All Forum Posts by: Cliff H.

I’ve had this situations as well Ken and have always thought the best option for SEO of your listing is to have the potential guest decline the reservation themselves through exactly the kind of special counter offer you made. I regularly have folks put in a request for a stay where dates are not what they are looking for in the hopes that other dates currently blocked are actually available. Really folks? I doubt they realize that impacts my listing’s rank having to decline a request that was never valid in the first place. The compromise, as you said, may be a special offer that’s treated as an offer the guest will never accept anyway.

Just a FYI that if you have guests traveling in from Europe you are now required by some (likely soon all) of the STR platforms to fully refund guest prepayment for stays between 3/14/20 - 4/14/20.

Here’s a snippet from the notification Booking.com sent out to hosts just this week:

“As a result of the policies put in place by the US government about the Coronavirus, guests from the Schengen area in Europe will be prevented from traveling to or staying at your accommodation.

As a consequence we have declared Force Majeure/Forced Circumstances for:

- All reservations made for properties in the United States by travelers from all 26 Schengen countries *), or travelers who have been in the Schengen area in the past 14 days;

- with a check-in date between Saturday, March 14, 2020 and Tuesday, April 14, 2020 (including).

- American citizens, US permanent legal residents, and their families are excluded from the travel ban.

*) Schengen countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.

What’s the impact?

With Force Majeure, we expect you to refund any prepayment and waive any cancellation amounts (fees, costs, expenses, and/or other amounts) for all reservations with arrival within the Force Majeure period, if the guest has requested cancellation.

Booking.com will waive the commission in these cases.”

With nearly all universities shifting to online classes it’s safe to assume most students will be reassessing their living plans. Why would you pay rent to be a place where no one else is? Take the slower summer months as an example.

My college renters are already asking about logistics for exiting their lease early and classes were only just cancelled in the last week.

“it’s important to note that the impacts are highly localized — that is, the markets affected are largely limited to where the virus actually is. This may seem obvious, but it’s important to recognize that the vast majority of vacation rental markets are not in all-out panic mode.”

“Urban Markets Face Far Higher Risk Than Leisure Destinations.”

Source: https://www.airdna.co/blog/coronavirus-impact-on-global-short-term-rental-markets

As always NoLo is a great resource here:

“Property owners with modified adjusted gross incomes of $100,000 or less may deduct up to $25,000 in rental real estate losses per year if they "actively participate" in the rental activity. You actively participate if you are involved in meaningful management decisions regarding the rental property and have more than a 10% ownership interest in the property. This allowance is phased out for taxpayers whose MAGI exceeds $100,000 and eliminated entirely when it exceeds $150,000. Thus, it is useless for high-income landlords.”

Source: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-you-deduct-your-rental-losses.html

None of the above: Estately. Hands down.

@William Kim North Conway and Bartlett have a long history of STRs, but as I've said elsewhere for folks looking in the area inventory is high making competition strong enough that I went further west with a STR off the 93N corridor of the state. Happy to answer any specific questions you have about STRs in NH.

In the meantime, here’s a few links to NH town regulations on short term rentals:

https://www.biggerpockets.com/topics/799075

@Sofia Sharkey YourPorter creates a direct booking site for any of the rentals you manage and allows you to offer both flat rate and percentage discounts to guests booking that way. Frankly, it's one of the key reasons I opted for it over other more expensive channel managers. Plus I can manage the whole thing from my phone, which not all the CMs offer. More info at: 

https://yourporter.com/how-to/...

@Mike Neubauer I've been working between AirBnB and Porter myself over the past week to troubleshoot why my sliding 3 month booking window defined in Porter is not opening the days by that same timeline inside of AirBnB. 

Something to consider if you did what I did in trialing a bunch of different channel managers is whether one of the other channel managers you connected before is either (a) still connected through the AirBnB API or (b) was set to a specific booking window (3, 6, or 12 months out) and therefor had blocked off days in your AirBnB listing's calendar (which another channel manager would not override).

You can test that by disconnecting Smoobu (as you appear to have already done), making the days available in Air directly, then reconnecting to your channel manager with your preferred booking window which should readjust available days).

Hope this helps and good that you are seeing challenges in a vendor's support plan now versus later on when things get even busier and you are back against the wall. 

@Sofia Sharkey

Hey @Mike Neubauer. Glad to help. Unfortunately, most of the STR tools are more hype than execution. Like you, I trialed a bunch of them, compared features, and ended up accepting that I could either settle for a terrible interface with robust features ( exemplified by the twin tools Beds24/BookingAutomation) or an inflated price and decent UI (exemplified by the likes of Guesty, Uplisting, Lodgify, etc).

I settled on Porter because it seemed a decent compromise and I do 90% of my work on the go, it had 100% of the product’s feature set in their mobile app, and I only really needed a channel manager for AirBnB, HomeAway, and Booking.com (without feeling like they were nickel and dining me for each new channel I added).   

My advice would be to start first with what key features you need, built yourself a nice checklist or spreadsheet, and check off the features of each product as you’re working through those 2 week trials. I actually got busy and ran over my trial for Porter and they were good enough to extend it for twice for me, which was a leading indicator on how they respond to customers requests and support. 

PS: @Mark Miles: a few of the sites/services do offer variable pricing by channel. From what I tested, Porter, BookingAutomation, Beds24, Tokeet, and Elina all offer some form of adding X% to a base price or Y channel. I absolutely use this with Porter to set a surcharge on HomeAway and a discount on my own direct booking site (which Porter manages and syncs with pricing/availability of all the commercial booking sites). 

Yes and most of the digital tools above are web-administered, so once you have the Apple TV setup, you can just manage and update it from their website, which pushes changes back down to the Apple TV. 
I have mine setup with all the major streaming service apps: Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, and Apple which guests can use their own logins to access is they really went on vacation just to sit in front of a TV, which most did not.