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444. Hosting Hotline: What’s the Best Day of the Week for Airbnb Bookings?
Introduction and Welcome
Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] Hello. Welcome back to another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.
Annette Grant: I’m Annette Grant, and together we are Thanks for Visiting,
Sarah Karakaian: and this is the Hosting Hotline. If you want to get your hosting questions answered here on the hotline, all you have to do is go to hostinghotline. com, ask your question, and we’ll get it answered.
And like today, Julia has a great question that we did not have an answer to, and so we reached out to our network of experts. Let’s get into julia’s question.
Julia’s Question on Booking Trends
Hosting Hotline Caller: Hi, my name is Julia and I am the owner of Helm Haven in Southern Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay. I’ve noticed a trend of bookings coming in for our property on Sunday evenings and I was wondering if you have any insights or hard data on which days of the week and times of day guests typically search and book vacation rentals.
I’d love to better understand these trends so that I can fine tune our marketing strategies, especially on social media platforms. Thanks.
Sarah Karakaian: Julia is a [00:02:00] rock star host because in all the years I’ve been doing this, I never once even thought about like, Oh, I wonder when my avatar is booking their stay. What a smart question to ask.
Annette Grant: So we called in our expert friend, Jeff Brown. He’ll introduce himself from a Intellihost, but let’s get into his answer.
Expert Insights from Jeff Brown
Jeff Brown with Intellihost: Hey everyone, this is Jeff Brown with IntelliHost. I’m here to answer a question on the hosting hotline regarding, what day is the most popular day for people to book? Meaning what day of the week is the most popular day for people to book?
so we pulled the numbers on this and we, we looked at the database for IntelliHost. IntelliHost has tens of thousands of properties across the globe that we track data on and we pulled directly from PMS and so we have, first we looked at 466, 000 reservations on our system to identify what’s happening at the global level.
And what we found is that , weekends tend to be the least popular day for people to actually book. So Sunday and Saturday. Have the lowest [00:03:00] percent with 12 and a half, so 12. 9 percent of the reservations happening on Sunday, 12. 5 percent happening on Saturday, we found that the weekdays, particularly Monday has the highest percent of the bookings having 16% of the bookings happening on a Monday. The person that asked this question appears to be located in Maryland, or at least where properties are. So we pulled this from Maryland. We see a little bit of a different trend here. The lowest day that people are likely to book is Wednesday with 12.4%, and then the highest day being 16.5%.
I think it’s worth calling out here that there’s only 442 reservations that we found in Maryland, so keep that sample size in mind versus the 466,000 for the global data set. Hope that helps.
Analyzing the Data
Annette Grant: Wow. All right. Global data set. We did not have
Sarah Karakaian: that. We did not have that at our fingertips. But our friends do, so that’s good.
Annette Grant: And I do think it’s interesting. We love making decisions based on data. [00:04:00] However, as you could hear, like the subset 4 hundred sixty six thousand to four hundred and forty fifty. or 442. So it’s one of those things that, Julia, I don’t know how much that is actually going to help you when it is such a small subset of reservations, but
Personalized Marketing Strategies
Annette Grant: What you could personally do is you said you feel like reservations are coming in Sunday afternoon, start to track it, start to track it, track your own, and you can start to dictate your marketing strategies based on my avatar. My guest that is booking with me is normally booking on those Sunday evenings.
So your own, uh, collection of data will best serve you. Of course. And then also, we don’t want you to get lost in the sauce on it either of, um, again, when you don’t have a huge data set, if it’s, it’s one property, you know, it’s going to take quite some time to get something that I believe like [00:05:00] statistical analysis would like, let you say this is the exact trend.
And you even heard, um, in Jeff’s answer. It was like 12 percent 14 percent because if it’s seven days and divided by the hundred percent, those are really negligible, I believe But I just I do love that you’re working on your marketing efforts if we could give you a Trophy. Well, if we could give you a piece of advice Outside of you know when they’re actually booking is When someone actually does book and stay and they’re an amazing guest, that is where we want you to dig in and inviting them back.
Seeing if you can, that peace of mind is priceless there. Inviting guests that already know, like and trust you and your property and vice versa is really A great way to build out your portfolio and just your list of guests. So we’re [00:06:00] excited for you to really dig in once those guests start checking in.
Focusing on Returning Guests
Sarah Karakaian: And looking at that, just zooming out for a minute, Annette just said is a lot of times we focus on new leads, which is great to do that. But what Annette is saying is take the leads you already have or the customers you already have, the guests who have already stayed with you and double down on those marketing efforts.
You still want to have. A system for getting new leads and where Julia is trying to focus. Okay, when can I get really heavy on social media because my guests are because my potential guests are getting ready to book and that’s great, but also making sure that we’re focusing maybe even more so on the guests that we already have.
They already know us and they like our properties. They already trust us and making sure we have a lead return system for that.
Annette Grant: And can you do some. upsells during the week. If someone books on a Sunday, what’s your cadence to reach back out to them and try to upsell them maybe on an extra night or doing something above and beyond the property?
So those are some marketing efforts that you can work on also.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:07:00] Great question, Julia. Jeff Brown from IntelliHost. Thank you always for being a resource to us.
Conclusion and Farewell
Sarah Karakaian: With that, I am Sarah Karakaian
Annette Grant: I’m Annette Grant and together we are thanks for visiting. Talk to you next time.
