Tag Archives: Airbnb

When can we take a vacation?

January 23, 2019BNB, BUSINESS, HOSTING, PaloAltoBNB, TRAVELAirbnb, BNB, BUSINESS, HOSTING, PaloAltoBNB, TRAVELchallenyee

Hard to imagine that my wife and I have joined the ranks of becoming a mom and pop operation. Wasn’t that a thing of the past? Ma and Pa Kettle (for those of you who remember) LOL

In either case, one of a few of the ongoing concerns my wife and I have with running and hosting a BNB is:

When can we take a vacation?

One of the classic tourist spots. Venice 1989 (photo by Challen)

I know there’s several hosts or property managers who run several listings as their business model. We can only imagine running one. I know hosts are encouraged to find partners to co-host, but we haven’t gotten there yet, though we have friends who host their own listings.

While it’s nice to have some of the unique advantages of running BNB that I’ve written about before (8 Reasons), it could get overwhelming multiplying that by 2x or more. Moreover, the inherent uncertainty of keeping the vacancies low can be a burden if you really need the income to pay all the bills. If you do happen to have more than one rental, having one on a lease would certainly help reduce the uncertainty in the traditional way.

Aside from the fact that our listing is bringing in needed income in a place like Silicon Valley, one of the most expensively taxed places in the world, especially in Palo Alto (many people need the extra income just to pay their property taxes, much less the mortgage) the thought actually occurs to us that it is hard to let others run your business for you.

First of all, we’re not aware of too many people who would like to jump in an help us run our business and if they did, we’re wouldn’t be so confident they would take the same level of care an responsibility of the business, for each guest and for the care of the house. We’d have to hand pick some people who are willing to jump in an help on occasion.

I realize there’s a certain amount of ego involved, and I haven’t reached the obligatory point of dire necessity yet, but it’s also really is a nice thing to receive a positive feedback from others on a regular basis and that helps make our listing attractive when new guests can be encouraged by good reviews on our listing.

The Airbnb system that allows for publicly presented positive feedback. It’s one of the attractions I also discovered from my two-month experience being a LYFT driver – if you are good, people let you know, you can feed on that and new customers can make more of an informed choice.

I apologize to all the truly great property managers out there, but when you’ve created a baby, it’s hard to let others take control.

We’ll see, we haven’t figured out how we’re going to afford and take off to see rabbits in Japan, take the kids to D.C., or even visit friends near Seattle or Denver, Italy, or wherever?

When you’re a host, your cell phone is never off. Can you imagine flying across the ocean without being able to field your messages from guests? Yeh, gotta fix this problem….

The first thing to do is start compiling a list of people you know who may want to learn and who you think would be good at being a co-host.

I’ll let you know how things go…

Please like, share, comment, follow my blog or contact me if you have any questions

CKY

Sometimes like Grand Central Station

January 13, 2019BNB, BOOKING, TRAVELAirbnb, BNB, BOOKING, TRAVELchallenyee

So what is it like coordinating guest stays?

There are periods of time when you get no inquiries and you almost forget that you are running a business and then there are some periods where inquiries begin to pickup and conflict with each other requiring some management skills to make your way through them.

Does the numbers of views on you website tend to correlate with bookings? Yes and no. I’ve found that even when the views are decreasing (and the number of tire kickers on your listing lags the actual activity by a bit), the real trip planners are still looking to book.

The economy is not dead – people still need to travel to conduct business and others still need to take care of their health.

Some days are a little anxious because you can have multiple guest requests overlapping for various reasons.

Here’s an example, a real day:

We allow same day check out (11:00) and check in (15:00) and, as can be expected, eventually your current guest will ask to stay longer and your oncoming guest will request to arrive earlier.

I worked out a deal where we could come in to begin cleaning the bedrooms at the normal checkout time and let the departing guest hang out for the extra hour until 12:00. The problem was, the arriving guest wanted to arrive at 12:00 to at least drop off bags and perhaps relax a bit.

In both cases, the guests were very understanding and were ready to accommodate my need to get the house cleaned up ready. Things worked out. It’s good, by the way to make sure one bathroom is totally cleaned for the oncoming guests so they can experience the pristine “clean” right away, and, furthermore, they don’t need to experience the previous guests’ temporary landmarks and dirty towels.

It turns out, in this same circumstance, the same few hour period, the oncoming guest didn’t know whether they needed to book for 4 days or 7, so they first booked for 4 with 7 pending a meeting with doctors at Stanford. THEN, I get another guest request to book over what would be the 7^thnight.

This is a case where instant booking needed to be turned off, and I did turn it off.

It gave my guest time to speak to the doctors.

What was necessary on my part as a host was to warn the new inquiry of my situation and I went further advising that in their best interest, they might want to seek another listing because I was giving my new guests a priority if they needed to book.

Well… As it turned out, the new guest booked one day shorter (probably with respect to the new inquiry) and the new inquiry took my advice and booked another listing (but they forgot to cancel their inquiry, which led to another little impromptu problem when I accepted her request to book).

So I lost two days in the aggregate, however, though money is important, it’s always good to try to do the right thing.

Please like, share and comment or contact me if you have any questions

CKY

How is Instant Booking better?

January 10, 2019BNB, BOOKING, BUSINESS, PALO ALTO, SILICON VALLEYAirbnb, BNB, BOOKING, TRAVELchallenyee

There are several options for hosts to choose in effort to attract guests to their Airbnb listing. One that is either loved or hated is called “Instant Booking”

Instant Booking (IB) allows a guest to book your listing without having to submit a request. It’s assumed that all the relevant info for a guest to make the commitment to make a reservation is available to be seen in the listing so that the prospective guest can make an educated and confident decision.

HOST ADVANTAGES OF IB?

The advantages of IB allows a host to be able to accept reservations without having to immediately respond to critical questions a guest may have that would delay their decision.

It is assumed that, without having to interact with the host, the guest can review any necessary information, including what the host specifically and generally expects from their guests behavior, known as “House Rules”, while residing in the BNB. For example, not all listings allow the guests to use the property to hold events (attracting large amounts of un-vetted people, particularly for a wild animal house party), smoking or the housing of pets. Hosts often like to know who to expect, so offering the names of your colleagues or family members may be a requirement.

House Rules make things interesting. Some hosts have very few rules (like we did when we started) and some can look like a full legal adoption contract. In general, hosts don’t want any illegal activities, don’t want anyone trashing their house, or any unapproved staying after their reservation time has ended.

The clear advantage for a host to use IB is Airbnb puts the your listing in the face of more potential guests compared to those who do not elect to use IB. In other words, if you adopt the use of IB as an Airbnb host, your listing will show up in both cases, if a guest chooses to see only IB listing or not.

GUEST USER CONSIDERATIONS FOR USING IB?

You might desire to seek an IB listing if you are in a hurry to make a booking and don’t want to bother waiting for a host to respond to any inquiry. However, it is customary for a responsive host to reply immediately or within an hour.

You may feel uncomfortable going into a brief “interview” session with the property manager and, instead, seek a similar experience to booking a hotel room. A BNB is not a hotel and usually does not offer the same kind of anonymity of booking a room in a hundred unit Marriot, although IB can make the feel similar to a hotel.

Even if you desire to stay at an IB listing, you can still ask questions of the host without making your booking. You may need to be accommodated for a special situation that is not covered in the listing or you may actually like to know if you can communicate with the host just in case you run into problems with the property.

It’s not impossible that there are both guests from hell and hosts from the same neighborhood. It’s a big world out there and the entire spectrum is in play, but establishing a line of positive reviews is a pretty decent indicator what typ of experience you can expect from either person.

WHY DON’T ALL HOSTS USE IB?

There are times when I do not use IB, it is when I need to keep a certain block of time open for a guest I am trying to give to make a decision. One perfect example was when I wanted to work with a family who was waiting to hear from Stanford Hospital when their child’s surgery could be scheduled for.

Aside from that, the general feeling among hosts who do not use IB, is they do not want to take a chance having to accommodate someone they would not feel comfortable with. In general, for a host to have to cancel a reservation is often a negative mark against the host’s rating, although, in the case of IB, if the cancellation is executed within a day of the booking, Airbnb allows for a host to break any booking he or she feels “uncomfortable” with.

Another reason a host may not use IB is they want more control how their schedule fills up. For an extreme example, it may be rather disruptive if a guest decides to book one Tuesday every week for the next 6 months. Something like that could wipe out any chance of a long term booking from 2 days to weeks.

In CLOSING

In general, I’ve found that using Instant Booking if a favorable experience, for the additional reason that I can let the guest (assuming they read my listing) self-exclude themselves. If they do not like our house rules or anything else we state as requirements, they are free to look at another listing, no harm done.

The guests that we’ve had are, in general, extraordinary and competent travelers who we’ve had the great privilege of hosting. People from all over the world and all over the United States who we’ve had the honor of showing them some hospitality in our small corner of Silicon Valley.