Three Ways to Rank Higher on Airbnb from the Hostaway Webinar Series

Making your way to the top of Airbnb’s search results is mission critical. Airbnb hosts have collectively earned $250 billion dollars in revenue. The higher your listings rank, the more likely you are to get in on that billion-dollar action. So how do you do it?

Airbnb’s Market Manager Julia Herrington joined Hostaway CEO Marcus Rader to talk about this very topic in the latest instalment of the Hostaway Webinar Series.

Julia shared three tips you need to know about ranking higher on Airbnb. And it all comes down to availability, competitive pricing and overall quality.

Rank Higher on Airbnb with Open Availability

You don’t have to know the nitty-gritty details of Airbnb’s search algorithm to understand how it works. Airbnb wants to connect guests looking for a great place to stay with hosts who have a great place to offer. But even the greatest Airbnb in the world doesn’t matter much to a guest if it isn’t available when they need it most.

“Open availability is one of the best ways you can improve your visibility on the platform and heavily influences how your listing shows up in the search results,” says Julia. “The Airbnb algorithm...it’s looking at a few things, like how far in advance a potential guest can book your place, the response time to inquiries, how often you accept bookings.”

It’s normal to have some nights manually blocked off in your calendar, for routine maintenance, for example. But the more you can avoid blocked nights the better, especially what the industry calls ‘orphan nights’. These are days in between reservations that don’t meet the minimum length of stay requirement you’d accept for a booking.

That’s one of the reasons why adjusting your minimum length of stay can be a valuable way to drive more bookings. Julia shares that from July to December 2023, there was a 20% decrease in average length of stay on Airbnb. Lowering the minimum nights stay is one way you can seize on this opportunity and meet travelers’ needs.

Three tips for increasing your availability

• Limit manually blocked-off dates
• Look out for ‘orphan nights’
• Adjust minimum length of stay

Airbnb Pricing Strategies to Help You Rank Higher

No one needs any reminder that life has gotten expensive lately. With every penny counting more than ever, you need a pricing strategy that reflects this new reality. Whether or not you’ve got a great place to stay, if there’s a comparable property that costs less, you’ll lose out more often than not.

To see how your listings stand up against your competition, Airbnb launched its Similar Listings Tool. The tool provides instant access to the average prices of similar booked and unbooked listings, helping hosts to set competitive rates. By understanding how their listing compares in the market, hosts can make informed decisions to adjust their pricing strategy, ensuring they remain competitive while maximizing their potential revenue.

“This tool is really great when you're trying to fill dates or figure out what's going on from a demand perspective,” said Julia. If things are looking a little bit off in your market, it helps you zero in on what you can do to help achieve the occupancy rates and revenue that you're looking to get out of a listing.”

Airbnb also recommends you take advantage of discounts, like the length of stay and early bird discounts. On top of discounts, custom promotions allow hosts to target specific listings with customized pricing strategies. If you’re looking to achieve particular targets for particular listings, custom promotions can really give your business a boost.

It All Comes Down to Quality

This goes without saying. But quality can mean different things to different people. As Julia and Marcus put it, quality is a product of good reviews, good images, good listing descriptions and open availability. Since Hostaway users, with the help of our customer success team, are always near the top of the quality scale, we took two real-life examples and broke them down.

What immediately stands out about this listing are the professional photos, detailed description and great reviews. Jana has an impressive 4.99 star rating from 130 reviews. (It’s no surprise that Jana has earned the “Guest Favorite” badge!) But if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll see another reason why this is a standout listing.

“You can’t reserve this week, but next week it’s available. In April, there are some weekends booked, but you could stay there for a full two-weeks. There’s a full week available in May, and June is fully open,” said Marcus during the webinar.

You Can Rank Higher on Airbnb Too

Hostaway and Airbnb have built a powerful relationship through sharing best practices and helping hosts like you drive more revenue. There’s no magical solution to getting there. At the start of your hosting journey, you should expect some hard work, trial and error and bumps along the way.

But the more you incorporate best practices like these three takeaways from our webinar with Airbnb, the better shot you have at standing out from the competition and making your property a winner. And if you’re a customer with Hostaway, our team will make sure you get there.