All Forum Posts by: Karen Chenaille

Pay your cleaners well. They can make or break STR owners who manage from afar.

Mellani sheets on Amazon. They last about a year and guests love them. Great price too.

@Valerie Rogers Thanks for your detailed response. I think I will get someone from Upwork to create a basic website that allow direct bookings and see how it goes. I hand out biz cards too and have found them very handy for promoting our places. Best of luck to you! Karen

Tim Schroeder Hi Tim. About a year ago I looked at Orbirental because I wanted to sync prices between HA and Abnb. They advertised it as something they could do after joining they said “it’s coming in a few months”. I only wanted them for the price syncing. I found the channel management features overwhelming. So I bailed. Since then I have learned from another app developer the HA unlike Air BnB does not share all parts of their API. This means that no third party channel manager or app will ever be able to sync prices between Air BnB and HA. HA has a proprietary tool called market manager that requires you to go into the app and manage prices. It’s very powerful but your prices will never perfectly match Air BnB.

Hello

I am considering enlisting the guidance of a business/real estate coach. Has anyone else out there done this and if so, who did you enlist? Did you feel you got value for your money?

Thanks!

Karen

@Valerie Rogers what a great time hack that would be! Especially if the HA emails are auto routed to a single folder. Thanks!

@Mark S. I pay HA by the drink. Their fees are really high when you also take into account the credit card processing fee. I am curious, does the 500 include CC processing or is that in addition?  

@John D.

What are you doing on the direct contact front?  Do you have a website or do you market on other channels?

Thanks for your reply!

Karen

Hi Mark!

I totally agree on the fees for HA. The fees along with the difficulty matching deposits made me so frustrated I took my 2 listings down. 

Hi John

That must be where I am messing up. I don’t keep the email. I was only using the spreadsheet which also breaks it down but there may be multiple lines per reservation if there was a deposit plus final payments. 

It’s funny but I have had a great experience with Air BnB payout breakdown. Almost the exact inverse of what you are seeing. 

I guess I better giddy up and try HomeAway again, but keep the emails. 

Thanks for getting back to me!

Karen