A Guide to Instant Booking For Vacation Rental Owners
Is Instant Booking Right For Your Vacation Rental?
Navigating the ins and outs of sites like Airbnb can be an overwhelming task at times, but staying updated with the latest ways to maximize your revenue on these OTAs is vital to the health of your short-term rental business. If you haven’t heard of the instant booking feature on Airbnb yet, now’s the time to educate yourself. Not only can this feature help you to earn more from your rental, but it can also improve your standing with guests and boost your Airbnb search engine ranking as well.
Today, we’ll be diving deep to give you a guide to instant booking that will cover all of the bases. From the what to the why to the how, by the end of this blog, you’ll know whether instant booking is right for you.
What is Instant Booking?
The Upsides to Utilizing Instant Booking
Increase Your Reservations and Overall Revenue: Because the instant booking feature on Airbnb streamlines the reservation process, you have the ability to host more guests and increase your overall revenue. According to a study done by AirDNA, hosts who utilize instant booking earn on average 52% more revenue than those who do not. This is because those who utilize instant booking are more likely to charge a higher average daily rate than those who do not, which overall demonstrates that instant booking properties are in high demand.
Become More Visible on Airbnb’s Search Engine: Airbnb wants hosts to utilize the instant booking feature, so they automatically increase the visibility of Instant Book homes on their search engine. This means you’ll appear closer to the top if you turn on instant booking.
Better Your Chances of Becoming a Superhost: Your response rate to guests on Airbnb must be over 90% for you to become a Superhost. Instant bookings will automatically help to up this score, since you won’t have to respond to each and every guest reservation request yourself.
The Downsides of Instant Booking
You Won’t Be Able to Implement Guest Screening: Although Airbnb does have certain requirements for guests who want to utilize instant booking, such as requiring their driver’s license and good feedback from previous hosts, this feature does take away some of your ability to implement your own guest screening.
Cancellations May Negatively Affect Your Airbnb Account: As we mentioned earlier, there are serious consequences for canceling a guest’s stay, such as losing your Superhost status and being forced to pay a cancellation fee. There are extenuating circumstances that can overturn this fee and penalty, such as if the listing is too damaged to stay in, but this will require you to submit proof to Airbnb yourself.
Traditional Bookings Tend to Be Longer: The same AirDNA study that demonstrated that those with instant bookings turned on earn more revenue also found something interesting: those who book instantly typically stay for less time than their traditional booking counterparts. Modifying your minimum stay requirements may be a better option than turning on Instant Booking, depending on your situation.
Utilizing Instant Booking the Right Way for Owners
Enable ID Verification, Review, and Minimum Stay Requirements
Because there are advantages and disadvantages to using the instant book feature on Airbnb, it’s important to make it work for you as a host if you decide to enable it. Thankfully, there are a few ways to do this, such as by setting certain requirements for your guests to meet in order to instantly book with you. By enabling identity verification, a minimum number of previous positive reviews, and a minimum stay requirement, you can effectively screen out guests who might be troublemakers.
Go Over House Rules to Ensure Guests Are Informed
Because the instant booking feature is incredibly convenient for guests, they may only skim your house rules or ignore them entirely.
In order to make sure that your guests are informed of these important rules, be sure to send it to each guest and leave a copy of the rules in your welcome book for guests. Because instant booking leads to more guests, you’re bound to get a few bad apples in the bunch, but protecting yourself can help to prevent things from going wrong.
Find Out More Insider Tips from the LocalVR Blog
While there may be a few downsides to using the instant booking feature on Airbnb, there are plenty of advantages as well that should not be overlooked. From higher revenues to a better search engine ranking on Airbnb, you can uncover a whole host of upsides if you utilize this feature.
Hoping to find out more ways to improve your short-term rental business? Check out more LocalVR Owner Blogs, such as our guide to enhancing guest experience or our overview on handling difficult Airbnb guests.
