One of the most common causes for low occupancy rates is inaccurate pricing for a listing – whether too high or too low. Having a strategic pricing plan based on researching the average Airbnb prices in your city, especially your direct competitors, is crucial to maximizing revenue. Listing an accommodation with too high a price in relation to the surrounding competitors could mean potential guests automatically disregard the property while listing a property too low could mean that guests distrust the property listing.

Peak season calls for peak pricing. During the off-season, consider lowering your prices to attract more guests. Offer special discounts or bundle deals. A lot of off-season travelers pick the off-season to travel in order to get more value out of their trip by booking cheaper flights and having more lodging options. Appeal to this kind of traveler by making your place a no-brainer money-saver.

Open your scheduling to a 12-month calendar year so these savvy travelers can plan their off-season trips in advance. Adjust your minimum stay rules to attract even those just passing through. The more people who book your place during off-season travel months makes for more potential (positive) reviews on your page for peak-season travelers to see. Plus, building an off-season clientele by lowering your prices and opening your availability will add to your status as a superhost.

Enabling the Instant Book feature on Airbnb can significantly improve occupancy rates. The Instant Book feature enables guests to secure a booking without having to wait for confirmation from the host. Airbnb reports that two out of three bookings on Airbnb are now made via Instant Book, which matches the share of supply.

As many travelers search for a place to stay on Airbnb by filtering for Instant Book properties, hosts can maximize their visibility by enabling the feature. Additionally, once a new property has started gaining positive reviews and traction, instant booking can be removed and the host can be more selective about its guests. Notably, the Instant Book option has been linked with the status of ‘Super Host’, which is certainly favorable for guests.

The photos and description are the first things a potential guest sees on a vacation rental listing page and are therefore crucial to occupancy rate. If photos are blurry or misleading in any way, guests are less likely to book. Airbnb reports that owners who have professional photos of their properties earn 40% more in earnings and had a 24% increase in occupancy.

Similarly, the vocabulary used to describe a property should be chosen very carefully. For example, a property in Manhattan, New York may attract more attention if words like “modern, chic, local” are used in the title, whereas “cozy, quaint, comfortable” are more suitable for a cabin in Aspen. In fact, many property managers are now actually outsourcing the copywriting on their property pages to companies like GuestHook in order to capture potential guests.

Updating your listings may also call for changing up your space’s look. A new design may attract the attention of those just scrolling through booking sites and landing on the rentals that look the nicest (who doesn’t do this?). A picture says a thousand words and the photos you choose to post on listing sites play a huge role in attracting guests.

If interior design isn’t your thing, try out Houzz. Houzz is an online site full of inspirational interior and exterior decor pictures sure to spark your creative touch. In the age of social media, creating a picturesque backdrop for Instagrammers to get their perfect shot may land you some new guests during an otherwise slow time of the year. There are also many property management services that can help you maintain your vacation rentals year-round from home-cleaning to furniture assembly. Remember to keep your properties in peak shape even during the off and shoulder seasons.

The value of a single good review is hard to overestimate. It can make your property stand out from the rest of the pack. Before your guests leave, give them some subtle encouragement to leave a review. If you think they’ve had a great experience, there’s absolutely no harm — and asking for reviews has become an industry norm.

Another great way to encourage reviews is by writing your own reviews of the guests. As the platform hides host reviews until guests leave a review of their own, it gives them an incentive to leave a review. And while it may seem impersonal, having a pre-written review template can save you time if you manage multiple properties.

To encourage reviews hosts should of course not forgets the basics – the simple way to get more positive reviews is to provide a rock-solid guest experience. This includes maintaining constant open communication with your guests, being an active host, recommending local hotspots and attractions, making sure your rental properties are routinely stocked with amenities, and taking care of the little things.

Much of the reason travelers opt to stay in an Airbnb rather than a hotel is because the experience feels more personal. Travelers want to feel like they’re staying like a local, not like a tourist in some far-off cookie-cutter hotel room. Knowing this, there are tons of subtle, tasteful additions you can add to your listing that improve the guest experience. Offering welcome baskets, refreshments, local foods, and information on things to do nearby are surefire ways to increase your home’s rating and its occupancy rates. There are also a wide variety of apps for Airbnb and vacation rental hosts that will help you improve your guest experience and make your job as a host easier.

A great way to secure guests during your low season is to earn positive online reviews. Let the fabulous reviews of peak season travelers bring in offseason guests. A simple way to get more positive reviews is to provide a rock-solid guest experience. This includes maintaining constant open communication with your guests, being an active host, recommending local hotspots and attractions, making sure your rental properties are routinely stocked with amenities, and taking care of the little things.

Keeping updated on the highs and lows of occupancy within the local market is valuable, especially when trying to identify trends throughout the year. For example, our Airbnb statistics show that Miami’s high occupancy months tend to be in March due to spring break and events like Miami Music Week.

Another option is to sign a contract with an Airbnb property manager. These companies will manage, optimize and market your listing with the aim of achieving your listing’s projected Airbnb revenue potential. However, the do charge for this service – either a fixed fee or a commission.

If you want to increase your occupancy rates, but don’t want to hire a property manger, another option is to try using Airbnb property management software. These services offer many different features, but the underlying principal is that they allow you to list your property on multiple booking platforms (Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking, etc) and synchronize your reservation calendar in one place, getting more exposure for your listing while removing the issues of coordinating bookings across multiple platforms.

If you’re looking to increase your occupancy rates, become an Airbnb super host. While you have to meet certain requirements in terms of cancellation rates and response rates, the enhanced visibility on Airbnb can lead to more bookings and higher occupancy rates.

The superhost status is not simply given away— it has to be earned. Hosts and property managers seeking the promotion must excel across four different metrics:

– Response rate
– Guest ratings
– Host cancelations
– Booking frequency

Response rates for superhosts must stay at, or above, 90% to maintain the status; which means that as soon as the host receives a message, they must reply within 24 hours. This includes both booking inquiries and any questions that a user may have about the property. Airbnb places a lot of value in efficient communication to maintain a fluid and trusting relationship between the host and guest.

Guest rating is probably the most obvious metric hosts must adhere to. Hosts can’t become a superhost if guests consistently have bad experiences with them and their property. To reach the guest-rating standard, hosts must maintain a 4.8 or above rating within the last year. This is based on Airbnb’s five-star rating scale.

Cancelation rates are very important to Airbnb as well. The platform believes guests are unlikely to return to the site if their accommodation is canceled at the hands of a host. Superhosts must have under a 1% cancelation rate. This equates to 0 cancelations per 100 bookings in a year. However, if there are situations that genuinely make a cancelation necessary, Airbnb will dismiss it as an official cancelation. A list of these scenarios can be found here.

Finally, booking frequency proves how experienced a host is and therefore warrants superhost status. To qualify, superhosts have to have had ten stays in their property within the last year or 100 days, or longer, across three separate stays.

There is a reason why superhosts always appear at the top of the search results. That’s because Airbnb promotes superhosts’ properties on its platform. This perhaps is the biggest perk of achieving the super-status. Ranking higher in the listings vastly improves a property’s visibility. Increased visibility directly correlates with increased earnings for hosts and higher average occupancy rates.

Additionally, Airbnb promotes superhost properties in marketing materials like newsletter emails. The “Superhost” search filter also brings increased traffic to these properties when guests want to specifically browse for the most qualified hosts.

There other fun perks for superhosts also. For starters, superhosts are given $100 travel coupons every year they are deemed “super”. Plus, while all hosts are eligible for $100 referral bonuses when they get friends to sign up as hosts, superhosts see that amount increase by 20%.

For extremely serious hosts, there are none. For more casual hosts who are looking to rent their home every so often, it may be added pressure. Once superhost status is achieved, it does take some work to maintain it. Superhost status is best for just that — superhosts. Typically the superhost is a designation that is popular amongst professional Airbnb property managers.

People who are willing to deal with the added expectation of keeping their superhost status, and who treat their Airbnb property as a business, should absolutely strive to be a superhost.

Social media is a powerful tool to attract an online audience. Try setting up social media pages for your vacation rental business. This includes Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and a personal business website. Market your vacation rentals all year-round to attract the interests of travelers throughout the year. With social media, you can launch your own promotional campaigns whenever you want, offer special discounts to your followers for any month to increase your occupancy rate, and post a consistent stream of quality content to garner a strong and active following. An engaged following means more people have your rentals on their radar.

Take charge of your peak and off-peak seasons by directly advertising your amazing properties to your next potential guests across social media platforms.

And that leads to the next tip: marketing. Use the data you’ve collected to know your peak season guests — as well as the audience you may be regularly missing out — to target a larger percentage of travelers. Perhaps you own a beachfront home in Miami and tend to attract relatively young groups of vacationers during the summer; travelers who are looking to use your home as a resting ground between beach and club outings. Target other travelers during the fall, winter, and spring. This includes business travelers, families, retirees, locals, foodies, and honeymooners.

Update your listings on booking engines to highlight your property’s attributes that work well for other kinds of travelers. For example, the same beachfront view that attracts group vacationers during the summer could also be the perfect secluded getaway for honeymooners. Perhaps your place’s proximity to all the city action could also be the perfect location for foodies looking to experience the city’s local eateries. Rethink your marketing strategy to target the guests you typically do not book.

If you’ve noticed that it’s harder to book international guests during your low season, try targeting locals to increase domestic sales. You know your city better than anywhere else, so try marketing your place for local and cultural events that occur all throughout the year. Keep a calendar handy and make note of all the holiday weekends, events, and school year breaks that happen during the low months. These should include the four-day weekends, no-school-days, and work breaks that visitors may want to celebrate while in the city. Market your short-term rentals during these times to attract the domestic guests you don’t usually book. This strategy will help keep an eye on the local and cultural events in your city and target “staycationers” in the market for a weekend getaway.

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Airbnb amenities often make a massive difference in the vacation rental landscape. Sure, location, pricing, and marketing each deserve careful consideration — but having a curated setup of kitchen essentials, a barbecue, a fireplace, top-speed WiFi, and comfortable lounge areas is really what makes listings pop.

However, implementing amenities is not entirely straightforward. In fact, because every listing is incredibly unique with its own style and characteristics, amenities that prove to be essential in one location may be downright bizarre in another.

In order to determine exactly which Airbnb amenities help hosts and property managers most by improving guest experiences, AllTheRooms Analytics analyzed the effect of specific added items on occupancy rates across a number of markets. Here are our findings…

To understand which Airbnb amenities drive occupancy rates most, we dove into data for listings with at least 10 reviews in four distinct areas over the last 12 months (May 2018 to May 2019):

7 of Sydney’s most famous beach districts; Bondi, Coogee, Manly, Palm Beach, Avalon Beach, Cronulla Beach, and Watson’s Bay.

13 of Europe’s most popular alpine ski resorts across France, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy: Courchevel, Zermatt, Val D’Isere, Tignes, Cortina D’Ampezzo, Chamonix, St Anton, Meribel, St Moritz, Courmayeur, Val Thorens, Verbier, Cervinia, and Alpe D’Huez.
The beautiful and rural region of Provence, France.

8 of Germany’s most iconic, lesser-known cities: Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Dusseldorf, and Stuttgart.

In order to present the data, we created an easy-to-read amenity scoring system. If an amenity was deemed important by a particular algorithm in a particular area, it received one point. Below is a chart outlining our findings.

For each area, there is a set of small amenities hosts can include that have proven to increase occupancy rates. Across all area types (beaches, cities, rural regions, and ski resorts), providing basic items such as extra bed linen, basic cooking essentials, and shampoo can boost occupancy by 7.1%.

Additionally, hosts who don’t indicate the availability of WiFi, hot water, or a refrigerator (items that may go overlooked by some) suffer a 7.7% penalty in occupancy rates. Our first clear takeaway from the data is that investments in small amenities go a long way. Moreover, hosts benefit by listing every amenity available, no matter how obvious or redundant it may seem.

Going beyond the basics and providing a more comfortable and functional experience for guests can be achieved at only a small outlay. Creature comforts such as a microwave (1.5% increase), a hairdryer (3.9% increase), an iron (3.7% increase), and a coffee maker (1.0% increase) all increase the occupancy rates across the four regions studied. Including all four of these amenities in a property can yield returns of a 5.3% increase in occupancy. These types of add-ons are especially useful for marketing your listing towards business travelers and appealing to those using Airbnb on work trips.

There are other adjustments hosts can make if they have the right resources. Advertising listings as family-friendly can increase occupancy by 2.9%. Indicating if the listing has the availability for guests to park freely on-site leads to a 3.5% boost in occupancy. Other listing features such as the availability of long-term stays and self-check-in also increase occupancy rates by 3.2% and 4.6% respectively.

Unsurprisingly, when parsing out the particular areas, certain Airbnb amenities are significantly more favored in one location than they are in another.

In the beach neighborhoods of Sydney, guests heavily favor beach essentials (3.1%), BBQ grills (3.7%), and the personal touch of being greeted by the host (5.2%). Curiously, they also value having a flat path to the front door (7.0%). While a flat path may not be possible for all vacation homes, offering the other three can boost occupancy rates and provide a more comfortable guest experience.

In the ski resorts of the Alps, guests show preferences for more snow-friendly facilities such as a ski-in-ski-out entrance (3.6%), hot tubs (5.3%) and on-site first aid kits (3.7%). As for the listings in German cities, dishes and silverware (2.1%) and allowing pets to stay (9.7%) both result in higher occupancy rates. Listings noting the presence of a doorman in German cities also see an increase of 6.2%

In the countryside of Provence, guests tend to look for long-term stays and family-friendly listings that offer amenities such as a pool (4.7%) and a stove (2.1%). Offering all four of these features — something holidaymakers traveling to the South of France would generally find appealing — can raise occupancy rates by a staggering 19.8%.

When asking ourselves which Airbnb amenities increase occupancy rates most, it becomes clear that the key is more nuanced than simply throwing in a few marketable items. Furthermore, the data shows that thinking beyond individual items and focusing on bundling amenities around a strategic brand or a theme provides sizable returns.