Blending Marketing Experience with Short-Term Rental Hosting

In this episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast, we welcome Nicole Bansal, a part-time marketing consultant for B2B tech companies and an Airbnb Superhost. Nicole was born in Canada and is now based in San Diego, California. Nicole owns three Airbnbs, has four rental arbitrage properties, and manages three properties for other people, whom she enjoys working with.

In the episode, Nicole shares her journey as a marketer and short-term rental host, and how she applies her experiences in the tech industry and marketing to managing short-term rental properties. She discusses the importance of understanding customer personas and streamlining guest communication, and highlights some effective marketing tactics for hosts.

Press Play now to learn more about Nicole’s journey from marketing professional to successful short-term rental host, and how technology makes her life easier and helps her succeed. 

Do you prefer to read the highlights? We’ve got a summary of the key takeaways below.

Applying the Marketing Experience to STR

Nicole worked as a full-time marketing professional for tech startups and really enjoyed that work. She says she loves marketing, and it’s one of the reasons she still does part-time marketing consulting. Nicole notes that her previous marketing experience and lessons from the startup world helped her make smarter decisions about her short-term rental business and property management.

“I think the lessons that come to mind immediately for me are just building systems and standard operating procedures so that you're not spending a bunch of time doing the same thing every day. And so certainly a lot of our work is templatized in terms of our booking messages or check-in/checkout messages, our reminders to cleaning staff, and automating a lot of the systems that go into the day-to-day management of Airbnbs.”

As a result, Nicole spends little time on day-to-day operations and guest communication. Instead, she focuses on acquisition, setup, furnishing, design, marketing, and pricing management.

Nicole’s marketing experience also helped her differentiate her Airbnb properties from competitors. “Thinking through what will make someone choose my property over the one next door, and ensuring that I am thinking about my ICP—ideal customer persona. Whenever I acquire a new property, I think about who is going to be booking this house.”

Understanding her ideal customer personas enables Nicole to optimize property setup for the target audience, offer the right amenities, and price the rentals accordingly.

Marketing Strategies for STR Hosts

Nicole shares two low-cost marketing tactics that all hosts can use to attract potential guests and increase bookings. First, she recommends offering 10% discounts to return customers in post-checkout messages to encourage repeat bookings. If you have a direct booking site, provide a link to it so your guests can book directly with you.

Another effective tactic is editing listings’ photos to improve their appearance and make them more appealing to your target audience. Nicole thinks photos are one of the number one drivers of bookings.

“I actually go in, even though I pay professional photographers a lot of money to take excellent photos,” Nicole says. “I often do a second edit and improve or add twilight using AI. I've taken some photos that a photographer took, and I thought the sunset wasn't good enough. And I go into Canva and make the sunset look better, or I add an image on the TV, like a big Netflix logo, if they haven't. Slightly more saturated photos do well on Airbnb, so I might tweak the saturation levels a little bit.”

Using Hospitable to Help Manage Properties

Nicole says that at the beginning of her STR journey, she was using software with a lower-tier subscription, so she couldn’t benefit from the features included in the full package. When Nicole had two properties, she understood she needed more features to scale her business efficiently. She decided to look for other tools and signed up for Hospitable.   

Nicole reveals that Hospitable saves her a lot of time by automating guest communication, and her favorite feature is the AI tools in the Inbox. “That is the piece that I could never live without that would take way too many hours in the day,” she says.