How do I get more bookings as a new Airbnb host?

Let me tell you a personal story. Back in 2019, I owned a condo and wanted to rent it for the long term to make some money with my property. The first tenant that showed up was a guy who was doing Airbnb arbitrage and offered me a lower price than what I aimed for. I told my wife why we won't list our property on Airbnb and see how it goes. The day we listed, I was anxious about whether we made the right decision, and if we were going to make at least the amount I was looking for, what if the guests damage our property, who is going to do the cleaning, and many, many more questions, but most importantly, how can we keep the bookings coming in from our ideal guests?

Long story short, this condo made at least twice as much as what we were looking for, but we made a lot of mistakes. Here I list some mistakes we made as new hosts and what actually ended up having more bookings, and in our first year, our condo became number three in our city in revenue

What went wrong

1. Offering free breakfast: We didn't have much budget to offer a menu for breakfast and cook what guests wanted, so we had only 2 options for breakfast. This ended terribly. Besides all the stress and hard work of cooking, cleaning dishes, and making things ready on time, our last breakfast was for a family who were so rude and didn't appreciate the breakfast and put a lot of claims for free food we offered them, which was the last time we offered free breakfast, and that went to history
2. Not defining Ideal guests: This one ended up in some terrible experiences with people whose goal by booking wasn't tourism, or a group of people who damaged our property, and some experiences I don't even want to explain here 
3. Bad reviews: Guests who didn't follow our rules received a bad review from us, and they tried to retaliate and left us some bad reviews as well. This again shows how important it is to define your ideal guests before even starting
4. Offering a cheap rate: It happened to all of us, when we just get started, we say let's keep the rate as low as possible to bring as many guests as possible, but this has a lot of consequences, you end up with the wrong guests, you don't make enough money to pay bills for utilities, cleaning staff and products and this can also impact your quality of service 

What went right

1. Analyze your first bookings: After having our first guests (good and bad ones), we started analyzing what people were looking for and what amenities we should add to our listing. I can say this one was the most impactful task we have done. Looking for the right amenities and adding them ASAP to our listing. We had a king bed in the master bedroom, but the second bedroom had only one double bed. We had enough room and added another double bed, and also fully equipped our kitchen, bought a new washer and dryer, and added a small TV in both bedrooms and a 70" TV in the living room. These amenities together made our next month full. Always make sure you have all the most important amenities; you can't believe how important TV is to our guests, and we didn't have any idea.
2. Adjust Pricing: Getting started doesn't mean you should offer your listing for free; study your market, analyze competition, and, depending on your condition, define a nightly price. Don't put pricing randomly or blindly follow Airbnb's dynamic pricing. You can't believe that when we adjusted our pricing and raised the nightly fee and also the cleaning fee, we got high-quality guests who became our loyal guests. Pricing is something that needs constant changes depending on holidays, market, political condition, toustim, season, weather a lot of variables and the best way to be on top of pricing is studying guests behaviour - What listing for when and at what pricing they are booking and where are those listing located, what are their ameneties - are the most important questions you should answer
3. High Quality Customer Service: This was what led to becoming a venue for us to bring 5-star reviews, become a superhost, and beat a listing that had way more amenities than us, and where located in a better part of the city
4. Self-Checkin: We had this by default since our condo had an access card and pin code and guests could checkin at their convinice. many people look for self-checkin listings and they don't want to see you when they just arrive and tired from the flight 

Using AI to bring more bookings

When we started, there was no ChatGPT, and all the hard work was on us to search, try, and see what works and what doesn't. Now, you have a lot of AI-powered tools that can optimize your listing SEO to rank better in Airbnb search, analyze reviews, and find what is causing you to have fewer bookings, competition analysis, and listing analysis. I want to introduce you to 2 of our tools that are free and can help you get started

1. ShortRentals AI: You drop your listing ID, and AI analyzes your listing, rules, reviews, amenities, and title and description, and provides actionable insights for you on what to do to improve your listing
2. Dynamic Pricing: ask AI to analyze your competition in a specific location, and it will give you dynamic pricing for the next 30 days, depending on your goal