Do this to get an unfair advantage on Airbnb (12 tips)

Airbnb is hard, especially if you're just getting started out, and especially if you're in an area with high competition. And so, in this video, I'm going to give you 12 hacks that are going to enable you to get an unfair advantage over your competition. Some of these are going to give you more time, some are going to give you more money, some are going to give you more bookings, some are a little bit in the dark arts region, but you know, that's what we're here for.

No one ever gets hurt from bending a few rules. If you're new here, what's the crack? My name is Dave and my company manages over 75 properties welcoming over 18,000 guests a year right here in Belfast.

And so my first tip is how to hack your competitors. Now I've got two options for you with this one. So first is for people who are just getting started out and they're looking to see if an area is going to work.

Maybe they're looking at an apartment in a building or maybe looking at a house on a street. This is how you find out whether it's going to work and whether the guests are going to be happy. So we can do AirDNA to look at the rates and how much occupancy and everything you're going to get.

Yeah, whatever. We know that you've done that. But here's a way to find out whether the guests will actually be happy.

So what you want to do is open up some competitors that are in that building or in that street. Copy all of the reviews. I mean all of them, as many as you can get.

Put them into Chachi BT and tell Chachi BT analyze these reviews. Give me a summary on what guests think is good about the building or the street or the area and what things they think are bad. Also get it to tell you what they think the things in the apartments in the properties themselves are good because that's going to give you valuable knowledge that when you're getting set up that you know to put those same things in because if you're doing your research on AirDNA and the numbers look good but then you do this chatbt review research and you find out that guests all hate the area.

You're going to know that running this business is going to be a constant battle between disappointed guests and you just trying to firefight every booking that comes through >> and that's not good. Now the second thing you can use chatbt for in this context because in reality you can use chatbt for almost anything in this business. It's incredible.

But the second thing is for established host. So if you're already up and running, this is what I would recommend you do. What I've done here is basically what I've told you to do for new properties.

You don't have one yet, but I've done it for one that I have that we own. So I've pasted in all the reviews and I've asked it analyze these reviews. Give me feedback on areas of strength and also areas for improvement.

This first one is just one of the reviews. So, these are from brookin. com.

There's tons in here. It takes their names, the scores they give for everything as well as the actual comments that they left on the reviews. So, you can see I put quite a lot in here.

Oh my god. Let me get to the bottom. So, here's an analysis based on the reviews.

So, strengths, central and convenient location, accessibility, cleanliness and presentation, facilities. So, it's all these things people are consistently talking about in the reviews and giving us high scores of effective communication, staff responsiveness, and value for money. Now, it does do areas for improvement.

I'll show you them. No, no secrets here. What I want this to do, what I want this information to inform is I'm always talking about how when you're picking your titles and picking your descriptions that you need to put in those what are the most talked about things in your reviews.

So, if all the guests come and say it's 3 minutes walk to a football stadium or it's the hot tub in the back that's the best thing, that is what you need to be putting in your title, certainly in your descriptions and if you can in your photos. The other thing about the titles and the descriptions is you're putting in things that can't be seen in photos. So, a conveniently located place to a shop or to the best restaurant in town, you can't really put that in a photo.

But if guests are raving about it in reviews, you need to be putting it in the title because if everyone who stays loves it, well, that's a great draw for people who don't even know about it yet. You can draw them in using that. So, areas for improvement, we'll brush over this.

Housekeeping and maintenance. Yeah, this is why it's good as well. Okay, this is a temp check, a health check on what's going wrong here.

Now the team might not see this on a daily basis but when you put this into chatbt you can see trends coming. So we can't do anything about the corridors and stairs. We can do something about cleanliness.

We can certainly do something about not having enough utensils and dishes like that. We need to do that. I'm going to action that today actually.

And this bin and waste disposal instructions. Yeah, in this building you got to go on a little bit of a trek to find where the bins go. It's so clear now has presented that to us.

So this is valuable because it highlights your blind spots, the things that guests complain about. So you can just fix them. What I used it then was said using the strength give me some suggestions of what to put in my listings title and description what I was talking about.

So suggested listing titles modern and spacious apartment in central Belfast secure parking botless bright and central walk free parking secure parking. Secure parking gets mentioned a lot. The location is mentioned a lot as well.

You know you don't just use these. You use these as inspiration. But you can see here that if a lot of guests are talking about in their positive reviews about why secure free underground parking was such a big draw and it's such a big thing for them.

If we put it in the title, that's going to just attract more people who want that and need that to click our listing and hopefully book it. And then in the description, it can go a bit deeper. So, why guests love our apartment, the location, it's clean and comfortable, the beds, the secure parking, the amenities, the hosts.

Again, this is just used for inspiration, but this gives you just stuff to talk about that people are going to be like, "Oh, that's quite interesting. " Then they're going to read the reviews and they're going to be like, "Oh, yeah. Everyone actually is saying how about how good this stuff is.

" So, Chach here. If you're not using it, you're seriously missing out. It is catapulting businesses forward.

You need to be on it. You need to be utilizing it to help grow your business. Next up, I want to tell you about what to do when things start to get a bit overwhelming.

Now, if you're just starting out with one, you might not be overwhelmed. or actually you might be overwhelmed with just every little thing is overwhelming. But once you get once you get going, once you get into the groove, things tend to systemize out and you get you get a bit of get a bit of time back, but if you're in the process of growing or if you're in the process of well, if you have a job still, if you have a young family and your phone is just going constantly, you might start to feel overwhelmed and you might start to think, I wish I could just get some help with this.

And you're thinking, well, I can't go and employ someone because we as Airbnb hosts feel like this is not a proper business where we can get employees. So you think you're stuck, but you're not stuck. Let me show you.

So this is Upwork. This is a freelancer website. There are other ones like Fiverr, People per Hour.

There's other ones as well. But what you can find on here is people who want to help you with your business. They're all around the world and they do it at some very competitive rates.

So if we look here, I'm going to just search for an Airbnb virtual assistant. And look at the opportunities that are coming up here. So for $6 an hour, you can get MM to help you with your messaging and any of your other Airbnb stuff.

And these people exist all around the world. $3 an hour for Amara. She has a 100% job success.

So like everyone who's used her and paid her over $30,000 have been happy with the job she's done and she's charging $3 an hour. Like what could she help you with? I mean, let's just click into her and see because she's obviously smashing it.

She does listing optimization, dynamic pricing strategies, guest communication. Here's a full list of stuff. Like there's tons of stuff.

You know the stuff. It's all the stuff that you do that you hate doing that you're like, "Oh, I wish I could get someone else to do that, but I can't employ someone at like 40 grand a year plus a pension plus holiday pay and maternity pay. " Freelancers, freelancers, virtual assistants open up and unlock everything.

You could get Amara to come and help you for a week while you go on holiday and you know, you can just switch your phone off for a week and Amara is going to be looking after it. Now, that's obviously a simplified thing. You wouldn't just give it to her straight away.

you would ease her in, train her, practice it, like do a little test. But you get the point. It's freedom.

It unlocks peace of mind. You're doubling your time because for $3 an hour, you're getting an extra person who's going to be hopefully as engaged in the business as you. All right.

Next up, we've already talked about how you can use real people to help you with these things. Maybe $3 an hour is still too expensive for you, or you just don't like the thought of outsourcing your stuff to another person that could get sick, have a day off, basically send a really nasty message if they're having a bad day to one of your guests. There is an other option as well.

Also, these people need to sleep and have their own holidays. There are options for 24/7 guest communication. Touched on chatbt already, but the world of AI the AI world.

The world is being disrupted by AI. And one of the best and most exciting things that I've seen is AI replies, AI guest communication. There are multiple options out there.

I know guesty offer it. There's one called Bestie AI as well. And basically what you do is you train these AI models because they're basically just like dumb robots at the start.

Don't robots the start robots. >> You train them with your guest manuals. They like watch you and your messages and they see the tone you use, the type of words you use, the length of messages you use, and it learns and learns and learns.

And then one day you turn on Skynet and it just it takes over and it just starts replying to your messages on your behalf and it writes them the way you write them. It writes them. It knows everything about your property because you fed it and taught it and trained it the information.

But the key here is it's not just good because it replies for you and it saves you a bit of time, but it replies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year within minutes. So none of this, I'm out with my family having dinner. I'll reply to that later.

Oh, the booking's gone already. This thing replies instantly. It can even hook in to your calendar.

So it actually knows if you've got gaps on either side of the booking that the guest is talking about. And it can actually offer upselles and say, "Oh, you know, we actually have a spare night after the day you're due to check out. You know, we're willing to give it to you for a massively discounted price.

Would you be interested? " So, it's actually making you money, working for you on your behalf in the background. For me, I think it's one of the biggest game changers that's going to absolutely dominate this this industry.

Airbnb themselves are already using all these chat bots. That's why it's so [ __ ] hard to get through to anyone. But, we can use this ourselves.

And this is like a million little robots, million little AIs, not terminators, that are helping us to run our business and to just get our time back and run things more smoothly. Next up, I talk about this in almost every video, but every time I coach someone or have a call with them, almost everyone still has not done it. And I want you to think about it like this.

Imagine you sold something. Imagine you sold a phone and you decided, right, I'm going to get it into the shops. Now, I only know the UK shops here, but say you sold it in Tesco.

You're just selling your phone in Tesco and people are buying it and it's great but then Marks and Spencers comes knocking little Sainsburries all the waitros all the other ones and you're like no no no I selling Tesco it doesn't make any sense. What if Tesco closes down? What if Tesco gets a cyber attack and can't work anymore?

This is what we're talking about when hosts only list their property on Airbnb. It's madness. It's absolute madness putting all your eggs in Airbnb's basket and you have to be prepared that someone is going to go and kick that [ __ ] basket across the room because that could happen.

Airbnb could go down. Airbnb could get cancelled for some reason. Everyone could just leave that platform.

So, you owe it to your business. You owe it to your family, for your livelihood to not just list on Airbnb. Get on as many different booking sites as possible.

And the way to do that without overwhelming yourself and having a million different loginins that you're I need to learn how to do Xedia now. I need to learn how to do Booking. com.

Now, forget all that. Get a PMS property management system, one like guest. It's the best on the market.

It is the system that can build your listings in these different platforms. Everything is managed from the one guesty dashboard. They can take your payments there.

They can do all your reporting. There's no like, well, I'll do my analytics in Airbnb and then I'll do my analytics and booking. com and try and marry them together because Booking.

com says your Airbnb bookings are closed off ones. So, it's a mess. And I juggle all these separately and independently.

The best thing you can do for your business is to use a PMS like Guestie. And if you want to use Guestie, I have a killer discount code below if you're using Guesty Light, which is for one to three properties and get you 50% off. Yes, that's right.

50% off. If you're using Guestie Pro, that's if you have four or more properties and get you 20% off the onboarding and the first year. It's still good, but there's a lot more bells and whistles in Pro.

All right, next up, one thing I kind of like kind of take a bit of sadistic pleasure in is knowing that all the bad guests that we turn away end up having to stay in our competitor's place and our competitors end up hosting them and dealing with all this [ __ ] So, the tip here is have a really strong vetting procedure. This is how you're getting ahead of your competitors because you're not accepting those bad guests. They're not coming in damaging your property, costing you money, annoying your cleaners and your neighbors and your reputation, and just giving you general stress.

Oh, no. When you have a strong vetting procedure, you stop those bookings at source. As soon as they've booked, you get on the phone, you deal with them, and if you find out that they're here for not nice things, >> no, sorry, pal.

>> You just cancel them, and then they have to go to your competitors, and they can deal with all the [ __ ] If you're not vetting your guests and every booking that comes in, you are a ticking time bomb and you're going to let someone really nasty come into your place and it's going to be horrible. Maybe it's already happened and I'm sure if it has, you would not want that to happen again. Get a strong vetting procedure.

I have one that I use in the Airbnb success blueprint below. Turn them away. Do not let them in.

Once they're in, it's so much harder to get them out again. Your minute alarm is going off. Your neighbors are phoning you.

It's chaos. It's horrible. You don't want to have to deal with that in the middle of the night.

The best thing to do is just not let them in in the first place. Send them to your competitors and let them deal with them. Next up, and this is a tip that's going to get you a few extra quid in your pocket potentially from every single guest that comes to stay with you.

In most places, unless you're like a remote cottage in the middle of nowhere where guests just come for like a silent retreat. In most places of people who watch this channel, you're going to be in an area where people come to you for tourism and they're going to go to like restaurants and bars and tours and attractions and stuff like that. Now, they're going to go there anyway.

So, you may as well strike a deal with those tours, bars, restaurants, attractions, everything else to say, I will send all my guests to you. I will give a personal recommendation, a local recommendation, and I'm going to send you a 100red, a,000, 18,000 guests a year to you. What's that worth?

And you can get these set up very very easily. We have them set up in Belfast with Titanic, with some of the sightseeing tours, some of the restaurants. You can get a QR code or a link that all these tours and operators, they have a margin.

They give you a margin to play with could be 20%. And you can just split that in half and say, "Okay, we'll take a 10% referral fee and we'll offer our guests a 10% discount. " Now, everyone wins there.

And if you tell those guests, listen, I can get a 10% off in Titanic Belfast or wherever it is in your place, they're going to be like, "Oh [ __ ] right. Definitely. I definitely want discounted price.

>> It's an absolute no-brainer. It's a money-making machine because it goes out in your automated emails. You do nothing for it.

It's a link. The guest then clicks and goes and makes the booking and all the rest and then you just get steady stream of referral income. If you're not doing this, it could be hundreds or thousands of pounds or dollars a year.

So, have those conversations, reach out, make sure it's the best places. Don't go for like really [ __ ] ones because you're going to get negative reviews. If you've sent the guest to a [ __ ] tour, it's not worth it for like $10.

And that brings us on to another way. just squeeze a little bit more monies out of those guests. They're all going to ask for stuff that we don't really want to give them.

It's going to be early check-ins, late checkouts, it's someone's birthday, could you do something nice? It's Valentine's Day. Do you know anyone who can pick us up from the airport?

Can we leave our luggage after we check out? All these things, they're little annoyances. We should be charging for these and guests will expect that they can pay for these.

It's if if you ask for a late check out in the hotel, you got to pay for it. Should be the same with us. And you can offer these in your automated emails.

You can have it sitting in the property in the guest book of things they can if they want extras even before they arrive. I've heard of people that do will go to the shop and buy a full pack of groceries for the guests and then they charge like a percentage of the total cost. Now that's good if you're doing like £100 worth of stuff.

But I certainly wouldn't be going and just buying a loaf of bread and some milk. I mean unless the shop's next door getting 10 or 20% of like5 quid is not really worth going. But there are other things that you know that you could offer and like if you can make it worth your while and the guest is willing to pay for it, just do it.

It's extra money and it's free money because it doesn't come through Airbnb. No commission to them, clean profit. Next, this is the tip that is going to make you the most money compared to your competitors who aren't using it.

It is going to have the biggest impact on your business apart from the PMS and it's using a real pricing software like Price Labs. If you are not using this, you will be leaving thousands of monies on the table every year in your property. I guarantee it.

You will not put your prices down quick enough in periods of low demand and will miss out on bookings or you'll have to slash the prices to try and pick up some last minute demand and will lose out on money. You will not put your prices up high enough in periods of high demand and you will lose out on money. If you do not use pricing algorithm, I talked about it already.

The AI is here to take over. It is better than us. It works longer than ours than us.

It knows more than us. If you're not using it, you will get left behind. If your competitors are using it, you're going to be looking online thinking, >> "Why is my place 200, but everyone else is like 300?

" >> Because they're all using Price Labs. And if you're not, you're getting left behind. Again, there's a link below.

It is without doubt the biggest game changer that I've used in my business. We've been using it a couple of years now. I found our booking rates, our overall revenue increased by over 20%.

It was insane. bookings come in and you see the nightly rate and you're like, "That can't that can't be real. No one could pay that.

" Like, you don't even need to look at it. You don't even need to check it. So, not only is it making you more money, it's saving you all that time that you've been tinkering with it yourself, looking at your competitors, and you know, it just saves so much time.

Get it done. Now, this next one is a way to get loads of fivestar reviews. And if you use Trip Adviser or any of these other external ones, this is the way to grow a massive following of reviews on these platforms as well.

So, what you do is once a guest is checked out, you send them an email and you say, "Thank you very much for staying your normal stuff. By the way, we'd love to enter you into a competition. " We enter all guests who send us a screenshot of a fivestar review into a competition once a month for a chance to win a £100 Amazon gift card.

Now, if anyone was not going to leave you a review, they're going to now. If anyone was going to leave you a four, they're going to leave you a five. We're all driven by money.

We all like the chance that we're going to win something. And this tantalizing little competition is going to turbocharge your five-star reviews. This next tip or hack is about streamlining things for your guests when there's just little periods of uncertainty and confusion, which never seems to happen with guests.

We've all been there. Where's the door? Where's the car park?

Where's the key safe? How do you work the washing machine? I can't find which channel on the TV remote.

There's a million different questions. And yet, if we tried to write those all down in a guest book, it would be this thick. It would be massive.

It's so hard because you want to give as much detail as possible. Say, you know, park here, but don't park in this one because this happens. So, you have to park here because it's just massive.

The answer to all of this is to just get your phone out and take videos. Take videos of where the front door is. Take videos of where the car park is.

Take videos of where the lock box is. Take a video of how to work the coffee machine. Like, set the thing up.

Push the buttons yourself. In videos, you can put like arrows. You can put like X's.

There's so much stuff that you can do with video. It doesn't need the guest to speak your language or to be able to read your language. It's just so much easier to show and not tell.

And you can have these as a little bank on your phone that when someone asks a question, you just send it. Or you can have it in your guest book, but with a QR code or if it's digital, a link, you know, having problems with the Wi-Fi QR code or link, watch this video. Make sure you're connecting to the actual apartment's Wi-Fi and not the router Wi-Fi.

Trust me, if you do it, it will save you so much time. Next up, and we are talking about another of my bug bears, and it's professional photos. If you're in an area where the norm, the standard is to just take photos on your phone and they're like from up here and down here, and they're wonky, that doesn't mean that you are happy and fine to just do that as well.

You should see that as an opportunity, an absolute golden ticket to come in and obliterate your competition in that area because you, you smart host, are not going to take photos on your phone. You are going to get a professional, pay them well, and get them to showcase the property that you've spent so much time and money and effort on in the best light possible. Your property is going to go live on all the booking sites, and you are going to absolutely decimate the competition.

They are going to be quaking in their boots because they're going to be like, "Holy [ __ ] look at how cool that place is. " It is not okay to say, "Well, no one else is using professional. I'm not paying for that.

" >> No, use it. It's an investment. It pays for itself multiple multiple multiple times over.

You can use those photos on Facebook, on Instagram. You can share them all around the place. You're going to stop the scroll on Airbnb search results.

That is how you're going to get ahead of your competitors. And my last tip, my last hack of how to get ahead of your competitors is to just get better bookings. Bookings are the lifeblood of this business, and we're all fighting for the same ones.

When someone searches for Belfast or wherever you are, my properties are fighting with every other competitor in the area to try and get those bookings. We need them. We need them on a daily basis.

We can never rest on our laurels. And so for that reason, you need to watch this video where it's going to show you all the best tips of how to get the best bookings. See you in the next one.