How to Use Short Term Rental Data to Grow Your Airbnb Business

There is a variety of short term rental data that can be useful to vacation rental hosts, enabling you to make data-driven decisions to increase booking frequency, occupancy rates, average nightly rates, and revenue generated while listed on a variety of different platforms and generating direct bookings.

What Types of Short Term Rental Data are Useful to Vacation Rental Hosts?

There are a variety of data types that are accessible to hosts and can help them grow their vacation rental business. These include:

1. Booking Data

This includes information about the number of bookings, length of stay, and booking sources – such as Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, or vacation rental website. Hosts can use this data to understand booking patterns and identify opportunities to optimize their pricing, minimum night policies, and availability.

2. Occupancy Data

Occupancy data includes the rate of occupancy over time, lengths of stay, types of occupants, and occupancy from the different channels you receive guests from. Hosts can use this data to identify occupancy patterns and optimize their minimum stay policies, pricing across different channels, and marketing strategies.

3. Guest Data

This includes information about the demographics and preferences of guests who have stayed at your property. Combined with your booking and occupancy data, you can understand the traveler segments (business travelers, budget travelers, families, college students, etc) that have stayed at your property, what they liked about your property and didn’t (workstation, lack of outdoor space, etc) and hone your marketing and pricing strategies to attract more of the guests you want.

4. Revenue Data

As the name implies, revenue data is all the data regarding the revenue generated by your property. Tracking revenue data will provide a picture of your Airbnb’s finances and allow you to understand the financial performance of your vacation rental including your expenses, most profitable guests, etc. This will allow you to tinker with each factor to maximize your revenue.

5. Review Data

This encompasses the reviews and ratings left by guests who have stayed at your vacation rental. While negative reviews can be a terrible experience, looking at reviews as valuable feedback will provide you with information on what you are doing well and what areas you can improve. This, in turn, will allow you to improve your guest experience, continuously.

Where Can Hosts Access Vacation Rental Data?

There are a number of sources of short term rental data that Airbnb hosts can use to make informed decisions, improve the guest experience, and implement effective strategies to grow their vacation rental business.

1. Collect Your Own Data

Collecting your own data and analyzing it will provide you with the most personalized and unique insights about your Airbnb vacation rental that no other provider will be able to match. However, collecting, storing, and analyzing data can be complicated if attempted manually. Integrations through Zapier to the appropriate tools can lead to a streamlined process.

2. AirDNA

AirDNA is a provider of data and analytics to the global short term rental market. It tracks the performance of over 10 million properties on Airbnb and Vrbo in 120,000 global markets and an additional 1 million partner properties. Using AI and machine learning, it provides pricing, revenue, occupancy, rental types and sizes, rental platform choice, preferred cancellation policy data, and more for destinations and neighborhoods across the globe.

3. Transparent

Transparent tracks over 35 million listings on Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor, globally, to provide vacation rental hosts with actionable data dashboards including demand, occupancy, and competitor rate forecasts over the next 360 days; historical data; review analysis; guest origins; and more.

4. AllTheRooms

AllTheRooms Analytics provides short term rental data including market overviews and comparisons, historical and future demand and supply, competition tracking, potential revenue calculations, best-performing properties, etc.

5. KeyData

KeyData provides business intelligence and benchmarking tools for short term rental hosts that allow users to build customized, competitive sets for each property; rental projections; real-time and forward-looking traveler demand data; as well as financial monitoring for your whole Airbnb business and each listing.

6. Dynamic Pricing Tools

Dynamic pricing tools like Wheelhouse, PriceLabs, and Beyond that make up a crucial and significant element of your revenue management strategy, also provide varying amounts of pricing and related data apart from recommending the most competitive rate for your vacation rental each day.

Key Takeaway

By accessing and analyzing short term rental data relevant to your Airbnb using one or more data resources and/or tools, you can make informed decisions and implement effective strategies to grow revenue and scale your business.