Airbnb vs Vrbo, eggs in one basket, and rankings
I've gots ground STR business. A few years ago I had about 40% of my bookings coming from VRBO but airBnB gained significant traction, and soon 95% of my bookings were from AirBnB with a 90% occupancy rate. Sounds good... until something with Airbnb burns to the ground and then I'm reliant on only VRBO guests. The thing is, since so many bookings now come from ABB, my Vrbo listings have dropped off the first page and onto page 15-20 so they don't get any traffic any more. I hate reliance on ABB. In the last year I have had two huge issues, 1 because my channel manager had an api issue that got my account deactivated for a few days (!!!!) until it as reactivated by the trust and safety team. AirBnB confirmed it was a problem with the channel manager that was triggering some sort of internal security flag. The second problem was last year there was some problem with the site itself and I was unable to receive instant bookings for about a month. As you can imagine, bookings tanked. What do you all think about investing in one channel and absolitely dominating it versus spreading out over multiple channels?
Most Popular Reply
#5 All Forums Contributor
- Investor
- Greer, SC
I do get 90% of my bookings from HA/VRBO and about 6 bookings from Airbnb last year.
I was updating pricing this morning and it is such a pain set min stays for different times of the year on Airbnb vs HA/VRBO.
I love how I can annotate significant dates on VRBO. Airbnb seems so pedestrian after being on the VRBO/HA site.
It doesn't cost me anything to keep my Airbnb account open to pick up those few bookings that I get from them.