Welcome to Boostly Podcast Episode 341. This is a recap of my Facebook live where I talked about Airbnb Instant Book.
Here's the audio for this episode:
Here's the video for this episode:
Timestamp
00:00 Start
01:20 Massive shift
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Transcript from the Episode
The booking scenario of all of the otas in the str world has changed massively over the course of the last 6,7, 8 years. When I first started in hospitality, everything was inquire-only. Any of the listing sites you would go on on any of the upcoming otas, apart from booking.com, and Expedia, which was, which was back then geared more towards hotels and guesthouses. So you were to go anywhere, and everything would be an inquiry only there would be no instant booking feature. But what happened was that the public and the generation and generations decided and to hold these into this industry what they wanted. And you just got to look at Amazon, you just got to go and look at the book now buy now but you know all of those buttons, and this is the way that the world changed.
Airbnb was one of the first to move, and they brought in instant booking. And instant booking for the world of vacation rentals. str was unheard of. A lot of people freaked out, a lot of people refused to adapt. But slowly but surely, the more that the rise of Airbnb, the more that the sentiment towards the booking process has changed.
Massive shift
And we've noticed a massive shift. So before where it used to be guests find property, guest likes property guest sends an email or a contact request or a booking request guest waits for an answer for the host to then get in touch, send an email back, ask couple of questions and then book is gone. Airbnb and you've got to just go and look at Brian Chesky and Joe, and how they talked about their desire to be a one to three book process. And they've done this within with instant booking. So now a guest finds a property they like it, they book it done.
And everybody has moved in evolve to this. And instant booking is now key. And this brings me to today's episode where if you want to hack the system, if you want to become higher on the Airbnb algorithm, if you want to be seen by more people, you have got to turn on instant booking.
Now, there may be things, mindset issues where you have not yet turned it on. But there are ways and means and systems and structures that you can put into place into your business to make sure that even an instant booking can mean that you're going to still get the right guests in your property. Now that is not for today's episode. That's for another one.
But what I will say is that, if you haven't yet turned it on, do turn it on. In fact, if you have loaded recently, a unit or a new listing into Airbnb, they pretty much turn on instant booking straightaway, you have to manually switch it to inquiry only. And you have to do it in the back end if you want to do so.
So Airbnb moved. Now look at VRBO. Now look at all of them. They all followed suit. So instant booking is a key way if you want to get higher in the ranking.
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