I haven’t frequently hosted properties on Airbnb in Pakistan but I listed one property in 2018 that I rented to sublet just for learning purposes and found success with it.
While there could be many tricks and hacks you may use to find success on Airbnb, my personal favorite is simply a pricing hack that I’ll share later in this post.
I think everyone agrees that the core success of any property comes from how good the property is, and what is the value for money. So you certainly cant discount that advice. Your property photography needs to be really good for the whole thing to look good and your pricing needs to be competitive with what others are offering in the neighborhood.
The second most important thing for your Airbnb listing is your landing page. It should be super informative. There’s little need for you to get creative, just look at the highest rated properties, and try to copy everything that they’ve done on their landing pages. Try to provide as much information as other top properties have done. If you don’t find anything extra ordinary in the neighborhood, explore properties in other countries such as US and UK and find the best parts for your sales pitch.
The third thing, that I was able to really make money from, is simply a pricing hack. When you search a property, Airbnb displays the base fare on the front-page. If you have ever booked a property, you may have noticed how your $50/night and 10 nights never add up to become $500. Instead, you’re always paying $750 or something. This happens because when you open the property, the pricing now includes price per number of guests staying, weekend pricing, cleaning fee, airbnb service fee etc.
Since I was only interested in rentals that were at least a week long, I set the minimum length as 7 days, and took advantage of the weekend pricing. I set the base pricing as $50 or about 20% lower than my competition. By doing so, Airbnb not only ranked me higher than my competition but I also looked more interesting and generated a higher clickthrough rate from my audience. My weekend pricing was twice as high ($100) as my base-fare and since the rentals were always week long, there was no way to avoid weekend pricing.
In the end, my pricing structure would sell 5 nights for $50/night, and 2 nights for $100/night cumulatively giving me $450/week or an average nightly rate of $65/night.
After taking the final pricing into account, I costed about the same as my competition, but appeared 20% cheaper, appeared higher in airbnb search ranks, and had a better click-through.
This is just one of the many ways you can take advantage of the Airbnb pricing system to generate higher revenue and occupancy rates than the rest of the neighborhood.
PS: This was only an experiment that I ran a couple of times and not something that I presently do.