Do you wish you could get more of your guests to book repeat stays? Are you overwhelmed by the thought of building a separate website to market your Airbnb? Do you wish there was an easy way to do guest marketing to fill your calendar and bank account?

If so, Episode 34 of the Host Coach Airbnb Podcast is for you! We’re sharing our secret hack for leveraging technology you already use to automate guest marketing, increase bookings, and feed the Airbnb algorithm so you stay on page one of search results.

Read on to learn how you can work smarter, not harder, on generating repeat guest bookings in less than 10 minutes!

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Why you DO NOT need a direct-booking website
• The rarely discussed issues that come with taking direct bookings
• How to use software you already have to automate guest marketing on Airbnb
• Which 3 messages to send to successfully secure repeat guest bookings

 Host Coach Airbnb Podcast Episode 34 Show Notes:

The internet is bombarding hosts with all kinds of supposed gurus saying you must have a direct booking website for your Airbnb. You must run social media ads and endless other must do suggestions that can be really overwhelming and frankly, not good advice for Airbnb investors. So let's start this podcast episode with the facts.

We all have Airbnb guests who have loved staying in our spaces. These are the guests that leave rave reviews and delightful private feedback, which is my favorite part. I love it when they tell me how much they enjoy the space and the thoughtful details that I put into it.

Another fact as hosts and investors, we would all love to have those same guests book our properties. I mean, they're a known quantity. They're good people. They were zero drama, and they already love our Airbnb.

Fact number three, it's easier to get someone familiar with your property to come back, than to solicit a new guest. If you think about it, the barriers to booking are low because repeat guests have already asked their questions before they booked the first time and have experienced your Airbnb as well as the surrounding area.

And finally, repeat guests are usually good people who leave five star reviews. It's pretty obvious, but repeat guests come back because they had a great experience and want to repeat it. These are not our one-star divas or two-star Grinches. But the problem is these are starting to sound like some pretty mythical creatures to me.

Why You DO NOT Need a Direct Booking Website for Your Airbnb

How do we find, nurture, and reach these repeat guests? I was listening to a podcast the other day, driving back from a presentation, and they were getting it all wrong. As they talked about ways to get repeat guests off of the Airbnb platform. Their big idea was to collect emails and build a website and just take direct bookings.

Wix aren't that hard, but it's an additional something to do, a cost, and a skillset that not everybody has or has time to master.

Secondly, building just a website isn't a good plan. If you think that if you build it they will come... they won't. You have to have a direct marketing plan for your website. People aren't just going to find it. So we're going to have to create organic search, right? So how is your website going to get found? What content are we going to create?

You can't just put up a couple of pictures, right? You need to have original content and links for the website to be found organically. So having a website on the internet of 10 million other websites, doesn't mean that people are going to find your website.

What Culin means by organic is: not paid for. You're not going to be paying people to click on your website by running ads. This means that Google has searched the internet and found your website because of keywords and links and all this information you've added to help Google understand the value of your website -So as you said, you just can't have pictures. It doesn't work.

Another part of the marketing plan might be to build a big email list and create a drip campaign where we're emailing people and nurturing them with interesting stories and things to do at our Airbnb. Again, this can be done, but it's a lot of work.

The Biggest Problem with Direct Booking Websites

Here's the biggest problem: if you start taking direct bookings and let's say you're successful with it, and a third of your bookings are coming from your direct booking website, that's going to close your calendar off to Airbnb, which is going to result in poor rank placement because your calendar is closed a third of the time on Airbnb. Airbnb is just not going to show your listing, right? They don't have a capability to make money off of your listing if your calendar is closed because you've taken a direct booking. So it really hurts your rank placement on Airbnb, and in turn, that is going hurt the number of views your listing gets.

The other problem is you're now going to need to set up and handle multiple calendars, right? There are tools for this out there to sync your Airbnb bookings with your direct booking website. You're also going to have to handle booking contracts. You will have to have a contract people sign, wait for them to get back to you, create a contract, keep it on file, and now you're going to also have to handle collections and refunds, right?

AirCover that you receive on Airbnb. AirCover for hosts is the top-to-bottom protection that you get that includes guest identity verification, reservation screening, $3 million in host damage protection, the million dollar host liability insurance, and Airbnb's 24 hour safety line.

I generally find that the people that are telling you that you have to have a direct booking website are usually someone selling you a solution caused by the problems by maintaining those multiple channels.

The Simple Solution for Repeat Airbnb Bookings

We have a much more simple, effective solution for you. Instead of building a direct booking website and dealing with all the things that Culin just talked about, simply add three timed marketing messages to past guests, encouraging them to book again.

Hospitable automated messages and schedule them to send a check out, 90 day, and 270 day message to our past guests. Hospitable is something you're already paying for, and its messages have open rates in the 90% range compared to an email opening rate of 30% percent at very best. Guests trust messages coming through the Airbnb platform.

Airbnb Tech Stack for Success post. If you missed it, Hospitable is a software that plugs into Airbnb's API, so it can seamlessly send messages on behalf of hosts. We recommend this tool to any host for automating their inquiry, response, booking, confirmations, and check in instructions.

(which is three quarters of the way through the year to give them time to think.) is: "It's been almost a year since your stay, and we would love to host you again. Book your stay to get away from it all at this cabin, or click on Culin's profile to see our curated collection of modern rustic cabins in Virginia."

As Culin said, this message is close to a year after the guest stay, but not at the year mark because then we've passed too far. The whole purpose is to remind guests of how much fun they had, and that it's time to start planning a stay with us. Again, we're also sharing our other cabins in the area in case they love the area, but want to try out different accommodations.

Messaging past guests works with one Airbnb and larger portfolios. The great news is that setting up these messages in either scenario takes less than 10 minutes.. Please note, these messages work best if your guests have had a positive experience in your Airbnb. You have to provide a five star accommodation, amenities and recommendations. But when you take the time and effort to do so, it's not easy. It's really easy to leverage that hard work into repeat bookings.

When A Website Makes Sense for Airbnb Investors

LurayCabinLife.com. You can go check it out to see what we're doing.

Again, we have a webiste as a way to let people see the entire portfolio. Our website has each one of our properties, but it clicks directly to the corresponding Airbnb listing. This provides the benefit of additional views of our properties on Airbnb, which is again, another positive signal to the algorithm.

Another good example of a use case for a website would be if you were really a boutique hotel, or if you're a multi-unit property - like one of these big beach places. We also have a client who's got this ranch in Montana, and it is next to this super luxury ranch. There are only 14 listings in her market, so in her case, she can be on Airbnb, VRBO, booking. com and have a direct booking website, and she's still going to rank well because there's so few listings in her area. So there's a couple of examples of where a website can really serve you as a host.

How to Get Traffic to Your Website

There are still some issues with having a website. It's the same problem as before. You must do something to get potential guests to that website. So if you have a strong social media presence, you can use that to drive traffic to the website, or you can pay for social media ads on Facebook and Instagram.

If that is not your skillset, you can hire people to do that. But again, you're adding layers of work and paying other professionals to try to get your guests to come back to your properties. You can create relevant content and blog posts for your area, such as what to do in Skyline Drive, the best places to eat in North Carolina, or whatever your particular market is, but you still need to cultivate in-bound links from other websites.

Websites are a long term strategy. We use it for our collection because people ask about our cabins. Well, I can't send them eleven links. I can, but it takes forever and it's kind of weird. It's nice to just visualize all of them and then be able to click on the one or two that they find interesting.

This is why we think marketing to your past guests on the Airbnb platform is the best way to work smarter - not harder to get more bookings from people who already love your places.

So there you have it. You now know our new hack for the fastest and easiest way to cultivate past guests into rebooking. You also know why direct booking websites are a terrible idea for Airbnb investors looking to maximize their cashflow, and a few instances where a website can actually be helpful.

book a free 30 minute coaching call with us. We LOVE helping new investors avoid pitfalls and find financial freedom through Airbnb investing!