Jon Bell:                               00:00                     Today, we’re talking about booking channels and why you should be on all of them.

Julian Sage:                         00:06                     Vacation rental machine helps hosts just like you learn how to start, grow and scale your short term rental business. The show’s all about creating systems that help you automate your business, give any more time and money freedom. If you’re ready to start living the vacation rental life, then subscribe to this podcast today. Come and join us on our Facebook group, the host nation, where we’ll be talking about starting automating and scaling a short term rental business. Now onto the show.

Jon Bell:                               00:31                     Welcome back Host nation. This is Jon Bell and I’m here with Julian Sage, who is on site at a special location today.

Julian Sage:                         00:37                     What’s going on Jon? Yes, I am. I’m actually in Florida and we’re doing some construction in my parents’ house, so a little bit noisy outside, but this was the only place. So it’s a, it’s a Jon-filled episode, but in this episode we’re talking about where you should be advertising. So whether you should be on Airbnb or VRBO, HomeAway, there’s all these different channels and everybody’s saying, Oh no, you should, you should go on all of them. Or okay, all of these things. But starting off, it’s probably not the best idea to be on all of them. And what are your thoughts on this, Jon, about listing on multiple channels?

Julian Sage:                         01:19                     Because in the previous episode we were talking about channel managers and channel managers. Just to summarize that real quick is where you’re able to list your site on multiple different platforms. But we said this really isn’t something that you need to do right off the bat. It is a good way to be able to build your portfolio, to be able to expand and scale and also come off professionally. But in the last episode we were talking about that it’s not a completely necessary first step, but having your profile listed somewhere, having your place, being able to advertise is important. So where are these places that we could be potentially listing on and which is the best for a person that is just starting off?

Jon Bell:                               01:56                     All right, so I mean listing platforms. We all know the big four, right? We know Airbnb, we know HomeAway. We also know booking.com and Expedia. Those are the big four that are in the U S that we all book from or have booked or searched something to either book tickets or other hotel stays for ourselves, so we have the option to book on all of those platforms.

Jon Bell:                               02:23                     Eventually you want to be on every platform that you can be on because you don’t want to run into an exposure problem when you’re trying to book your one room or multiple rooms or wherever you’re trying to book, but starting out, let’s start with the one platform that was designed for you as the homeowner to post your listing and to get it rented by somebody that is Airbnb, 100% you should start there. I typically say when you start there, you don’t need a PMs to start off because you’re just trying to get to everything that’s there, right? You want to get used to one interacting with guests too, seeing what kind of complaints they have, resolving those issues. You become a well oiled machine on the platform that was built for you to do. So when you’re going to other platforms, let’s say you go to booking.com you are kind of opening yourself to a lot more scams.

Jon Bell:                               03:24                     You kinda gotta open up and process your own credit cards. It’s just different, right? It’s a lot more steps to kind of go through that Airbnb just solves, right? When somebody books on Airbnb, they’re just booked. You get a notification like, Hey, somebody is coming to stay and it’s all done. Booking.Com and most of the other platforms, you have to take either an extra step or there’s extra fees involved with them providing a service to you that you don’t have to pay with an Airbnb.

Julian Sage:                         03:57                     And Jon, in the Facebook groups and part of the host nation, we always hear people that are complaining a lot about Airbnb. They say, you know, Airbnb injustice and all this negativity towards Airbnb. People should stray away from that. You know, being a professional host having over 30 listings now you know a thing or two about listing on multiple sites, on your direct booking site. What are your thoughts on Airbnb for new hosts?

Jon Bell:                               04:21                     100%! For new hosts, it is the best place to start. Okay. If we could change the conversation a bit, or let’s say you get comfortable with Airbnb and you’re like, Hey, I want to expand now you want to bring in that PMs system and you want to put your things on the next platform, the next platform that everybody should roll in after they’ve got a little bit of experience under their belt. It’s HomeAway, and VRBO. That platform is going to be pretty good. Just a couple in with Airbnb. There’s a lot of support for it with all of the tools that we talk about within the show. That’s your smartBNB, that’s your PMs system. These things are pretty standard for those two booking platforms, so you can add it in without too much stress, but there are some nuances and things that are different.

Jon Bell:                               05:14                     Four VRBO and HomeAway, you have to pay or you should pay as a professional host, the $500 annual fee just to get your commissions down just a bit, or else they add another 5% fee on top of all of your bookings. Let’s compare the two platforms just for one second. Airbnb has about 80 million visitors per month. Airbnb has also booked more than Hilton hotels. I believe last year. So that’s 2018. That shows you the growth of just Airbnb as a whole. Homeaway and VRBO is a smaller footprint, but it’s a different crowd. Let’s talk about the crowd. Your HomeAway visitor or guest, typically, will be older. Let’s make sure that your place can accommodate somebody that’s older. This might mean you can’t have just apps on your TV without some type of app, cable subscription service where somebody could still click through channels and kind of have to change the way that we think because our audience grabbed is just a tad bit different.

Jon Bell:                               06:30                     We got to remember HomeAway has been out for a very long time, so there’s a lot of older people that know, Hey, I just go here. I don’t know about this Airbnb thing. They probably believe all the bad hype about it and say I don’t want to stay at those places. Not knowing you can book them both from the same place. The advantage of the difference in crowd, you can charge more on HomeAway and BRBO then you can on Airbnb 100% I book more for more money on HomeAway and VRVO than I do on Airbnb. Airbnb is my budget booking resource. It also books differently. It books last minute almost when you got pricing right, it should book last minute. You shouldn’t be booked up a month, month and a half ahead unless you know you are in a low season and you just want to just ride out the low season as low as you can or get booked up so you have some revenue. So that’s good. A good strategy for low season but I want to keep some of my availability for my HomeAway guests that come in and just pay me just more per booking. Again, I want you to book so I’m going to post it and have it out there with all the pictures. Homeaway can hold up to 50 pictures. That’s great. I’m telling the full story I got, I got everything you need. I’m taking picture of toilet paper, paper towels, you know Julian’s right there. You can take some photos while he’s in there.

Jon Bell:                               08:04                     Outside of that, the next platform you should really kind of roll in should be, I would say booking.com booking.com is one of those. It is more of the national, or I’m sorry, it’s more of the international booking platform. This is where you can pull in guests from all kinds of different countries. They can come in and you’re just really opened up your, your listing to a broader audience. They have about 450 million visitors per month, so that’s a huge audience. That’s more than 10 times of the other two channels, so you want to be out there, but you also expose yourself to a whole different type of experience. Like I said, fraud scams, credit cards that are fraudulent. People that want to exchange checks a stays. This is stuff that you kinda just, you have to allow yourself to accept or just know that, Hey, this is what it is.

Jon Bell:                               09:05                     It’s fake. I don’t have to worry about it. It doesn’t have to stress you out. But Airbnb has precautions in place that you don’t get these things. So just remember Airbnb was built for this. It’s similar to like Uber being built for us to share cars and pick up people. If we were to just say, Hey everybody, just use this other taxi app that’s been out for the longest time and get this CB radio and I’ve got this roto Dao number and we’re going to go and you’re going to go pick up people and you couldn’t accept credit cards and you can only do cash. Or if you did cards, you gotta pay like this other person to do it. It’s similar to all of that. So when bringing in a different booking channel, keep that in mind. We’ve got a PMs that’s going to tie everything together that’s going to make all the bookings just seamless, communicate with each other so you’re not double booking.

Jon Bell:                               09:59                     You don’t want to double book. That’s a very, very, very bad thing. You got to cancel on somebody. If you ever have to do that, pick the right platform to do it. That’s all I can say there. There are other notable platforms. You’ve got flipped key, you got ’em, TripAdvisor. These are all notable places that people go to book things. Eventually. If you are really trying to be a pro in this market, you will always pick up platforms, post your listing because you don’t want somebody not to be able to find your place when they’re looking to stay. Everybody isn’t always going to go to the same channel. The book, you just want to make sure you don’t have a inquiry problem. When you’re trying to book a place, you want to make sure that you got more inquiries than you do listings. That way you can kind of scale, you know, Hey, if I get 30 people that are asking for a rental in this one place, maybe I should expand in this area.

Jon Bell:                               11:02                     This is how I’ve been able to kind of expand where I’ve expanded just because I see that people hate, they like this place, this area, right? So I want to get more in this one concentrated area versus spreading out. Made me just to a cooler building. Right. Again, one of my lessons learned was don’t always go for the cool building because the building didn’t really bring the people. It’s really the location, so having a pole, a nice jam, all that other stuff wasn’t really what I needed to go for it. They just loved being in a nice sweet spot of places.

Julian Sage:                         11:39                     So Jon, what it really sounds like is that you’re really just looking for inquiries when you’re planning on expanding out to different platforms. It really just comes down to how many people are asking about your property and what I thought. I think it’s really key that you said earlier was that you know with Airbnb you’re going to be getting different types of inquiries.

Julian Sage:                         11:58                     These are going to be people that are hang a little bit less. They are going to be typically more last minute and the people that are on let’s say booking.com these are going to be, you know, more internationals and the people that are on HomeAway and VRBO, this is going to be an older crowd, but really it sounds like it comes down to how many inquiries you’re getting for your property.

Jon Bell:                               12:20                     Definitely inquiries equal customers. The more inquiries you have, the more customers you’ll have that book your place. The more inquiries you have, the more popular your places to be booked. You want to make sure that you don’t strangle the flow of inquiries just by sticking with one channel. You want that flow of inquiries to be as large as possible.

Julian Sage:                         12:44                     So the two big questions would be what is it a good time to expand to other platforms? And out of all the platforms that you’re on, where are you getting the most inquiries for your properties?

Jon Bell:                               12:56                     All right, so still the bulk of my inquiries come from Airbnb. Again, it’s nice to have them there, but when I get an inquiry at it, HomeAway, I’m paying more attention to that inquiry just because it’s a different booking. My Airbnb booking might be right at my minimum stay of three days. My HomeAway bookings normally are five to seven days. They’re also further out. People will book a year out, which I think is crazy. I prefer to book my holidays as we go into the holiday season on HomeAway than I do Airbnb. Again, because those guests, they treat the place a little bit different. They’re a little bit older at the same time, they pay a lot more. Booking.Com is still also a very good place to be in any season because you can still squeeze a little bit more out of the booking at the same time.

Jon Bell:                               13:55                     Your outreach for that guest is now international. That’s great. Airbnb is still very nice with this space. Again, it was built for it. So yes, the majority of my inquiries come from Airbnb. Okay. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t expand to other platforms. We’re going into a low season right here in D C I’m gonna end up probably not getting that many inquiries on Airbnb just because it’s about to be cold. Right? When it gets cold and you don’t have a ski like area, then people don’t really come. So I just have to endure that low season. And the best way I found to do that is to book longer and higher on other platforms. And when is a good time to start reaching out and expanding your platform? You’re starting off on Airbnb. When should you be adding these different, I would say for everybody out there, once you get comfortable with Airbnb, when I mean by comfortable is you gotta really get good at interacting with guests.

Jon Bell:                               15:01                     Do you want to get a good solid foundation? I would prefer everybody’s a super host at least on Airbnb before they go to expand to multiple places or booking channels just because you should have mastered something. I feel like that little bit of badge that you get from Airbnb just kinda, you know, it lets you know that Hey, you’re doing something right. You want to keep up those same standards on all the other platforms that you’re on. I would say if that means that you only take your one listing and then put on all the other channels, you can do that. You don’t have to have multiples just to go to other platforms. Now there are some restrictions on some platforms like Expedia, I believe you have to have a minimum of four to get published by them. Booking.Com has realized that this short term rental space is a space that they could really get in and dominate as well.

Jon Bell:                               16:00                     They’re going to be the second friendliest within the next year or two years as Airbnb on just allowing hosts to kind of post their properties and actually work with us to make sure that we’re putting our best foot forward and they’re actually doing their best to integrate everything that we need from them. So that will probably be another good place to be.

Julian Sage:                         16:23                     That’s really good information Jon because I think a lot of people when they’re getting into the space, they feel overwhelmed because it’s like, man, there’s all these different channels. Now I have to hook up the PMS and I actually have to look up the dynamic pricing and the automated messaging and now I have to be on all these different channels and have all these different calendars with all these different cleaners. But the thing is is that you and really just start off on one and as you become confident, as you become comfortable and once you’ve really mastered just one platform, then you can start focusing and worrying about adding on because like John was saying, the majority of his bookings are coming from Airbnb, but when you are trying to increased your inquiries, you do want to expand onto other channels, but there is no rush or that you can start off on one and then once you build up that confidence, then considered adding on to multiple platforms.

Julian Sage:                         17:15                     But lots of really good information in this one, guys. We wanted to just cover everything and make sure that you are feeling comfortable and that’s you’re not stopping yourself from moving forward just because of all these different tools. You really just have to focus on on the primary. Where are you getting the majority and then start to scale up.

Jon Bell:                               17:32                     With all that being said, host nation. Keep on hosting. Hope you hosts found value in this episode. If you did, please go on over to iTunes and leave us a review. That would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with Jon, the community, and I, then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation, talk to you hosts in the next episode. Keep on hosting.