Nowadays, Airbnb is one of the most popular platforms when it comes to booking a vacation rental. In fact, there are over seven million listings worldwide on the platform and on average over 2 million guests staying on Airbnb every night.
Managing property listings and bookings across different sites can be quite tricky, especially when if you have your own website for your vacation rental business. You need to ensure that all the calendar availability, bookings and rates are always up-to-date.
So how can you manage everything from one place and save time? Not only does Lodgify sync directly with Airbnb, but it also provides you with additional functionalities. In this article, we’re going to take a look at seven ways on how our Airbnb management software works:
1. Avoid Double Bookings
Hotels have long been using channel managers to ensure that room availabilities and calendars are updated on any external listing sites when there is a booking made. For vacation rental owners, it’s the same principle. For example, if a guest makes a reservation on Airbnb, it will automatically be updated on your website. Channel managers are essential in your vacation rental business to ensure that everything is in sync.
Managing your vacation rental business is easy when you can use just one central reservation system for all your bookings and inquiries. Lodgify’s Channel Manager has a two-way synchronization with Airbnb, which means you don’t have to manually update your availability calendars.
You’ll be able to keep your website’s calendar up-to-date by instantly importing bookings into Lodgify, which will synchronize your availability. When you receive a booking on one channel, all the rest will automatically update to show your guests the correct availability. Double bookings won’t occur anymore and you’ll be able to easily manage all your reservations from one single platform.
2. Maximize Profit with Rate Markups
While it’s free to list on most OTAs, the majority do charge commission per booking. A channel manager marks up base rates on specific channels to cover any fees or commissions.
You can also use them to maximize profits through dynamic pricing. For example, pricing by demand and day of the week makes it much more likely to fill the gaps in the calendar and increase revenue.
When you change a rate on Lodgify’s channel manager, it will be updated instantaneously on Airbnb. This will prevent guests from paying too little or too much when booking your vacation rental.
3. Answer Your Guest’s Messages
Communicating with your guests during their booking process or before their arrival is vital. It’s the making or breaking point, and shows your guests how you are as a host. But when guests are messaging you from different sites and platforms, it can get a bit confusing and complicated.
With Lodgify’s message integrations, you won’t lose track. Any message you receive or send on Airbnb will automatically appear on your Lodgify account. Likewise, you can communicate with your Airbnb guests through your Lodgify account.
This way, all messages are synced into one centralized platform. If a guest messages you on a non-listing platform such as Facebook messenger, it will also appear on your Lodgify account, along with your Airbnb inbox.
4. Import and Export Properties from Airbnb to Lodgify and Vice Versa
If you’re just getting started with your vacation rental business, you’ll want to diversify your bookings by creating your own website and promoting your property on platforms like Airbnb.
If you have already created your properties in Lodgify and you want to create an Airbnb account or you wish to add a new listing in Airbnb, you can do it directly inside your Lodgify account. Or if you already have an Airbnb account and want to showcase your listing(s) on your new Lodgify website, you can also import all of your listings.
Lodgify’s two-way integration allows you to export a property’s name, description, photos, amenities and rates from Lodgify to Airbnb and save time.
5. Ensure Consistency Across Your Channels
Constantly manually updating your listings across Airbnb and all of your other channels can be a repetitive bore and is also prone to error because there’s a higher risk of posting inconsistent prices or promoting the wrong descriptions.
If a potential guest finds the wrong information on your Airbnb listing and the specifics have changed, it’s highly unlikely that they will continue with the reservation. Additionally, they might think you’re unorganized and untrustworthy.
Lodgify instantly synchronizes with Airbnb so it’s far less likely for errors such as overbookings or double bookings to occur. Once a room or property has sold on one channel, our channel manager will automatically remove availability for those dates on the other online channels. This will avoid any inconsistencies on your listings – and the best part, it’s quick and easy!
6. Build Brand Awareness
Since a channel manager saves so much time, it helps vacation rental businesses to expand their reach to more channels.
More exposure usually leads to more bookings especially with the immense amount of traffic you can get from exposing your property on Airbnb. Simply being on Airbnb increases awareness of your property as guests navigate through different listings on their booking journey. Some of those guests may even be compelled to visit your vacation rental’s official website and make a direct booking.
Having a channel manager is essentially an easy, effective and affordable way to boost bookings and enhance the ongoing marketing efforts of a vacation rental business.
7. Manage Multiple Accounts On One Single Platform
There are many tools that vacation rental owners like you can use to help streamline your processes. Instead of managing your business through different platforms and accounts, it’s worth checking out options that allow you to do everything from the same place.
With Lodgify, owners and property managers can manage all their bookings from one place with an integrated channel manager while having their own vacation rental website.
The Lodgify channel manager provides two-way API connections to Airbnb to ensure rates, availability, and bookings are correct across all your channels. There is no maximum number of accounts you can connect to and all of them are included in the subscription price.
You won’t need to switch between your different Airbnb accounts anymore, but instead, manage everything from Lodgify.
“I chose to add the Airbnb channel manager to increase exposure without shortchanging myself as other sites do. The fact that the calendar is automated and synced between Lodgify and Airbnb is absolutely perfect. I have a busy medical practice so I can’t be worrying about calendar hiccups.” – Dogwood Inn
