When a guest books through Airbnb is it your customer or is it Airbnb’s?
Vacation rentals can now advertise on 100+ sites thanks to channel manager, but you have to ask yourself who really owns your customer and where will they go back to book
I think that for most Airbnb reservations Airbnb owns that customer. They own their email address they own the review & they own the brand recognition in your guest’s head.
Should We Cut Off OTAs?
Short answer no. I have seen a lot of property managers beating on the down with OTAs drum at conferences. While that gets great reception in a room of property managers, it is a long term losing strategy.
Even the largest property managers who have 1,000+ homes or have raised hundreds of millions of dollars are getting a significant portion of their guests through OTAs.
The cold hard truth is that no individual property manager has the distribution and ad budget that they can choose to not work with any OTAs.
The OTA Trade Off
When you work with OTAs it is by far the easiest way to reach new guests, but you have to understand what that means. It is not your guest, it is not your site, its not your ads, & you may not even have their real email address.
They can just as easily change their algorithm & give their eyeballs to other listings or cut you off altogether or increase their commission.
Seth Godin often refers to this as digital sharecropping
Shopify’s founder also knows this.
(Shopify is world’s largest ecommerce software that isn’t amazon)
How to Change It
The only way to change this dynamic is by offering the guest a memorable experience that goes above & beyond that an OTA or regular host could never do.
When you give the guest a memorable experience we change the dynamic from the OTA owning the guest to you owning your guest.
What is Memorable
Guests expect a simple check-in process and a clean house with wifi & toiletries that’s not enough to make you memorable anymore.
I will always remember a property manager that called me beforehand, knew my name, & stocked the property with my favorite alcohol & coffee.
I will always remember the property manager in Martha’s Vineyeard that told my family we needed to do a clam bake on the beach.
I will always the remember the property manager that told us about the best hole in the wall restaurant or bar that made my trip.
These are things that guests will never forget & makes them book direct with you next time & tell their friends about you.
This is what flips the OTA relationship on its head.
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