The Battle for the Bookings: Airbnb vs Vrbo vs Booking
Hosting an Airbnb isn’t easy by all accounts. The amount of care and time management you’d have to invest in in order to ensure the safety, security, and comfort of your guests should come first above all else. But aside from taking care of your guests’ needs during their stay, you should also consider investing time in attracting more guests to your property.
Luckily, there are a lot of online platforms that allow you to interact with your potential guests, enabling you to post photos, features, and descriptions about the space, well enough for people to see what it has to offer.
With that in mind, you have the opportunity to choose from three major lodging platforms in the short-term rental industry today. While they may have the same purpose, they all feature different characteristics that may or may not be advantageous to your Airbnb business.
To help you decide which ones would work best for you, we have written down a couple of information about them and their basic features.
1. Using Airbnb
Airbnb definitely makes it easy to post insightful information about the property. You may put photos and a list of features on the platform; you may also post the pricing of your space for rent. If guests have further questions or clarifications about the property, they may utilize the messaging channel of the site. If you do not feel like answering many inquiries within the day, feel free to fill out the FAQ section for more details about the rooms, amenities, offered activities, etc.
Take note that Airbnb has a section for former guests where they may leave reviews about their experience with the place. They may even leave a star rating and a long paragraph informing others whether they had a great time or otherwise, so be sure to tidy up the place before they arrive and to provide anything that they’d need during their stay.
2. Using Vrbo
Vrbo is similar to Airbnb in many ways. They are both platforms for vacation rentals, they both enable the hosts to post photos of the location, and they both have sections where the features and amenities of the place can be listed down for the potential guests to see.
They also feature a Trip Board, a bookmark function that enables the interested guests to save the venue page for when they’re finally ready to rent out the vacation rental.
2. Using Booking.com
This online platform is a bit different than the first two. This can be attributed to the fact that it is mainly designed for hotels and businesses rather than the average bed and breakfast. For this very same reason, Booking.com does not give its host the chance to cancel the guest’s reservation, forcing them to accept any customer that confirms their time and date of stay, even though they may badly behave towards the host. This option is available in Airbnb, making it more viable than this last platform.
Booking.com is also targeted mainly towards mature guests rather than younger individuals who like to mingle with hosts and other guests alike. The disparity in target markets may also be detrimental for a host who mainly wants to entertain millennials rather than older executives.
Conclusion
Whichever platform you’d choose for your vacation rental, keep in mind that they all offer varying features. The advantage you’d experience from one platform may not be as present in another. Only by knowing their basic functionalities and sections will you be able to decide which one works best for you and your rental business. So choose wisely, invest enough time to prepare your venue, and treat every guest like a VIP.
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