If you’re a hotel manager, you’re probably wondering if and how to sell your rooms on the Airbnb portal with an Airbnb Channel Manager.
In this article we will give some practical advice on how to make the right choices and avoid making mistakes. We want to share some tips on how to optimize the management of rates and availability, taking into account the new paradigm of commissions introduced by the portal.
As you know, Airbnb has marked a turning point in the way of travel of millions of tourists, the Californian startup founded in 2007 in San Francisco makes available on its website every type of solution: from beautiful houses to simple apartments, going to homes on tree up to ancient abbeys.
3 million structures in 191 countries, 65,000 cities and 150 million guests
Recently Airbnb is winking at hotels, especially those structures that offer tourists an “experiential” holiday, we try to better rattle this concept.
Airbnb for Hotels
The goal of Airbnb is to increase its offer, setting as a goal to arrive in 2028 to a billion guests a year.
There are currently over 180,000 B&B’s and more than 55,000 boutique hotel rooms available on Airbnb. With this aim, one of the innovations introduced in the last few months and more debated in 2018 was the opening of AirBnb to hotels.
At the hotel that would like to sell their rooms on the portal, a seemingly advantageous commission is required ranging from 3% to 5% (the amount varies according to flexible rates and cancellation policies).
If for the hotelier the commissions are reduced and very attractive, it is important to note that the tourist, on the other hand, will have to pay a commission that varies between 10% and 15% of the total.
Going then to add the two percentages of commissions, both the hotel and that on the shoulders of the tourist, it is easy to see how after all we have an alignment of costs to those that are the costs of the main OTA portals.
1) Why do I need a channel manager to manage Airbnb?
Almost always, a hotel sells its rooms through many online and traditional channels. Manually managing the availability, restrictions and rates is a titanic effort that must be absolutely delegated to a software, for this reason the “channel managers” were born.
Therefore, the hotel that chooses to sell its accommodations on Airbnb must absolutely include this channel among those synchronized by its channel manager in order to automate its management.
We therefore expect that an Airbnb channel manager will be able to communicate 2-way with the portal; 2-way means that it is able to send updates from the management system to the portal, but it can also receive the bookings and insert them in the planning of the management itself.
The limitations of the channel manager connection via iCal
Airbnb offers all users the ability to update openings and closings by sharing a calendar in iCal format.
ICal is a very limited tool because it allows the hotel to synchronize only the openings and closures but does not offer any way to send information to the portal about restrictions (minimum stay, maximum stay …) and prices.
As you can easily guess, this is an acceptable limitation for those who run very small businesses (one or two apartments) but become unmanageable for a hotel that applies sudden price changes and receives many bookings.
2) Connect the 2-way Airbnb Channel Manager:
- prices;
- minimum stay restriction;
- maximum stay restriction;
- availability;
- closures.
But it must also be able to receive real-time updates on registered bookings, making sure that these are inserted into the management software (PMS) of the hotel automatically.
3) How to build your own pricing strategy on Airbnb
As explained in the introduction, the “Airbnb method” of the commissions applied to each booking is different from the main portals used by the hotels. For this reason the hotel owner must carefully think about the prices and the rates he intends to send to Airbnb.
What is the risk?
if you do not act in the right way, you end up “out of price”, creating discrepancies between your website or the other OTAs on which the rooms are sold.
Respecting the concept of “Parity Rate“, ie selling at the same price on all channels, becomes more complicated because the different form of fees charged by Airbnb must be taken into account.
But even if the hotel owner does not intend to respect the concept of “parity rate”, it is still important to define a price update plan that can be defined at the channel manager level and applicable automatically.
Let’s take an example!
So to give a practical example, you happen to talk to hoteliers who want to sell a room to:
- € 100.00 on your booking engine (direct booking);
- € 110.00 on the OTA portals (e.g. Booking.com, Expedia);
- € 100.00 on AirBnb.
The reason why the price on Airbnb seems to be lower is because it must be taken into account that the tourist while buying the room will have to pay an additional commission that will bring the final price of the room to € 115.00.
Obviously not everyone chooses to operate in this way, but in any case it is necessary to use a channel manager that is able to modulate the prices sent to the various channels on the basis of settable rules.
The AirBnb portal has entered as a tornado in the boutique hotel industry.
This means that it will be an instrument that will grow more and more and will increasingly play a high-level role. For this reason it is important to understand how best to use it, analyzing with great skill how to create a pricing strategy able to face this new sales paradigm.
Slope Channel Manager
If you are wondering if the Slope Channel Manager is able to help you manage the various OTA channels, by automatically updating prices, availability and reservations … the answer is YES!
Try it now by filling out the form! ⬇️
