Adding more listing sites to your overall channel management strategy is the best way to grow your short-term rental business, but part of your growth initiative should be to get the most out of your performance on each channel you appear on.
One way to maximize your experience on Airbnb is to become an Airbnb Superhost.
What is an Airbnb Superhost you might ask?
In 2016, Airbnb began to reward their most dedicated and hospitable hosts with a new badge that would distinguish them from other hosts on the platform: the coveted Superhost status.
Here, we discuss what you will receive in return for becoming an Airbnb Superhost, what it takes to become an Airbnb Superhost, and five tips to achieve Superhost status.
What does Superhost status bring to your business?
On average, Airbnb Superhosts benefit from a “significant” increase in earnings due to a higher rate of visibility.
You will also inherently attract more guests through the designated Superhost badge, search filter and promotions surrounding Superhosts from Airbnb. Finally, you can gain access to exclusive Superhost rewards, like an additional 20% when you refer a new host and an annual travel coupon.
How you can become an Airbnb Superhost?
Luckily for you, there is no paperwork or application process to become an Airbnb Superhost. All hosts who meet Superhost requirements on Airbnb’s quarterly assessment dates - January 1, April 1, July 1 and October 1 - qualify for Superhost status. The size or style of your vacation property doesn’t matter, so long as you meet the following requirements:
- Host at least ten stays or complete three reservations that total 100 nights or more
- Respond to a minimum of 90% of new messages in 24 hours
- Have at least a 4.8 overall rating
- Cancel less than 1% of the time
If you meet these requirements, you’ll be notified of achieving Superhost status roughly ten days after the respective assessment date. You will then notice your new Superhost badge appearing on your listings.
5 tips to help you become an Airbnb Superhost
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Create strong property listings. To increase your chances of hitting the ten stay minimum, you have to attract as many travelers to your listings as you can. Since human beings process images faster than they do words, you should have beautiful photos of your vacation rental property posted on your listings. Photos often become the determining factor when it comes to choosing a property. Be careful that both your headline and description of your property are professional and appeal to your target audience, and make sure you’ve updated your list of property features so that you can appear in as many Airbnb searches as possible.
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Centralize and automate your reservation calendar. Creating one reservation calendar that automatically updates when a booking is pulled in from another channel will save you from cancelling on guests. To centralize your calendar, use property management software like MyVR that connects to each channel with direct connections. Direct connections avoid glitchy, third-party channel managers that often cause more of the same issues you are trying to solve for. Adopting this to your short-term rental business will not only help you achieve Superhost status quickly, but will allow you to perform better in every channel and grow your revenue.
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Set up autoresponders to automate guest communications. With one of the conditions to become an Airbnb Superhost being a 90% response rate to new messages within 24 hours, setting up autoresponders will greatly increase your response rate and also provide you more time to respond. This is a particularly useful tool if you manage a large number of properties, and it also assures the guest that their message was received. MyVR makes automating guest communications easy. From within MyVR, you can create a single autoresponder to go out to all guests on every channel you list on, not just Airbnb.
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Provide an excellent guest experience. In order to become an Airbnb Superhost, you need a 4.8 rating or higher. To get five stars every time, you don’t have to pull out the red carpet - although thoughtful touches like a welcome basket and guest book do help. But for most guests, nailing the small things are more important, namely maintaining a tidy property and operating a seamless check-in/check-out process.
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Ask for reviews. Listings with more reviews attract more bookings. Reviews go a long way toward maintaining a score of 4.8 or higher. Make it your goal to source a review from each guest that stays with you; this is another example where autoresponders can save you hours of time in reaching out to past guests. If you need more suggestions on best practices to source reviews, these tips will help you build up a library of reviews in no time.
Juggling multiple properties across various channels can be a time consuming, organizational nightmare. Using property management software like MyVR in place will help you keep your business in order so you can focus on its growth and maintaining your Superhost status.
MyVR makes it easy to manage all of your listings on Airbnb - and every other channel in your marketing strategy - to ensure that you gain maximum exposure and reservations without the fear of double bookings. Our direct connections to each of the five major channels, including Airbnb, skip the third-party channel manager to protect your data from degradation and costly errors that cause cancellation rates to rise.
