission on OD next month. My son is currently working on our website to make it more professional looking, also our Facebook and Instagram. I'll see how these work out over the next couple of months. I've also joined some Facebook "groups" and already had some bookings through these.

We will look at Airbnb in more detail. Very useful to have your thoughts. I will need to ensure "whole week" bookings, not just minimum, and not be at risk of short term cancellations - my property is too big and the season is too short to take that sort of hit. Many thanks again. Giraffe x