Airbnb Slow Season: 8 Tips to Increase Your Bookings
For many Airbnb hosts, the slow season is the dreaded time of year when the usual tourist rush slows down, and keeping their properties booked can be particularly hard. In this blog post, we'll share top tips to help you get the most out of your Airbnb listings and remain profitable during the slow season.
For many Airbnb hosts, the slow season is the dreaded time of year when the usual tourist rush slows down, and keeping their properties booked can be particularly hard.
Although navigating through the Airbnb slow season can be challenging, you can ensure that your income remains consistent throughout the year with the right strategies in place. So, what can you do to prevent your home from sitting empty when things slow down?
In this blog post, we’ll share top tips to help you get the most out of your Airbnb listings and remain profitable during the slow season.
Airbnb Slow Season: How to Ensure a Steady Stream of Income
You can do a few things to drive demand during the Airbnb slow season. Here are eight effective strategies tailored for these quieter months that can transform them into profitable opportunities.
Reduce your minimum stay requirements
A longer minimum stay makes sense in peak seasons, but it can be a smart move to reduce it in the slow season. For example, if you usually have a 2+ night minimum, the slow season may be a great time to test out a single-night minimum, even if you set it just for weekdays.
Shorter minimum stays look appealing to a broader range of travelers, especially those seeking brief escapes. Being flexible with Airbnb minimum stay requirements will allow you to meet their needs and increase the likelihood of bookings. This approach will help fill up your calendar and keep your rental competitive and profitable year-round.
Enhance guest experience
Airbnb hosting is about hospitality, so you must prioritize exceptional guest experience. That means creating a cozy space for your guests, stocking your kitchen with essentials, and providing thoughtful amenities and high-quality bedding. A good idea is to optimize your home for business travelers and include pet-friendly features in your listing.
You must also ensure impeccable cleanliness and proactive communication with guests during the customer journey. This way, you can make your guests feel cared for and happy, and happy guests are more likely to leave you positive reviews. Remember that 5-star reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations from previous guests can significantly affect bookings.
Managing your Airbnb is rather time-consuming, but if you automate your routine tasks using short-term rental management software like Hospitable, it will be much easier. Our STR super app has a comprehensive set of features and can save you hours of your precious time every week, which you can use to enhance guest experience.
Remove extra person charges
Many hosts set extra person fees throughout the year because of the extra work and property wear and tear in welcoming additional guests. It’s an aggressive pricing strategy, and by dropping it during the slower season, you can make it cheaper for travelers to stay at your place.
Eliminating an extra guest fee during the slow season could be particularly helpful if you live in a highly seasonal area. Having an extra guest doesn’t add much work to your schedule, but it could make the difference between someone booking a night at your rental or not.
Set up a parent-child listing
If you have a larger property, this strategy is a great option to optimize it for more bookings. For example, if you have a four-bedroom Airbnb property, you can install locks in two bedrooms and list your property separately as a two-bedroom rental. Then, the entire property is the “parent”, and the smaller rental unit with fewer bedrooms available is the child.
This approach lets you list two different Airbnb listings within a single property and attract large groups seeking a four-bedroom property, as well as business travelers and couples looking for a two-bedroom stay. By renting out a smaller space, you’ll be able to get bookings during a slow season and weekdays, when the demand for the entire property might be low.
With Hospitable’s parent-child feature, renting out different listings within a single property at the same time won’t be a problem. If the parent listing gets booked, the child listing is automatically blocked, and vice versa, to prevent double bookings.
Offer discounts
Since the demand during the slow season is lower, you may consider reducing your rates to attract more travelers. This will help you remain competitive with local hotels offering discounted room rates during unpopular periods. It’s also essential to monitor the prices of similar listings in your local area and adjust your nightly rates accordingly.
Offering discounts or value-added perks can also entice potential guests to choose your Airbnb property over others. For example, you may encourage your guests to book additional nights at discounted rates and offer discounts for last-minute bookings and long-term stays, like a week or a month. Just add the word “discount” to your title to inform your potential guests that the prices are lower than usual.
The easiest way to get your pricing right is to use a dynamic pricing tool, and the good news is that Hospitable users can take advantage of our built-in Dynamic Pricing. This feature is included in Host, Professional, and Mogul plans, saving you money on third-party pricing tools.
If you enable this feature for your property, Hospitable’s Dynamic Pricing engine will adjust your rates automatically based on demand, competition, and seasonality to maximize revenue and optimize occupancy.
Adjust calendar availability
This tactic can help attract potential guests planning to travel six months or more before the slow season. For this to work, you should extend your Airbnb calendar availability to 12 months into the future at the start of a busy season. After three months, you need to adjust your availability to 9 months into the future, and three months later, you should adjust your availability to 6 months.
List your property on more platforms
If you have a listing only on Airbnb, it’s time to expand and list your property on other short-term rental platforms, at least such significant players in the vacation rental market as Vrbo, Booking.com, and Agoda. This way, you can reach a wider audience and increase your visibility.
Opt for vacation rental software with channel manager functionality like Hospitable. You’ll be able to list on multiple channels without worrying about juggling calendars, messaging, and cleaners across bookings. With Hospitable, you can efficiently manage all your accounts on major booking platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, and your direct booking website, and be protected from double bookings.
You may also consider listing your property on niche and local channels to extend your reach and target different types of travelers. And with Hospitable’s iCal imports, you can seamlessly sync calendars across various niche platforms like Expedia, Hipcamp, or Hopper app and manage all your bookings in one place while taking advantage of automation and AI features.
Just copy and paste an iCal import link from your booking site. Hospitable works with any platform that offers an iCal feed, and iCal imports are updated every 20 minutes.
Get a better idea of how this feature works with the interactive demo below.
Find creative ways to market your rental
Attracting guests to your Airbnb rental during the slow season can be challenging. But it’s the perfect time to get creative and explore unique ways to market your vacation rental property. For example, you may try to gain exposure in the local community by networking with nearby businesses or attending local events.
Another effective strategy that can help your Airbnb stand out and attract more guests is to highlight the unique features of your rental by adding stunning visuals and creating engaging listing descriptions. Popular social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook can also be valuable tools to reach a wider audience.
Remember that with a bit of creativity and effort, you can successfully market your vacation rental property and thrive during the Airbnb slow season.
If you are looking for more Airbnb hacks, you may also want to check out our blog article to find tips on attracting more guests to your property and maximizing your bookings during shoulder season.
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Table of contents
Reduce your minimum stay requirements
Enhance guest experience
Remove extra person charges
Set up a parent-child listing
Offer discounts
Adjust calendar availability
List your property on more platforms
Find creative ways to market your rental