Airbnb Alternatives to Increase Bookings

Airbnb may be the most popular site for short and long term rentals in Phuket and undoubtedly seems the best, but as tourist numbers are dipping and competition is growing, you may want to consider including a few airbnb alternatives to increase your bookings for 2020.

Make your property stand out from the crowd

Before we show you the alternatives, we would like to stress the importance of optimizing your property and listings to stand out among the crowd and increase conversations per view. We released a guide on this privately a few months back which can now be found here: Increase Your Airbnb Bookings. While the below list may turn out to be nothing new to you, we dare say this guide will have a few tricks to help increase your bookings.

So what you’ve been looking for, here’s a definitive list of other sources to get bookings for your property.

Airbnb

Just I case you have clicked this and have been hiding in a cave so haven’t yet joined Airbnb it is undoubtedly the best way to get people to rent your property in Phuket right now, just don’t forget to utilize the below options as well!

Tripadvisor

You may be scratching your head right now as Tripadvisor is often overlooked but their fee structure is arguably more appealing than Airbnb’s and they have a much wider audience to hit so are well worth checking out if you haven’t already!

Nearby Tourism Business’s Partnerships

Are you located near Muay Thai Gyms, Golf Courses, Wellness Centers, hospitals, etc, etc? Any business that draws tourists to Phuket and needs accommodation will undoubtedly be interested in what you’re offering, if they can make some good commission by sending you their clients.

Independent Agents

A lot of people now can be seen on social media advertising various properties they see for rent, long term and short term. These Facebook agents tend to be looking for long term tenants for your rooms which may be a nice option with increasingly less tourists to Phuket. You can find agents simply by looking on the Facebook groups such as Phuket Rent and Sale Property (19k members) but by searching property Phuket keywords you can find many groups. I’d recommend messaging a few agents and see what they offer you and what they expect in return.

Facebook Groups

Leading on from the above recommendation of using the smaller independent agents, you can cut them out and do exactly the same as they do yourself! Just search various property groups in Phuket to post your property listing. As you will be competing with hundreds of other posts I again stress the importance of making your listing stand out with professional photography and a well written description. If you want more advice on this again checkout this guide to increasing your Airbnb Bookings.

Property Management Companies

Property Management Companies are a step or 2 above independent agents generally. They offer different levels of service ranging from just sending you bookings that you manage yourself, all the way up to fully managing your property, maintenance and picking up and looking after your clients during their stay, actually the clients become their clients and all you are doing is picking up a paycheck. The quality and professionalism of these companies also varies so we recommend two methods of finding the right one for you. Firstly, ask your friends who they use! Recommendation from someone you trust is always best. Do, do your own research though as even good friends may inflate numbers sometimes! Take these recommendations and google their companies, see how they appear in the rankings, if high then they will likely be getting lots of customers for themselves and incidentally you! If you have no recommendations then googling the kind of keywords you imagine your potential clients will be searching and see who appears highly.

Homeaway

Homeaway has actually been around a lot longer than Airbnb and many people we shoot for in Phuket have told us it’s a close contender in terms of how many bookings it sends. However the commission rate on Airbnb is approx. 2% higher but in our opinion paying an extra 2% on your booking is better than not getting any booking! The other drawback to using Homeaway is it’s not free. At a few hundred dollars yearly this may put some people off, but they’re known for giving extra service to hosts and guests alike and frankly the fee should pale in comparison to having empty slots that could be filled with paying customers.

Booking.com

Lets be clear, Airbnb is cheaper and will likely send you more customers than booking.com, however! If Airbnb is not leaving you fully booked and you have a well optimized profile already (click here for tips on that), maybe it’s worthwhile signing up to Booking.com

So we hope you got some value from this post and we would like to re-iterate the importance of making your property stand out from the crowd and we have now made public a guide we were sharing privately a few months ago, which can be found here It’s not just about creating amazing photography so hopefully you will find it helpful on numerous levels!