16 Expert Tips to Immediately Get More Airbnb Bookings

By Jasper

November 11, 2019

Your Airbnb business, just like a hotel, relies on bookings. Here’s an expert list of how to get more Airbnb bookings.

The number one influence in getting more bookings is…getting found.

You could have the best listing ever, with world-class, phenomenal service, but if you aren’t getting seen, how will anyone book you?

Your booking inquiries correlates to the number of users that find your listing in the Airbnb search results.

They say the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google.

The same applies to Airbnb listings.

Therefore, the secret for how to increase your Airbnb occupancy is to get your listing on the first page.

To understand how you can achieve this, you need to understand how Airbnb determines these search results. Airbnb aims to show users the listings that they are most likely to book, as that’s how they make money. In addition, they promote hosts who take good care of their guests. Let’s look at this in more detail.

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How to get more Airbnb bookings: improve your search ranking

Airbnb uses a search algorithm that calculates a unique ranking for each search performed on Airbnb. They take many factors into account. Some of these are based on the guests’ personal preferences.

Related Reading: Airbnb SEO: How to Improve Your Search Visibility

Others are based on your listing and your behavior as a host and these are 100% within your control.

There are over a million listings worldwide. You can’t just plop your listing on there and hope something will happen.

You can, however, be both strategic and creative and think like a business person when it comes to your listing.

The trick is to use Airbnb SEO to optimize your listing and get more views and bookings.

How to increase views on Airbnb

Airbnb takes into consideration a lot of factors.

Hosts who don’t let their calendar get a month or more out of date are 70% more likely to get booked.

– Airbnb

A lot of these factors take daily consideration: updating your calendar daily, updating prices regularly, answering messages lightning fast. They can be considerably boosted using automated property management tools.

Why is my listing not showing up on Airbnb?

Airbnb has published some of the factors that they use to determine which listings show up. The main ones are:

Booking appeal: Airbnb recommends that you “make the title and description attractive and informative” and “explain what makes your space unique.”
Price: The more competitively priced your listing, the more likely guests will be to book your home. This results in greater revenue for Airbnb.
Number of reviews: Positive reviews greatly increase the chance that your place gets booked. This is essential when you start out, having a few positive reviews versus none is a big deal!
Trust and Verification: Add as many verifications as you can.
Photos: These play a major role in getting your place booked, make an appointment with the Airbnb photographer is you haven’t yet.
Responsiveness: Respond to every single message and aim to respond within one hour. I know you have to sleep sometime, you can use a service like Hospitable to ensure all messages get responded to within minutes.
Updated calendar: From the guests’ perspective, making an inquiry just to find out that the place is unavailable even though it showed up as available is terrible. Always make sure your calendar is updated by visiting your calendar on a daily basis. You can automate this using automated property management tools.
Acceptance rate: You are free to decline certain booking requests, but don’t be too strict as this will hurt your search ranking. Give some guests the benefit of the doubt, 99% of the time it will turn out well.
Pricing: You have to assign the right price to your property based on demand, competition and more. You can also use Airbnb pricing tools to help you stay on top of this daily.
Cancellation: Never cancel a reservation, this causes great inconvenience to your guests and Airbnb doesn’t take cancelation lightly. Make sure you understand the Airbnb cancellation policy.
Instant Book: Listings that can be booked without first making an inquiry get booked more often and are therefore favored by Airbnb.
Social connections: Connect your Facebook account, Airbnb will show the user if you have friend in common.
In addition to these factors, you should also do anything that improves your listings’ appeal or your guests’ experience. It makes sense that Airbnb looks at these factors as well, although this is not confirmed.
Number of Bookings: A booking is always better than no booking.
Referrals: You can request friends and family to write you a referral. This is specifically important if you have no or little reviews.
Log in frequently: There is no harm in showing Airbnb that you’re an active host.
Write responses to your reviews: This shows that you care about your guests and only takes a few minutes. Look for examples of guest review responses for inspiration.

How to increase views on Airbnb

Follow these three steps to improve your Airbnb search rank.

1) Do a search on Airbnb for your type of listing

Specify type (entire house, private room or shared space) and size (1-bdr, 2-bdr etc). Don’t fill in any dates to make sure all relevant listings show up.

First, search for your neighborhood and note your listing’s position (i.e. page 2, no. 8). Now do another search for your entire city and note the position.

2) Make adjustments to your listing according to the factors mentioned above

3) Repeat step 1) once a week for the next few months

If you implement the suggestions in the article you should see your listing’s position in the search results improve within a few weeks.

Here’s a fun video I created that summarizes this article.