Upselling Ways to Maximize Profits with Guest Booking Options

Increasing profitability for the rental business is not a hodgepodge task anymore. Now, rental owners can increase their occupancy by selling nights at a high cost. This sounds simple, isn’t it? Yes, In this blog you’ll learn similar ways to generate strong profits in your rental business for a longer-term.                                        

Also, you can grow profits by enabling Guest Booking Options that help guests to opt for more choices. This way businesses can increase their booking conversions as well as reduce the risks of bulk guest cancellations.

How vacation rental bookings changed?

Due to COVID-19 outbreaks, it’s evident there is a permanent shift prevailing in short-term rental industries. Travel restrictions paved the way for uncertainty among travelers and many avoided it because of financial constraints. Most travelers experienced rebooking and the hassle of flight or accommodation cancellations that lead to financial losses. 

Uncertainty is amplified just because of the lock-down restrictions and tourist place bans. The spread records various stages across countries and even four waves of COVID-19 took place in some places. In the current scenario, travel booking is incredibly complicated but still, the demand is only increasing. Many travelers are looking for the best ways to minimize their financial losses.

What does the Vacation Rental data tell?

Here is a brief note of statistics that summarize the complications of travel bookings. Get insights from this data and strategize your business plans. This includes short data between June 2020 to May 2021:

• Listings with a “fully refundable” policy are booked 5.2 times often when compared to a “partially refundable” offer.                                          
• The average day rate (ADR) for “fully refundable” is 45 percent more than “partially refundable” bookings.                                                                                                      
• Guest cancellation rates of “fully refundable” bookings experienced a 20 percent higher cancellation rate than “partially refundable” bookings.
• 34 percent of “fully refundable” bookings got canceled within 7 days. This data shows that the calendar will get reopened for bookings quickly.

Guest cancellation rate

The experts recommend Property Managers utilize a “fully refundable” cancellation policy that records 5.2x more bookings with just 1.2x higher booking cancellation rates. These canceled dates can be booked by other guests quickly which reduces the loss of revenue.

Introducing Guest Booking Options

One of the big brands in travel bookings named “HomestayDNN” has launched a new feature that allows you to set up three different cancellation policies at three different price levels. Also, travelers can create up to three different guest offers while booking a property on this platform.

However, Booking.com was the pioneer of Guest Booking Options (which is “Rate plans”) years ago. Also, many popular channels like Expedia adopted these trends and incorporated them into their business strategy. Therefore, you can provide multiple offers along with different cancellation options at different price points to travelers. Guests can choose the best fit that matches their pricing and requirements while booking your property.

How to avail extra perks from Guest Booking Options?

To use Guest Booking Options for driving more profits, you need to follow the below strategies.

• You can set standard rates such as Basic or Seasonal rates in your rental platform that matches your cancellation policy. 
• In order to move towards the Booking step, you need to set your Baseline cancellation policy.
• The last step is to create additional cancellation policies and offer more flexible bookings with fully refundable policies. This attracts more guests as it reduces the risks of non-refundable ones. 

We recommend you to set all the three policy types in this priority order:

• Fully refundable
• Partially refundable
• Non-refundable

The reason why we recommend this policy is:

• Few channels only accept Guest Booking Options currently. You can take advantage of this highest converting policy and boost your rental business. 
• Not every channel supports all types of cancellation policy. For instance, Booking.com has stopped “partially-refundable” policies during May 2021.      
• HomestayDNN has introduced a “Super-flexible” policy for travelers. This still stands as a partially refundable policy when compared to Booking.com.

Are all OTA channels supported?

Now only Booking.com and Expedia allow you to send multiple offers notifications for guests while they book your property. Therefore, you can take advantage of such strategies in order to increase the booking conversion rates.

EndNote!

Guests are hunting for more flexible vacation rental booking options to manage the uncertainty due to COVID-19 and in the future). By providing more flexible options for guests, you get property booking rates higher. Offering fully refundable bookings not only reduces the risk of revenue loss but increases occupancy and profitability when you have accurate pricing.