CFD 564 – Why Are My Short Term Rental Bookings Declining? Q&A

October 21st, 2019

Questions and Answers

  • Our short term rental bookings have been plummeting recently and I’m not sure why. Am I discounting too early or too slow based on data?

You have to decide how far out in advance you want to be comfortable with for your bookings. To really know what’s going on you need to get the right data in front of you. In the case of the caller’s short term rental unit, the average number of guests is 4.1 with a 7 day booking window. Since all the data came from the one platform, one solution may be to get on additional platforms that will increase the booking window.

If there is a conversion rate decline, the question becomes “what changed?”. If customer preference is what has changed, that may mean you have to adjust the way you are describing the rental and modify who you are trying to attract.

It’s important to look at last year’s data as well so you can compare. If your conversion rate is down to 56% from 70% in Q4, maybe that’s what you should expect based on historical data. If you have the same number of leads, it may be something to do with your listing, or your communication, or your response time that is affecting your conversions.

  • For a house, do you put a camera in the backyard?

When it comes down to an expectation that a space is going to be private you can run into issues. You can put a camera in the backyard but you should make sure it’s looking at the backyard and not into the house. If you do do it, make sure you disclose it to your short term rental tenants.

If there’s a pool in the backyard, you have to be especially careful. You are probably concerned about the number of people coming into the unit at that point and if that’s the case there are other solutions to that problem. You could use devices that detect cell signals or wifi connections that would indicate the number of people present.

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