How Hosts Swap Unbooked Nights

In this episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast, we are joined by Sean Wilkinson, Co-Founder of Hostshare, a home exchange network built exclusively for short-term rental hosts. The platform lets hosts share unbooked nights with each other so they can travel for the cost of cleaning fees.

Sean shares how Hostshare started, what has changed after three years of host feedback, and how hosts can travel using the nights their listing earns. He also discusses Hostshare’s integration with Hospitable and how Hospitable users can benefit from it.

Press Play now to discover how you can share your unbooked nights with other hosts and travel for free.

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

What Is Hostshare About?

Sean says Hostshare was built for short-term rental hosts who all deal with vacancies, which inevitably happen when you run an STR business. “We started asking how you get any additional value from the nights that go unbooked,” he says.

Sean notes that globally, vacancy rates still run over 50 percent, so this is a problem worth looking into and trying to solve. So they started as a company focused on filling only last-minute open nights. They created a host-only network and platform where hosts can trade unbooked nights with each other and experience a new way to travel—free.

“It's definitely morphed over time, especially over the last six months to a year, quite a bit from what we started with,” Sean points out.

What Has Changed After Three Years

Sean says that when they started, they had only a few hundred members and most of them were from the US. Now the Hostshare network has member homes in 55 countries, although 90 percent of their listings are in the United States.

“We really haven’t started looking outward internationally in a major way yet. We’ve built in all the functions to work internationally, so we technically have live listings in over 55 countries. But we do see a lot of travel within those countries.”

They launched Advanced Travel on Hostshare, a completely different model that lets members book stays up to six months out and plan trips ahead.

“If you're only traveling last minute, you're only going to travel within a few hours of where you live. Before, it was only a five-night horizon—you could book a property that had vacancy within the next five days. With the changes we made, everyone now has 200 blockout nights they place across their calendar, leaving 165 nights that are flexible and can potentially be booked on Hostshare. And they don't actually share all 165. They set the maximum number of nights they want to share.”

Sean emphasizes that hosts decide which nights to share and which to keep to themselves: peak season, holidays, high-demand weekends.

Partnership with Hospitable

Now, Hostshare integrates directly with Hospitable, so Sean explains what advantages Hospitable users get when they connect their Hospitable accounts to Hostshare. He says Hospitable hosts will receive a three-night bonus when getting started and a $300 credit toward Hostshare platform service fees.

“So that'll probably get you at least two full trips, assuming you're doing two- or three-night stays on the platform and just paying a cleaning fee. That's the only expense for those trips.”

Sean points out that they are capping this offer to 2,000 users and adds that connecting your Hospitable listing to Hostshare is very easy.