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452. Hosting Hotline

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 wanna get your hosting questions answered here on the hosting hotline, go to hosting hotline.com, ask your question, and we’ll answer it here on the podcast, and you will help so many other hosts in the process.

Listener Question from Melody

Sarah Karakaian: Today we have a question from Melody.

Hosting Hotline Caller: My name is Melody and I have been hosting two STRs for. About seven years. I have one in Santa Valley, Arizona, and one in Oregon City, Oregon. I recently attended your Hosting Mastery Workshop and I gained a ton of knowledge. We have implemented price Labs and seen an increase in bookings. We changed our arrival date to one day, and we have implemented a couple upsells. Thank you for all the great info. My question is [00:02:00] for early and late checkouts. Do you request money through Airbnb or do you collect from a different source? Thank you so much for, um, all that you do, and I am excited to hear what you have to say. Thank you.

Sarah Karakaian: You are welcome, Melody.

Bootcamp and Pricing Discussion

Sarah Karakaian: Melody was referring to a bootcamp we offered in January, and at that bootcamp we talked all about pricing your property. No, we didn’t. We talked about listing audits because the next bootcamp we’re gonna do, which is I wanted to invite you to, is happening in May. So January we did listing audits this May, we’re gonna do how to price your Property for profit if you want In on that bootcamp. And as Melody shared, we have so much value there. Head to, thanks for visiting.com/bootcamp. Get on our wait list, sign up. We’ll let you know first, but let’s get to Melody’s.

Understanding Upsells

Sarah Karakaian: Question about upsells. So, Annette, what is an upsell? What could it be?

Annette Grant: An upsell is [00:03:00] any revenue in addition to your nightly reservation. So think offering for them to check in early, to check out late to maybe fill the fridge. Maybe you have a, your guest is coming for a special occasion, maybe you would upsell, uh, decorating for them. I know there are so many hosts out there that are doing this because they are just crushing hospitality, but your guest would love to pay for that if you make them an offer of it. So there multiple things.

So anything above and beyond that nightly reservation, it could also, uh, be your pet fee depending on how you do those. But, uh, Melody specifically is asking about her early check-in and late checkout. So let’s dig in.

Sarah Karakaian: Yeah. So where does sh, where do you request those funds?

Handling Payments for Upsells

Sarah Karakaian: Well, Melody, it depends on how your business is set up.

So you said, do you request on Airbnb or do you do something else? I would love [00:04:00] Melody if you. Weren’t only getting bookings from Airbnb if you were diversified a bit, so you were also getting bookings from vrbo. Obviously the creme de la creme is direct booking. And so if you’re a host out there and you’re listening and you do accept reservations via Airbnb, vrbo, other online travel agencies, like maybe booking.com, Wim, stay, there’s a lot out there.

Uh, and of course your direct booking, you might want to have a way to accept additional revenue via, it could be your property management software will allow you to do this. It could be via because it’s more convenient for the booker, so via the platform or how they’re used to paying you for the reservation.

So if they did book via Airbnb, even if you did have a PMS, you might wanna ask for via the resolution center because. Your guest might be familiar with how to do that.

Annette Grant: Mm-hmm.

It’s a easy, it’s a easy way for them to know this is the way the payment’s already been sent through. [00:05:00] Their, uh, payment is probably already so, you know, linked to their account.

Sarah Karakaian: You could, so that’s. Ease there. It’s nice too. Well either, no matter what, what’s nice and what you wanna think about is you want to be able to send them the request for funds. Mm-hmm. That’s also nice and easy and then you can keep track of it. ’cause there’s something that’s pending in your world. Right.

Um, but let’s say, and, and here’s the thing too, is as of the recording of this episode, resolution money transfers. There’s no extra fee for that right now.

Annette Grant: Exactly where you might be paying for processing fees, if you’re going elsewhere. Right. And you could do things like maybe let, let’s say they want to Venmo you or PayPal you, because maybe they’re surprising someone with an early check in.

Mm-hmm. Or late checkout, or that upsell, you know, you can take that payment. Whether, again, you could use Venmo, you could use PayPal, maybe you have a payment processor. You could send them an invoice, right. Via QuickBooks. Yep. Via your property management [00:06:00] software. Even inside Stripe, you can send invoices direct the.

Tracking and Managing Upsell Payments

Annette Grant: Biggest advice that Sarah and I have here on any of these is how are you going to keep best track of it, you and your team? Okay? This gets a little trickier when you start having team members help you too, because we found there’s times where the team forgets to charge for the early check-in or the pet fee, or those upsells.

So you wanna make sure you have a checks and balances there, that if you do make that upsell and you deliver to the guest. You’re making sure that you are receiving the funds for it, but there is, there are so many ways, Melody, that you could do it. But yes, the Resolution Center is probably the easiest with Airbnb to just make that request with them.

Um, and, and they see it, they see it right in the portal that they’re already looking for all of their instructions, everything happening there.

Sarah Karakaian: There are some third party options, Melody, just to get, just to give you all the options.

Mm-hmm.

There are guidebooks out there. Like for example, we use the [00:07:00] Hostly guidebooks and you, even if you don’t use the Hostfully property management software, you can still use their guidebooks and you could set up upsell offers within the guidebook and set up how you know you can connect it to however you wanna be paid.

A lot of people pick Stripe because it’s a nice, trusted way to do business there, and that way when you send them the guidebook link that might have all the information about their stay, you could even suggest to them through the guidebook of all the different upsells that you have to offer, like your early, late checkout.

Or the, like Annette was saying earlier, if they’re coming to celebrate something special, if they want you to fill their fridge, whatever offerings you have, a lot of the guidebooks out there have an area within them that you can set up these like, they’re like, it’s like shopping on an online store. It’s like a product and they can click on that button, shopping cart, add it to their cart and check out real easy.

And so you could end up saying like, here’s your guidebook. It’s everything about your stay, how to find our place. Also, if you’d like to upgrade to an early check-in or a late checkout if if available. We have a [00:08:00] section for that. If you want to add on a filled whatever your offers are. Having a guidebook like that, that offers that.

This is especially nice if you’re not yet using a property management software ’cause you don’t have to. But remember there are processing fees and then when you do get paid, whether it’s via the Airbnb Resolution Center, whether it’s Venmo or. PayPal or a guidebook into some sort of payment processor.

When it dumps into your, we’ll just use QuickBooks, for example, your bookkeeping software. You wanna make sure that you are also tracking that in terms of categorizing it as that upgrade, so that you know mm-hmm. Is offering early check in, late checkout. Is all this worth it? And what and what is it worth it when you and when you make the offer, how many people take you up on it?

Annette Grant: Yeah, it gets exciting. We, um, Melody mentioned she, you know, in our bootcamp, but we also talk about our Hosting Business Mastery. We just had a coaching call the other day, and it is peak season for [00:09:00] some of our hosts and spring break, you know, get a lot of spring breakers coming in. And these are people, um, that have multiple properties, but they are making thousands of dollars extra per month on these reservations. So please don’t count yourself out. Um, people, this is an amazing, amazing offer that you are making for folks, for them to be able to start their vacation early. Um, and so just, uh, we really advise you.

Let’s pay attention to it, track it, it can get really exciting. We, we kind of had everybody in our chat, um, the people that are offering, uh, early check in late checkout or gap nights. We had the, the chat was going crazy with all of the extra earnings that everyone is making on those. Reservations where people have already chosen you, you know that you already know they’re coming, so why not?

Um, upgrade their stay, make some extra revenue there.

Encouragement and Upcoming Bootcamp

Annette Grant: And Melody, I just wanna say, uh, kudos to you for taking action. All of this stuff. [00:10:00] You said a lot of things like going into your price labs, you’re getting those extra bookings, you know, you took action and you’re being rewarded for it. And so, um, just.

That’s excellent. ’cause you said it there, you’ve been hosting for seven years and we meet so many hosts that are kind of just like, they’re just going through the motions. They feel like they’ve been doing it a long time. And you, wow. I’m, I’m impressed with you taking all that action. You’re reaping the rewards.

We cannot wait not only for Melody to join us, but all of you. Our next bootcamp, um, Priced Right and Profitable, please. This is a must attend bootcamp. You are going to learn so much about pricing your property, making sure that it’s priced right and profitable, especially in your market. You’re gonna leave knowing where you are in your market.

So this is something that’s ever changing, always new things to learn, and we can’t wait to see all of you there.

Conclusion and Sign-Off

Sarah Karakaian: With that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

Annette Grant: I’m Annette Grant, and together we are. Thanks for visiting, visiting. Talk to you next [00:11:00] time.