All Forum Posts by: Cliff H.

@Mike V. thanks for the insight. How are you are soliciting the required SMS opt-in to auto-text guests on their booking? Once you have guests’ emails, are you entering them into a a CRM manually or just using them for emailing them throughout their stay? 

Reference: FCC rules ban text messages sent to a mobile phone using an autodialer unless you previously gave consent to receive the message or the message is sent for emergency purposes.

You cannot say your state is closed for tourism and keep your motels open. In New Hampshire there’s a state-wide moratorium until 5/31/20 on all lodging for anyone who’s not an essential worker or residents self-quaratining. Yet looking at major hotel chains like Marriott and Hilton you would never know it: online booking for the month of May 2020 continues to be available and fully usable, with only a small a disclaimer (if any) to check local regulations. In fact, the emergency order specifically states online booking is to be made unavailable, with reservations by phone only.

Currently abiding by the restriction, but the number of inquiries I’m turning down now that states are reopening is piling up by the day and clearly not something that appears to be in play for the big boys. 

What approach have the Tahoe hotels/motels/BnBs taken (assuming they are similarly restricted)? Here in the northeast I’m seeing state-wide orders restricting STRs, but major local chains like Marriott and Hilton offer little more than a generic, non-specific disclaimer to “please check with your local state guidelines” while still fully allowing online booking (which is actually precluded by the state regulations). 

Hey @Paul Sandhu I can’t recall, but are your listings physically next to each other where they could potentially share a common Internet connection that was blasted between the buildings over buried cable or a directional WiFi antennas? 

The perpetual challenge with municipal WiFi is that it’s often deathly slow and unreliable. Potentially OK for the occasional email, but nowhere near the bandwidth that streaming Internet TVs trying to pull HD signals demand. 

Agreed with what @Michael Baum says about challenges deactivating the modem portion of those Netgear modem/routers. In most cases those things are 80% modem, 20% router because there’s only one part of that product that makes your ISP money. 

Pick up some cheap wireless routers from Goodwill for $5 and you’ll find most can already function at either end of that wireless bridge (either converting the existing municipal WiFi to Ethernet or rebroadcasting that Ethernet cable in a basic “bridge only” mode that gets you out having to do late night web search for “Double NAT” which is actually far more annoying than the physical bugs of the same name. 

Hey @Anand S. you bring up an important, often overlooked point:

Owning a direct booking website is not intended to out-AirBnB AirBnB, it’s to allow a direct channel where you can own the relationship with your customer without an intermediary telling you how, when, and for what rate you continue that relationship. 

The value of AirBnB’s review system is vastly overrated. Figure out your basic screening questions, require formal proof of ID, and have direct bookers sign a formal rental agreement. If that sounds like a lot of work, keeping paying AirBnB their 10% surcharge and allow them to obscure the contact info for your guests. There’s no universally right or wrong answer, just what works best for you and to what degree you are comfortable renting your customers from the established booking sites. 

I've built STR site with WordPress with simple calendar plugins that sync availability, but have increasingly been just leveraging built in website builders in a channel manager like Porter. One of the unexpected nice benefits of that is that it allows me to prompt any/all guests to complete a check-in form that includes entering their email address, something I would never get through AirBnB because they have a vested interest in keeping guests and owners dependent on their platform.  

None of that is unique to Porter. Others like Lodgify or Hostfully offer similar customizable direct booking capability that syncs pricing and availability across all your channels, you’ll just pay 4-10x as much for some slicker looking web designs. 

Now if only someone on the forums here has a way to integrate the guest email into a formal CRM so that I can follow-up with guests directly while following applicable SPAM laws requiring formal opt-in. Any ideas?

@Greg Todrank @Trevor Ewen is right: hard to generalize across regions and tenants. You need to do you own math on whether smart locks are better than the rekey-able systems you find at a place like LandlordLocks or your local box stores.

I have them for my STRs and they’re a godsend. I also use them during vacancy turnovers since those turnovers are fully automated, self-serve showings, but you have to have a way to ensure batteries get swapped out regularly, then run a separate cellular network to push updates to the locks over time, which is a another added cost.

In most cases I’m heavy on tech for turnovers, then tend to be more hands off with various CRM, automatic rent collection, and maintenance request forms after move-ins.

What have you used/seen so far in this space yourself?

By the data alone, the safest means of ridding yourself of COVID-19 in your STR is to buy one that's all copper. You could call it a themed James Bond Goldfinger reboot: "CopperToe" and turn over your STR in just hours since COVID-19 can only live on copper surfaces for 4 hours and even that's a worst case scenario that's not realistic to how this thing transmits itself. Specifically, Johns Hopkins has already clarified the "several hours to several days" study, which suggests a far lower likelihood of anyone contracting COVID-19 from a hotel or STR stay versus riding a crowded bus, having someone cough on them while buying 80% off tiger shirts at Wal-Mart, or getting takeout from the local fast food joint that just happened to have one of their employees sneeze as they were packing up your food (which by the way, are all still businesses and experiences we are all exposed to).

From Carolyn Machamer, a professor of cell biology whose lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has studied the basic biology of coronaviruses for years:

What's getting a lot of press and is presented out of context is that the virus can last on plastic for 72 hours—which sounds really scary. But what's more important is the amount of the virus that remains. It's less than 0.1% of the starting virus material. Infection is theoretically possible but unlikely at the levels remaining after a few days. People need to know this.

@Account Closed AirBnB didn’t invent STRs, they just popularized it by flooding the sector with VC funding and modern design. Many of us here were involved in STRs long before them and will be doing it long after. It’s not a matter of anything changing suddenly, as much as the reality of how this company views it’s customers, which is an awareness that many of us have been coming to for some time now.
If anything is a change it’s how many, many hosts trusted a company like this in the face of repeated examples that the trust was not reciprocal. 

“Dear partner, we don’t trust you to run your own house, so we’re telling you how to do it ourselves. Also, never mind the the cleaning rating you earned, protocols you’ve established, or type of rental you have, we know best what’s right for you. Don’t worry it’s a voluntary program that will only result in you never showing up on the first page of search results if you do not comply. Please raise your hand now if you’d like to volunteer. Also, here’s our list of preferred cleaning product partners that we receive a kickback on to sustain our extremely high overhead that never had a profit margin to sustain since it was only ever funded through VCs whose goal it has been to establish a platform monopoly by bankrupting the others guys so we can set the rules all by ourselves. Who’d like to volunteer?  We love you and value you as a partner, which is exactly why we don’t trust you do to anything right.”

Folks, it’s time to find another platform. Are any of us really that surprised? AirBnB has had this chip on their shoulder from the very beginning, this crisis is just allowing the leopard to show its stripes. Other than SEO, there is nothing this platform provides that independent owners cannot setup themselves in about 1 hour’s time through any of the direct booking sites/services we’ve discussed ad nauseam here in the BP forums.  

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you don’t own the relationship with your customer, you don’t own your business, you’re just renting it from someone else. And renting someone else’s business I don’t think was the reason any of us got into this thing in from the beginning. 

@Lucas Carl I’ve seen some availability challenges with beyond pricing and Porter and Airbnb. Are you staying you’ve never set a min night stay or that you set one and are trying to exempt the next X days?

I think you’re already doing this, but I’ve found it’s best to let one of those 3 systems do all the driving as it were. I have Porter in full mode and do all my changes from there. BeyondPricing has no control over the listing other than pushing pricing daily.