The $100k Direct Booking Blueprint with Niyi Adewole

In the latest Hospitable Hosts podcast episode, our special guest is Niyi Adewole, the leader and founder of Ekabo Home. This company manages around 30 short-term and mid-term rentals in Atlanta, Georgia. Niyi is also an STR host, team leader, and realtor for the Ekabo Home Realty Team, which helps investors acquire short-term rental properties.

Chatting with Miles, Niyi shares his story of starting as an Airbnb host with a single property, growing a successful property management business, and moving into direct booking.

Press Play now to discover how Ekabo Home started on Airbnb and has hit $100,000 in direct booking revenue.

If you prefer to read the highlights, we've got a summary of the key takeaways below.

Why Direct Bookings?

Niyi Adewole explains that his hosting journey started in February 2021 with one short-term rental property listed on Airbnb. Now, he has nine active, fully furnished short-term and mid-term rentals marketed on the Hospitable Direct booking website.

Niyi admits that since Airbnb is the biggest distribution platform for short-term rentals, historically, that has been where Ekabo Home has gotten most of its bookings. But recently, they have moved into the direct booking space, and "it's been amazing."

"The cool thing about the direct bookings is that they allow you to take away that element of Big Brother. When you move people to direct, there's a little bit more trust there, and you can actually work through whatever issue at hand, and you keep a bit more in your pocket as well," Niyi points out.

Hitting $100,000 in direct booking revenue was one of his goals. "We would love to start to chip away at some of the OTAs and just build a portfolio where we have a lot of people rebooking within our network so that we can continue to keep that going. But that was a huge milestone. And I appreciate Hospitable for celebrating that alongside us," Niyi emphasizes.

Convincing Guests to Book Direct

Niyi thinks the most important thing is to deliver a great guest experience because otherwise, guests won't be willing to return. "I would say the experience, that's the first and foremost. If you don't have that, the rest of this will not work," he adds.

They also promote their direct booking site in every property—they put signs inside their rentals and provide a QR code and a link to their direct booking website showing their 30+ properties.

Recently, they also started using WiFi marketing with StayFi (which integrates with Hospitable) to capture the contact information of everybody who stayed at the rental property. Then, they send their guests follow-up emails and text messages and "show them booking direct is the way to go next time."

How Hospitable Helps Ekabo Home with Direct Journey

Niyi points out that Hospitable made the transition to direct bookings "headache-free" because they didn't have to build a whole website." I am a full-time realtor. I have a team of 13 that I'm managing there, along with the properties we manage. And so, to not have that headache factor and be able to seamlessly take all our properties on the platform and move them to a clean, professional, and beautiful page helped tremendously," he explains.

Another advantage of having a Hospitable Direct website is that they don't have to worry about collecting funds from guests and handling refunds and ad hoc charges.

Niyi also loves that the Hospitable team hosts public town halls where users can get answers to their questions and learn about new features. "From a learning curve standpoint, I like the pace at which you're releasing new features, and it's just getting better and better," he points out. Niyi looks forward to Hospitable releasing a full PMS system with improved connections for Airbnb, Booking.com, and other OTAs.

Advice for Airbnb Hosts

Niyi thinks that hosts who predominantly get their bookings via Airbnb and want to expand their property portfolio should go direct. "If your goal is to expand to two or more properties, and you look at this as a viable opportunity to replace some of your income or create a new business, you should have a direct site," he emphasizes.

Tune in to the full episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast to hear the inspiring story of Niyi Adewole and the Ekabo Home team, who took advantage of Hospitable to achieve direct booking success.