Airbnb Calendars are FULL Completely With This ONE Technique

The path to 100% occupancy on Airbnb starts with a commonly known but widely misunderstood term called length of stay. And knowing how to incorporate length of stay into your pricing strategy is the easiest way to guarantee 100% occupancy. My name is Sean Rocky. I do over a million dollars a month on Airbnb and I've had over a 100,000 reservations under my belt. And let me tell you, 90% occupancy is a lot of work. It's not necessarily hard, but it is a grind to get over 90% occupied. and my newest green property that has almost 100% occupancy in just the first seven or eight days that it's been live has taught me a valuable lesson on how I've been wrong in the way that I map out length of stay in my pricing campaign. First, you will need to understand something that I call zones. If you're new here, let me explain. We use five zones in a distribution curve style map in Cracking Superost. It's my coaching program and we have this belief that most of your bookings should come in what we call a golden window which is the prime time to get booked. We have hyperfar future which is zone one, hyper last minute which is zone 5. Your golden window is usually zone three and your shoulders in and out of these zones is zone 2 and zone 4. Your golden window can shift in peak season or slow season. It could be more proactive or it could be a little bit more sticky where you hold your rates more last minute. But zones are supposed to represent where we get percentages of our bookings. We should never have a campaign where we cannot get any bookings in zone one or where we have to get all of our bookings last minute in zone 5. This would be unhealthy pricing management. So we use zones as a guide to set goals on what percentage of our bookings should come hyper farer and what percentage should come last minute. I used to describe zone 3, the golden window as the time that you get the best ADR for your bookings. But I realized something else. It is not just ADR that we want season to season. We want to get the best combination of occupancy and ADR because you could get $2,000 for one booking one night. The rest of your calendar is empty, but technically you got $2,000 ADR in your bookings. That's still not good. At the end of the month, you only made $2,000 for one day. If we can map out a way to get a high ADR while also getting a solid length of stay, that means that we will get more of our bookings at the premium rate that we desire. Because if you got one night booked for $2,000 on a Friday, but then now Saturday or Thursday or Wednesday cannot get booked because Friday's taken, that ruins the whole entire week. And if your listing is capable of $2,000 on a Friday, it's likely capable of at least $5,000 for the week. Getting a one night stay on Friday just ruined the whole thing. But I'm preaching to the choir here. If you're a host, you knew that already. So now I want to introduce to you the very first time that I've had this thought in public out loud. Zones 1, 2, and three, we want to prioritize length of stay over ADR. And zones 3, four, and five, we want to prioritize ADR over length of stay. But the golden window overlaps where we have this unique blend of requiring a solid length of stay and a solid ADR. This is absent of seasonality because let me overlay this for you. You know slow season's coming even months a year in advance. You're going to want to get that calendar full and you realize that you're going to have to go below your typical price in any season. So you proactively will lower your rate. But if you get a two-day stay in slow season 4 months from now, you're also very unlikely to fill the rest of your calendar because that two-day stay gets in the way. And once you have a booking on your calendar, other days become less searchable. So you would proactively like to get a 6 or 7 or 12 or 15 day stay as your first reservation in slow season if you're going proactively. So you're going to keep your ADR higher for a 3-day stay because you're prioritizing a longer stay, meaning that you give a week-l long or longer discount on the condition of a oneweek stay. to say this in a fresh angle for you. Your price is still high in slow season per night because you do not want a one night stay or three night stay in slow season, but your discounts for a weekly stay or longer or deeper to highly incentivize somebody to choose your property for a week or longer. You've actually prioritized occupancy and length of stay this way where it looks like you were swinging for the fence on rates, but you knew that you weren't going to get booked at 2 days for $2,000 a night. So, what you've done on the service looks like your rate is too high because you're greedy, but it's because you want to prevent a three night stay and that's why your rates are high. And then you could do something like half off for a week stay or longer because you are prioritizing a stay that fills up your calendar and prevents those orphan days or those gap days in between the small reservations. But let's look at how this plays out in peak season. Every market has a peak season, but it looks differently per market. Think of seasonality like an island. Any land that is underwater is a season where customers have control. But any land that is above the water, the island is the time of the year that the seller has control. The water line is what I would call equilibrium where land meets the water is the rare moments of time where the guest and the host can agree upon price. But in the times of peak demand where there are more travelers than there are sellers, you also will raise your rates way ahead of time to prevent someone from booking for now. But what you expect to happen is three or four months in advance while you come into your golden window, you instead of giving discounts for a weekly stay or longer and prioritizing longer stays over ADR, you are waiting for customers to come around and understand that your prices are going to be high and they're going to have to pay it. And we achieve this by letting other hosts book first, thinning out the supply in your market. And now every new traveler will have less inventory to look at, meaning that your price will slowly become more and more and more attractive. And in your strategy for peak season, you know that the best ADR bookings are still going to be three, four, or 5day stays. You're not going to get a twoe stay that's going to pay the huge premium. So the math at the end of peak season will be that every single weekend is full of an extremely highpaying reservation. And then you'll fill in those orphaned weekdays with a different secondary strategy. you know that the end of month revenue will be best by letting every weekend book at double of its normal value. Where in slow season, you know that the end of month revenue would be best if you could get all of your dates full even at a discount because getting any dates booked at all in slow season is the challenge. Now, this hasn't even gotten to the crazy part where I've really changed my tune on length of stay. Both of these examples, we are looking for 3-day, 4-day or longer stays because what we've talked about is zones 1, 2, and three. Zone one is super far future where we would love to get a slow season booking. Any bookings in slow season, even a year in advance, would be great. It really helps derisk our portfolio. And in peak season, we've waited until zone 3 where a lot of our competition is already booked. We look better relatively to whatever is left over. we have a really high rate, but we still have a three-day or 4-day minimum. And people book the whole weekend, plus Wednesday and Thursday at a really high price. And then we worry about the Monday, Tuesday later. And this is what takes us from zone 3 down into zone 4 and zone 5, which are lastm minute zones where anything that we haven't gotten booked yet, we need to start getting booked. If you've made it this far in the video, I'd like to personally invite you to the Be Host Summit May 13th and 14th. This is a two-day event where you can learn everything about the Airbnb industry and it's split up for newbies and experts on each individual day. The 13th is getting started in the space, picking up a property, doing market research, getting landlords to say yes. The 14th is everything you need to know as an operator. From pricing strategy to ranking well on the Airbnb algorithm, managing housekeepers, getting five-star reviews, everything is covered at the Bea Host Summit on May 13th and 14th. I will be your only educator. There are no sponsors. There are no sales pitches, just non-stop, highly effective and highly actionable Airbnb business education. Do not miss your opportunity to attend this in-person event in Dallas, Texas May 13th and 14th, where you can learn alongside other ambitious hosts just like yourself. And I will see you there. There will be a QR code on screen to follow or the link will also be down below to attend the Be a Host Summit. Do not miss this opportunity. I'm looking forward to meeting you. Now, what I have done that I'm changing my ways on now is something that I changed my tune on just a few years ago. I used to tell hosts, have a one night minimum and then just raise your rates 30 or 40% and then give a discount for 2 days or 3 days, whatever your target is. That's still not a bad strategy, but Airbnb's changed their algorithm to do something that I call right fitting, where they are looking to give a guest the best and most correct listings. Now, because Airbnb is older, they don't care as much about interest. They care about functional bookings where three or five years ago your rates could have been too high. But Airbnb's algorithm would still show you because you had a lot of bookings and you had healthy interest. Airbnb instead has three things that really drive your algorithmic placement which is your reviews, your cancellation policy, and your price. And if you have bad click-through percentage or if you have a bad conversion percentage, which you can see in your insights tab, Airbnb will also give you less placement because your whole entire funnel isn't working as well as another listings funnel is working. And so if your price is too high, but you're available and somebody clicks on you but does not book, then you have a low conversion percentage and low viewto book conversion percentage gives you less of a rank on Airbnb's algorithm. This is the change that they've made over the last couple of years. So, it's better that we do not get shown in a search that we're not suited for on Airbnb and make sure that when we do get shown, we get clicked on and we get booked as often as possible. And so, that means now for you, if you no longer want a one night stay, we're not going to prevent it just by pricing ourselves out. We may use a minimum length of stay strategy to prevent ourselves from being seen when we are not relevant. This could be healthier for our position on the algorithm. But now, here's the change. Version point two. I think that we should allow one night stays more frequently than we used to. Airbnbs come a long way on anti-parties and anti- bad guests and the risk profile has changed. And also, a lot of hosts are restrictive on minimum length of stay strategy. So, they don't show up in search because they've made this change that we've talked about. And because of this, the supply and demand curve for single night stays is different. The world that allows a one night stay, the listings just aren't quite as good or they're just way too expensive. You can control your revenues for single night stays and still make 8 or 10 or 12% more than you normally would as far as ADR goes because the places that are available for one night stays just aren't pretty at all. But now let's introduce the counterargument from the beginning of the video. If we always allow one night stays, then we might get a Friday booked and the rest of the week won't get booked. So, we need to find a middle ground strategy for this. And perfecting the timing of your transition from doing a three-day or 4-day minimum down to a one-day minimum is the key to getting 100% occupied. And here's what I believe now. I used to set my 1-day minimums 12 days in advance. And that's it. Everything beyond 12 days in advance would have a higher restriction. Like weekends would be 2day and then weekdays would be one. And then beyond 20 days in advance, weekends would be 2 days and weekdays would be two days. And then beyond 35 days in advance, weekends would be 3 days and weekdays would be two. So based on lead time, we lower from 3 and two down to 1 and one. I am now pushing my one and one requirements further into the future because honestly there's this middle zone between 10 days and 30 days where we're trying to get a 2-day stay or longer and it just doesn't work out in our favor as often as we want it to in the market that we're in. I think that having a 3-day minimum on weekends for 3 months in advance is absolutely fine. I think having a two-day minimum on weekends and weekdays 2 months in advance is still absolutely fine, but this is where the gray area starts. In property sizes, this will vary. To require weekdays, have a 2-day minimum more than 45 days in advance. You could miss your one shot at getting your Monday or your Tuesday booked. Where somebody was planning 2 months into the future, but your restriction prevented that. We should know that two months in advance or less, we are going to be fighting to get these weekdays booked most of the time. peak season being our caveat. So instead, my minimum length of stay strategy is going from 3 and two at 3 months to 2 and two at about 70 days and then 2 and 1 at about 45 days and then 1 in one at 30 days instead of 1 in one at 10. Now this is for multi-bedroom properties. With a studio apartment, you can still go down to one at about the 21day mark because things do happen a little bit more last minute. But I realized that I overreacted to Airbnb's change in the algorithm to right fit and I started to be overly restrictive on my minimum length of stay settings and I'm walking that back now. And here's another pro tip that you can steal. When I would have conversations with wheelhouse over four years ago and I was helping them to determine what features should go in their pricing software, I came up with this term adjacency. And you understanding adjacencies will change the way that you run your business. An adjacency is a day that touches a reservation. If someone checks out on Tuesday and Tuesday would be the only way someone can check in and use that Tuesday, then Tuesday is an adjacency. And if someone checks in on a Friday, then the only way that somebody could utilize Thursday night would be by checking out on Friday morning, that Thursday is an adjacency. And adjacencies don't show up in search like they should. For a one-day stay, every day is 100% visible. Somebody wants a day on Wednesday or one day on Friday, it can be searched on a 1:1 ratio. But if someone is searching for a three-day stay and there's a checkout on a Tuesday, well, there's only one combination that Tuesday exists, which is Tuesday check-in, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday checkout. So, if someone wanted that Tuesday and check in on Monday, that's impossible. And that's why adjacency matters because adjacency governs that days are less searchable because other reservations exist. So, we would love to get 4-day or 6-day long stays initially and as soon as we have a reservation, we need to take the days that are immediately before or after a reservation and then optimize them for search. We need to increase the conversion percentage on those days. If someone can see that Tuesday because thank god somebody searched for a Tuesday check-in, we want to make sure that we capture that booking because an adjacent day is 1/ half of an orphan day. An orphan day by definition is when there's a checkout, two days of space, and then a check-in. The two days of space, those are two days that are orphaned. And orphan days are nearly impossible to get full. A lot of you have that problem with your weekdays. The best way to prevent an orphan day is to find a way to sell your adjacent days before the next reservation happens. And in summary, my friends, this game is like a game of Tetris. Reservations that fall on our calendar create spaces and then the rest of the game gets harder. When the board is completely open, you can put that first block anywhere. and we want the best blocks that we can get and we want to line them up right. Once our calendar becomes too full, the last remaining dates become nearly impossible to book. So in our case, we want to plan ahead and try to get a blend of length and ADR on our first bookings. So that way we can fill up as much of our calendar as possible before we start to see conflicts that we need to compromise on in our availability strategy. Some prime takeaways that you can follow. When your calendar is completely open, that's when it should be the most expensive because there's no combination of booking that someone cannot take. And the moment that you have a booking, the day before and the day after should be decreased in price. The moment that you have a 4-day gap or smaller, you also want to recognize the probability that those days won't get booked at all. And so, the value of those days drives down. And now you're weighing the probability of $0 versus some. you may find that you're slashing your rates half off just to guarantee that those dates get booked where you also have found historically that they never get booked at all. When you have days that do not get booked, I call this having a low hit rate. And if you discovered that your Tuesdays only got booked 20% of the time, for example, and your Tuesdays were listed at $200 a night, then the price that you are getting on average for your Tuesdays is $40 a night because you've missed four out of five nights on average. Understanding hit rate and how it factors into your ADR is your next journey in hitting 100% occupancy. And I do this with AI. If you want to learn to use AI to increase your profitability, watch this video next. Thanks for watching this to the end. Don't forget to hit that like button on the way out and I'll see you on the other side. Page 49 teaches you how to get more bookings on weekdays. Page 112 teaches you how to take advantage of zones to get bookings any day of the year. and page 149 will keep you making the most money during event spikes. This is 262 pages of every pricing technique I can teach you in one book. The Revenue Manager Handbook is out. If you're an Airbnb host, you need this book. Click the link down below and I'll send you a copy.