Heads In Beds Show - How To Get Last-Minute Bookings For Your Vacation Rentals

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Drive more bookings to your properties last-minute with these marketing tactics! Leverage rate, email, social, and ads to drive demand. Articles & linkshttps://rentalsunited.com/blog/last-minute-booking-channels/https://seetransparent.com/blog/2021/02/08/the-future-of-travel-2021-reports-hometogo/https://www.buildupbookings.com/

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Heads and Beds show. I'm your host, Conrad O'Connell. Today's episode is all about last minute bookings. Over the years, we've worked with clients and last minute bookings are always a need for every single property manager or vacation rental manager or host. It doesn't matter if you have one property or a thousand, if you do a phenomenal job of marketing or not, there's always little gaps to fill. Whether it's two or three nights in a midweek stay, or whether it's entire sections of your calendar that you need to fill for a specific property, having the skill and the marketing prowess to get last minute bookings are always needed. As we record this episode, however, it's in the middle of 2021.

The pandemic after effects are very real, and the booking window has shifted dramatically, shorter than it was if we look pre-pandemic 2018-2019 data. According to a study by Transparent and posted on the Rentals United blog, last minute bookings have changed drastically. In January 2020, 19% of bookings have been within six days of check-in and 28% of bookings are that longer than 60 day window. So everything in the middle could be considered more of a last minute booking compared to traditional booking windows. That's where you might need to push and promote and do a lot of marketing and a lot of promotion in that window. Today's episode, we're going to talk about several techniques that you can leverage to earn those last minute bookings and ultimately get more heads and beds. So let's hop into it. As we look into what last minute bookings are possible in

the channels, marketing channels that you can use to leverage, we're going to cover a few different topics. We're going to talk a little bit about social. We're going to talk a little bit about your website design layout and where you can kind of push or sculpt traffic to individual property detail pages. We're also going to talk a little bit about email and paid search. But before we do that, I'd like to get the obvious out of the way, which is the most obvious tactic, of course, to get a last minute booking is to consider lowering your rates. So if you've had your rates at a certain level and the property has been active for some time, let's assume on your own website, and on listing sites, and you have not yet got a booking, the natural assumption is that maybe you've overpriced it, maybe the property doesn't have enough reviews or ratings, or doesn't have

any past guests that have stayed in it before to, you know, have a strong desire to come back and want to book this property again. So naturally, the easiest thing to do, of course, is to consider lowering your rates. But in my experience, even if you do lower your rates, whether it's a small amount, 5%, 10%, or a significant amount, some hosts and managers that we've worked with in urban destinations will discount last minute as much as 30, 40, 50% from their normal rate. Whatever sort of discounting strategy you do, you still have to get attention to that property typically for it to book. Sometimes just doing a discount and pushing it out on listing sites will get you a booking here and there. But I think that if you want to create a strategy around direct bookings, just always slashing your rates to the bone and pushing that

out via listing sites is probably not the way to go. The best thing instead is to maybe have a plan strategy put together for different areas of your direct marketing that you can do, whether that's promotion through again, social media, we're going to talk a little bit about Facebook ads, Instagram, whether that's something that you do to the design of your own website, we're going to talk a little bit about banners that you can put on your search pages or in other places on your website, your email list, and even doing some outbound marketing as well, people that have stayed with you before. So the obvious piece, idea number one, as you consider doing or working more on direct bookings, last minute direct bookings, of course, is to lower your rates, you know, bring them down a little bit. That's the obvious technique. The non obvious technique, of course, is to let people know that you have lowered your rates. So what I mean by that is that if your rate is previously $200 per night for a specific property, displaying that information on your website, if you change the rate from $200 per night to 1799 per night or $169 per night, is best done through some kind of visual display. So that could be a small banner on the property page or kind of

card information that comes up when people search for those dates on your website. It could be a mention on the page itself, we've lowered our rates for this week, this day, etc. And it could also be communicated visually through Slash Through Pricing. So Slash Through Pricing is showing the original rate, $199, showing the discounted rate, $169, $159, whatever the case may be, and illustrating or showing to that traveler, to that guest, that you have lowered your rates on this property. People like to get value, of course. People like to get a good deal, no matter what they're searching for.

They look for a quality, of course. They want to stay in a nice property. But if you can explain, hey, this property is normally at this rate, $199, we brought it down a little bit, you've already started to anchor them that the property is worth a little bit more than what you're currently charging, and start to initially get some interest and hopefully some urgency in getting that guest to book that individual property, or whether you have one or a lot of properties, bringing that traveler, bringing that guest into that frame of mind of saying, ultimately, I'm getting a good deal. So as you consider bringing down rates, you make that more obvious, then you can start to

market or create a little bit of a strategy around how to push that promotion out. So many of the clients that we've worked with over the years have just simply taken a property detail page on their website, said last minute opening this weekend or something like that. And they push that out on Facebook, hit post, they link sometimes to the property detail page on that Facebook post. And then they put their hands together, start rubbing and hoping that a booking comes through. Hope's not a great marketing strategy. So we've never found that to be particularly effective. Instead, what we've done is the following. If you're trying to get someone to actually stop what they're doing on social, so on Facebook or Instagram in particular, you have to have something in the content of that post that makes them want to

stop scrolling. They've gone on Facebook primarily to look at other types of content for the most part. Other types of information is usually what they're more interested in actually looking at on Facebook. So you have to put something in that listing or in the actual creative or the image or the gallery in that listing to make them want to stop and start scrolling. What we do is we design one of two things. We put a little gallery together. So it could be a single image that has five or six different sort of areas within the image and like a grid format, show your best five photos or six photos of the property. Typically, that's not two photos of the same thing, right? Maybe if the property has a pool, you might include a photo of that, maybe a photo of the kitchen, maybe a photo of the best bedroom, etc. So mixing that up,

showing your five best photos of the property is a great way to get them to stop and say, oh, what's going on in this post? What can I do there? Overlay some text or some rate information if possible, either on the graphic or towards the top of the actual text content of the post itself. So if your rate was $199, you brought it down to $169. Again, show that slash through pricing. Rate previously was $199, slash that through and show that lower rate.

Again, in the graphic itself on that Facebook or Instagram posts. And of course, in the text as well, using some creative elements or pieces here, like an emoji sometimes can bring some attention to it. So if you have if you're at a beach market showing a little beach icon or a beach emoji, old rate was $199, new rate was whatever the case may be, that's a good way to do it. Some of our clients actually prefer to book them or prefer to show the actual gap that you're staying in. So for example, if someone was booking Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, they give the full rate. Book these three days for $7.99 or something like that, plus some applicable taxes and

fees. Those types of displays of information can make it easy for someone to understand as they're scrolling in an attempt to check out your property detail page. If you're not really giving them enough context or enough information, and they just see a nice picture of a property page, and they have to go to the website to see which dates are available or what the rate is, you're asking that guest to do a little bit too much work. In my experience, you want to make it easy for them to just, you know, quickly look at the post quickly look at the graphic on that post the copy on that post and decide if it's potentially a good fit for

them. So just by improving the creative or the actual post design itself that can help make that perform a little bit better and potentially get you more bookings than you were last minute just using social as a strategy. However, just promoting it organically or just posting it organically, I should say, is one piece. The other piece, of course, is doing ads. So going into Facebook Business Ad Manager and targeting specific audiences or people that you want to target that ad with can be particularly effective. Naturally, a drive-to market you can target based on radius. So for example, if people are traveling in from a three-hour radius, you might want to include some of your

core markets. I'm here in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for example. One of our core markets might be the Charlotte or Raleigh areas of North Carolina. So we can target our Facebook ad to only people who are there, as opposed to people who might be driving in from a much further distance, let's say Ohio, where they might be less likely to do a last minute trip. This is especially applicable in my experience, if the amount of days you're trying to fill is relatively low, two, three days stay, obviously, it's easier to convince and convert someone to drive a few hours as opposed to 10 or 12 or 15 hours of drive to destinations. fly-to is always going to have a tougher ability to do last-minute bookings, even if they, for example, someone in Houston, Texas would love to go to Hawaii,

it may be tough for them to figure out ways to make that plane travel work and make everything kind of line up, even if they find a great stay in your vacation rental property. So fly-to markets are always going to have some different targeting, but you can still favor or potentially promote only in cities that have direct flights. So if you're marketing, for example, a property in Hawaii, you might want to focus on those top four or five markets that actually have direct flights to your particular island or wherever that happens to be for you if you're in a different flight to market. So you can target just simply based on location and interest. So you could say,

for example, people were interested in my destination who live in these markets that can help narrow things down a little bit. But I would argue that sometimes you need to be a little bit more specific. So typically, we find that the best performing audience or ad group targeting set that we can put together on Facebook is actually people who have been on your website recently. So recently, in our experience, usually means the last seven days, maybe 10 days timeframe, because these are people who are already in that search mindset of looking for specific dates or looking for specific properties on your website directly. So you've narrowed down the ability, this sort of overall audience size from potentially

hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, depending on how broad that targeting is, maybe down to a few hundred or a few thousand. But these are people that have at least seen your brand and checked you out recently. And of course, you're retargeting based on people who have been on your website so your autumn your chances of conversion go up significantly because of how specific you can be with that targeting so as you put that post out again you can just push it out to your followers organically that works you can also put some ad dollars behind it and you need to determine the budget based on what are your chances for a conversion and what's the value of you for that booking if you're trying trying to fill a two-night stay at a condo that gets 200 bucks a night, your margin is low there. There's not a lot much you can do. If you're trying to fill a five-day

period at a high-end property that gets $800 a night, $1,000 a night, obviously you have a lot more margin to play with to get some bookings or just pay for advertising to get more bookings for that specific property using social ads. So explore all those options when you get to the Facebook and Instagram side of things, which is targeting via website visitors and targeting via your core feeder markets, people that are most likely to come in and book. So let's move on to the next strategy, which is actually physically displaying a link or a banner on your website or in search pages with a link to the

property that needs that booking or needs that last minute design. So it's hard to come up with a one size fits all type of suggestion here as far as the way you should lay this out. Some of the clients that we work with have a low enough number of properties where we actually put that banner site-wide. You land on the site every single page other than the property detail page itself, of course. We have a small little somewhat unobtrusive but obvious banner that's linked at the bottom and says, last minute deal, stay this weekend at this property for this rate. Again, try to give them as much context and information as possible. Then when they click that book now button or view property button, whatever kind of design element you choose to include in that individual banner on the bottom

of the site, if you can pre-fill the dates in. So if they click on that link, they should go to that property page, detail page, they should see the dates that have been pre-filled for them. And then of course, your website should quote that with rates and fees and taxes, etc. Add it in so the guests can decide to book it right there. You may want to be a little bit more strategic about this. If you have a very large site and you have a lot of properties, the banner could be a little bit more subtle. Maybe it could even be a collection page. Some of our clients, for example, have what we just call deals pages, which is over the next 30 days or over the next 15 days, we list out 10, 15, 20 different properties that all need last minute bookings. But again, we're showing slash pricing and we're sowing value between all those different listings. So the clients that kind of fit more

into that bucket might have 20, 30, 40, 100 properties under management. You may not want to put a banner on your site if you're just promoting one out of 80 properties that you have. And let's say 20 need a last minute booking, right? So this strategy might morph and change a little bit depending on kind of your site structure and what you have included. But the gist being that if you put a present banner on the site, as someone comes to your site and looks at dates, it puts them right into the frame of mind right away of what's available. What's an example property? What can

I find with this property manager, with this vacation rental manager? And how can I get that booking? And how can I get that person to actually go to that property detail page and start to explore? The only downside, of course, of the strategy is that maybe the property that needs this last minute booking isn't your best. So if you're pushing a lot of traffic into your site, and let's say 10 or 15% of people coming to your site are clicking in on one of this individual property detail page or collection of properties that need last minute bookings, maybe those aren't your best properties. So you're not actually putting your best foot forward. And we also don't necessarily know the intent of someone behind that search. If they come in and

put in certain dates, for example, in September, as we sit here in the middle of the summer recording this, we may have actually directed their attention to the wrong place when they're more interested in properties that are open in the fall. So be careful with that strategy. We leave these banners up very temporarily. Sometimes we've left them up for 28, 48 hours on the website and then taken them down. But these banners can be extremely effective if it's get more visibility on this property or bust. If you have a lot of site traffic coming in, the banners can be extremely effective. So let's move on to the next strategy,

which is email marketing. So email marketing in my mind is the greatest potential if you have a targeted past guest list. Using email marketing can be phenomenally effective because you have a lot of options available to you to get last minute booking. So the most obvious one, you could take people who've stayed in that rental before, but have not yet booked this year. Maybe that's a list of depending on

how long the property has been in your program, that could be a list of 10 2030 people. And you could send a targeted offer to them. Hey, you stayed in this property before we have it open this weekend, there was a last minute cancellation, or there's a last minute availability, the price is normally 199 tonight, we're offering at 129 to the first person that books it creates some sense of urgency, maybe even consider doing it where the timer sort of The price is normally $199 a night. We're offering at $129 to the first person that books it. Create some sense of urgency. Maybe even consider doing it where the timer sort of runs out, right? You send that offer and you say, we expect this property will book in the next few hours. Call us to confirm availability or check the property page on our website to find other

openings if you missed out on this opportunity, something like that. Obviously, you can do different things. So one option, again, is targeting just people who have stayed in that property before, but you can be a little bit more broad, you could target, for example, all the people who have stayed in that time range before maybe not those exact dates. But let's say you added plus or minus three weeks before three weeks after. And again, people who have not yet booked this year. So let's say, for example, that you had a property that you feel like should be booked, but is not for July 4th, you could take people who have stayed in previous years going back maybe two or three years in your database and look for people who have stayed towards the last week or

two in June and then the first two weeks of July. So take a bit of a wider sample size for the strategy and then you can know these are summer travelers, people that are interested in traveling in your destination in summer, and then you can send them maybe not quite as specific of an email, but still a pretty targeted email to potentially a few hundred or a few thousand people depending on your list size that has exactly the criteria that they look for when they make their booking typically in your destination. The last kind of idea here on the email list side of things is to include it as part of a larger newsletter or dedicated send. So let's say for example that you're just sending out your typical monthly newsletter that you send out to all your past guests or people that could potentially book again, you could include it as featured property

in the top of the newsletter, you can also include it as section towards the bottom, the last minute deals or deals this weekend, something like that, along with other content. So it's not necessarily a dedicated send strategy where you're just sending out this one property or the small collection of properties out to a list of guests. But instead, you have a larger newsletter send that you're doing, and you're including specific elements in that newsletter template design to get someone to come over and check out that offer that you have there as well. So with that email list, we're going to take that into kind of the next strategy, which is a combination of the two, which is taking that email list and considering doing

some outbound. So a lot of the clients that we work with actually do very little, very minimal outbound marketing, one-to-one style. They do a lot of email marketing, we help with that. They do a lot of paid search, SEO, and all those kinds of things, but they do very little actually calling or emailing guests one-to-one. We do have some clients that have used this strategy with phenomenal success. So what they essentially can do is take that list that we mentioned a moment ago, people who have stayed in this property before, and create a very specific, very tailored either text or email campaign to those people that have stayed in this property. So inside of your CRM, or inside of your property management system of choice, if you had that list of let's say 18 people who have stayed in this property before,

you could even spend a little time or have someone on your reservations team spend a little time to personalize that message. So instead of just saying, hey, we have a last minute availability in this property. Instead, you could say something like, hey, John, I know you stay with us here at this company in the past. And I know you enjoyed your stay at this property. It's actually open this weekend and we have a last minute opening. Would you be interested in getting a quote? I could send it over to you if you're interested.

Would you be free this weekend to come stay at the property? Something like that to make it a lot more personal. And instead of sending this in this nicely designed email newsletter template format, you could send it with a very personal looking style. So coming just from someone on your team, again, they could be marketing or reservations, sending to an individual guest with a very personal tone and a very personal feel and maybe spending 1015 minutes to customize that messaging a little bit. Instead of just saying we have the property, maybe if you have notes in your property management system about that guest, oh I know last time you came with your you came and stayed with a pet, this property is still pet friendly, we'd love to host you, etc. can naturally increase your conversion rate significantly because of how specific you can be with that outbound message.

So let's recap. Once you have the property that needs a last minute booking, there's a few things that you can do. The obvious thing, lower your rates. The non-obvious thing, lower your rates and then show the guests that you lowered the rates through slash pricing. This can permeate all the messaging and marketing that we're talking about here, whether that's through social, email, website banner, etc. But make it be known that the guest is getting a good deal. They're looking for that. After you actually have your rate settled and you know what the gap is that you're looking to fill, push that post out on Facebook. Consider using Facebook ads to promote that post. But again, make that graphic, make that image a scroll stopper.

They need to decide as they're scrolling through Facebook or scrolling through Instagram, why should I stop and look at this offer? Focus on your design. Focus on your copy. Don't just put out a link to your property page with one line of text. That's just not going to be enough to actually get that conversion in our experience. Depending on your site layout, depending on how you'd like to do this, consider adding a banner to the bottom of your website that would click someone over to the property detail page with the dates pre-filled. Or have a deals page or something on your website that highlights

or specifically mentions last minute availability and pull that in, share that to the guest, let them know what's available. Next, once you have a list, you can take your email offers and go two different directions with it. One is sending out like a newsletter style campaign, mentioning people who have stayed in that property before, or people who stayed with you in that general area or time of month before, meaning they've stayed in plus three weeks, minus three weeks in that specific property. And then lastly, you could take that email list and consider doing some outbound. Call, email, text that guest and say, hey, I have an opening. I have a property that would be a good fit for you. I know because you've stayed either in this property or a similar one before. Let's make a deal. Are you interested? Could we help you out and get this property

booked? So if you follow these strategies in our experience, you can help get more last minute bookings and ultimately put more heads in beds. Thank you so much for listening. I'm your host Conrad O'Connell. If you enjoyed this episode, please do leave a review and we'll get you next time.