How to master your Airbnb bookings using a channel manager

If you are in the hospitality industry, the term Airbnb needs no introduction to you. In this fast-paced world of short-term rentals and hourly booking, mastering your Airbnb bookings is crucial for your business. 

A channel management software can help you with this. It helps you to streamline your room rates and inventories.

In this detailed guide, we will explore how can you master your Airbnb bookings with the help of a channel manager. 

Airbnb allows you to share your place with someone and earn rent from it. Others can use your place to crash instead of going to a hotel.

As a host, it is not mandatory to stick to only one channel such as Airbnb. To earn more through the rent, You have to increase your property’s online presence. For that, you need to list your properties on multiple channels. 

However, it also increases your work to manage your room rates and inventories across those channels. Channel management software can help with this.

The main role of a channel manager is to update the rates and inventories that are available across all the room booking sites and eliminate the chance of overbookings.

Now as we have learnt the importance of a channel manager, a question arises of how to choose the right channel manager for your hotel.

You have to identify the features that matter the most for Airbnb hosts such as real-time synchronization, calendar management, and integrations many more.

Also, you need to keep an eye on popular Airbnb Channel Managers in the market and how they cater to the specific needs of Airbnb hosts.

Once you have selected the channel manager for your Airbnb bookings, it’s time to set it up. The steps may vary for different channel management tools. So, make sure to follow the most recent user doc or ask for setup assistance from your provider. 

The most commonly followed steps are as follows:

1. Go to your preferred channel management software website and add Airbnb as the channel. 
2. You’ll be redirected to the Airbnb page where you need to enter the property ID or the listing ID.  
3. Authorize your Airbnb account and your Airbnb channel is connected with your channel manager.

After setting up your channel manager for Airbnb bookings, it’s time to optimize the listings. You can set different dynamic pricing strategies based on factors like demand, seasonality and local events.

The guests may find your property on various channels. So, you have to make sure to update your property details such as photos and availability across all the connected platforms. This is helpful to make a professional and trustworthy online presence. 

Now, since your listing is well-optimized on Airbnb its online presence has significantly increased. There are high possibility that many guests book the same room many times. This is commonly known as overbookings or double bookings. 

Overbooking can become a nightmare for the hotel owners as well as for the guests. So you need to build several strategies to avoid overbooking in your hotel. 

With certain channel management software, you can prioritize certain channels such as Airbnb itself over others. And you can allocate a specific number of rooms to each channel to distribute the rooms more effectively. 

Also, some advanced channel management software offers overbooking protection features. This automatically closes the inventories across all the channels once a certain threshold is reached.

If you have followed all the steps carefully, you now have started getting new Airbnb bookings. However, tracking your hotel’s performance becomes slightly difficult.

The good news is your channel management software comes with in-build monitoring and tracking analytics. It can provide you with many reports that can help you in tracking the hotel’s performance.

Various reports such as booking and reservation, Occupancy and Availability, Revenue and Pricing Reports, Financial Reports and many more can help to track your hotel’s performance.

Moreover, reports such as guest behavior demographics and forecasting reports can help you identify booking trends and peak seasons. This will help you in a better analysis of the hotel and give more a competitive advantage.

So, the channel manager is not only a tool for syncing your room rates and inventories, but it also provides many other features as we have looked at in this blog. By carefully understanding its functionalities and implementing the best practices, you as a host can master your Airbnb bookings and gain a competitive advantage in this fast-paced industry.

If you are a hotelier and looking for software for your hotel, One Property Management that we recommend is QloApps – A Free hotel booking software

Got any suggestions? Kindly share them with us on the QloApps forum. For any technical help, kindly raise a ticket.