Earn $1000/night by Mastering Airbnb Booking Windows

welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast I'm happy you're here again uh I'm excited at the time of this recording I'm heading to another uh conference the Str wealth conference in Nashville so I'm actually recording this a little bit ahead of time uh at one of my properties here in Tennessee they'll be heading over there soon and one of the things that I'm sure are going is going to come up at the conference is pricing it's massive but also booking windows and so today we're

going to talk about booking Windows the differences between some of them and why they're different uh and just a couple five top takeaways things that you should be doing with your short-term rental making sure you're not leaving any money on the table so the first thing is our book and window let's just describe that real quickly that is the amount of time that one of your guests has in between the moment they make their reservation and the date they check in so if today I was

going to check in one month from now uh and I made my reservation today that would mean that my my booking window for that specific reservation was a month and now a lot of times we look at the average booking window for a property uh actually sadly I think a lot of people don't even know the average so we're going to if you're not using a dynamic pricing tool yet please make sure you're using one or working with someone that has one and can help you

with it we use price Labs uh but there's other ones like Beyond pricing or wheelhouse um so just make sure grab one of those I swear it's it's one of the best pieces of technology for a short-term rental and they have tons and tons of tools this booking window is just one of those so in that example that booking window was one month a lot of times we just look at the average booking window across the year but the booking window changes and so some of

the reasons it might change first of all is because of seasonality so one of the top reasons why your booking window might be changing is because of a big event so let's say Taylor Swift was coming to town uh and everyone knew it it was public you better believe that your property is going to rent up a lot faster than it normally would which means that that booking window would be bigger or longer for that specific event for Taylor Swift coming to town let's say she's

coming to town in 6 months and everyone just found out well you're probably going to sell out a lot further out in advance than you normally would so that's one thing we need to be weary of and if we're using a price tool like price Labs we can go back historically and look at the average booking times before these big events so a lot of common ones New Year's Christmas um you know these things we can go back and we can see when people were booking

these reservations and so that is one other difference aside from having our average booking window we have different booking windows for top events uh we also have different booking Windows um for days of the week really uh so if we have weekend dates those are probably going to book up a little sooner than weekday dates most of the time of course we have to understand our actual market right if we're a very business friendly sort of short-term rental maybe a lot of our midweek dates get

filled up sooner uh and so those are just things that we need to check out one other example that's really easy to see is that the longer the reservation typically the further out someone's going to book that reservation so if you have a medium-term rental for example and you have it on Airbnb someone booking a month-long stay is usually going to put a little more thought and and ask a few more questions on that and book it further out in advance than a weekend stay so

uh the length of our reservation also uh attributes a lot to that booking window so lots of different booking Windows going on here uh I think a good place to start is just knowing the average booking window across the year that's at least going to help you set up some of your discounts and prices without being too too far off so another really cool tool that we have available in price laabs I'm sure this is available in the other software programs too is the ability to

actually set a minimum expire Hing price so what do I mean by that let's say Taylor Swift's coming to town and you think your property is going to rent for $2,000 for that night or $5,000 or whatever it happens to be or maybe for multiple nights so the whole weekend you think you can get those rates but you don't want to risk not getting a reservation at all and wait too long holding out to get those prices so what you could do is say well I

think most people going to a Taylor Swift concert they're probably going to plan that out get their flights do all that ahead of time um I think they're probably going to have that all figured out within 3 weeks of the actual concert and so I'm going to set my minimum expiring prices these really high th000 night stays to expire after that 3 weeks so I'm going to hope to get those prices but if I haven't gotten them by that time then that price is going to

expire and my price will go back to being priced dynamically So based off Market occupancy the seasonality all those other types of things uh you of course always have a minimum rate uh for your property but this is a little different this is a minimum rate specifically for a a um a date out in the future uh so hopefully that didn't confuse you too much if you have no idea what I'm talking about well make sure that you jump online and you look for one of

these programs or that you're working with someone uh that knows how to use the these tools okay so we talked about a few of the reasons why we might have different booking Windows throughout the year so we we have the events uh we have some seasonality we have the length of a reservation so the longer the reservation is uh the that's going to impact the booking window as well uh but there's also another one that's sort of a little bit more subtle and that's when we

launch a new property so let's say you have a brand new property that you're launching we know that we get a little bit of Boost from the OTAs so OTA Airbnb or booking.com they want us to rent our property so that we continue to rent it and we continue to stay on their platform where they're earning money as well uh so we get a little boost uh it could be that our booking window for those first three or five reservations that you get from that higher

visibility is like 3 days or 4 days or something but once some of that visibility goes away your booking Windows going to change too it's probably not going to get booked so quickly so there is something to say about the length of time your property's been listed online and how visible it really is so if you have a ton of reviews and they're really good reviews you're much more visible on the platforms when you have Open dates you're probably going to get booked a little faster

than a property that doesn't have that so the booking window can actually change based on property which is a little uh a little confusing too you know in other words uh the things that are high in demand go for first right so the best restaurants the tables get reserved first uh but a good way to to understand this is just to look at our competition we can do that with these pricing tools and we can see occupancies in our neighborhood around our property at any given

time uh in real time so book and windows are also sort of like they're very similar to pacing we've talked a little bit about pacing before so pacing is is basically how the curent current state of our property compares to this same time last year so if right now your property's 50% booked for the next month we can compare that uh with last year at the same time and if it was only 40% booked then you know you're doing a little better than last year right

so it's sort of some of the same uh metrics going in there also something that's very important that we want to know but a little different uh than our booking windows so there are also some trends that are happening with booking Windows right and these booking windows don't stay the same all the time they change they change all the time and one of those big trends as you know was covid people were booking very last minute because they didn't know if they were going to be

able to fly if they were going to be able to get a a flight or uh if if the rules in that city were going to change or lock things down or whatever it happens to be so we have to consider some of the things happening in our economy too um if Reg regulations changed overnight uh and that limited the supply of short-term rentals in an area well with less properties the booking window for those properties if they still have the same amount of demand is

probably going to go down right so we we need to look at all of our numbers and make sure that if we had discount setup for example uh that started 30 days out that if our booking window changes and everyone is booking 15 days out that we're we're leaving money on the table right we're we're discounting too soon in other words so Trends in the economy uh Trends in in your particular City or neighborhood can affect your booking window too remember travel is easier than it's

ever been uh if you miss last week's episode go back and check it out I talked about being on a cruise ship for 15 days I had internet out in the middle of nowhere uh and so people can work from wherever they want they're booking last minute I actually did a whole episode a separate episode on this that was episode 206 talking about how it's easier to travel than ever uh and that's affecting the booking windows so because it's easier to travel people are booking later

on more last minute this is a nationwide Trend I think it's going to continue down this route I mean someone can literally pull up their phone book a flight book a hotel uh and book a short-term rental all which uh Google has ability to do now uh in very very little time and so I think this is going to continue but it's really important I've got some just takeaways for you some actionable tips for you to implement with your property if you're not already doing so

so I have five tips for you here real quick just to sort of sum things up and also make sure you're not leaving money on the table uh number one make sure you using a dynamic pricing tool so uh if you're not head over to rest methods.com you can see our recommended resources there you can see the one that we use uh but there's also several others uh just make sure that you're using one of them so you have access to this data uh the second

thing is understand your book and windows so understanding your average book and window throughout the year is a great start remember last year's performance isn't going to predict the future things are changing so we need to look into it a little further and understand the book and window based on events based on the length of stay based on the day of week uh so just make sure you dig into that a little bit more um so make sure you have a pricing tool make sure that

you understand your booking windows remember this is the third thing remember that these things are changing and so trends like co uh like the whole remote work possibilities those are changing our booking Windows number four experiment with those minimum expiring prices so if you really want to lock in a super high price for New Year's uh but you don't want to wait till the very last minute to lower your prices you can set this out a month two months out in advance to try to capture

that but also make sure that you still secure booking so experiment with that and the last one and this one's really important is make sure that your last minute discounts are not starting too far out in the future so if your average booking window is 7 Days someone's booking your property usually last minute within 7 days you don't want to start discounts 20 days into the future because no one's even looking at your property then yet right uh and so make sure you take a look

at those again these are all tools that you can find available in a dynamic pricing tool you can also look at the booking windows and historic averages I know this is a little uh a little more detailed this week uh hopefully I didn't lose you anywhere there so until next week I hope that gave you a little bit of insight I hope your pricing is optimized your property staying booked at the highest rates possible and I hope you have a fabulous week talk to you soon

want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals well it all starts with the properties you acquire but you want want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is no charge it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to rest methods.com that's reest methods.com