The Airbnb Story

In its early days Stayz was set up for individual owners that wanted to manage their own properties . These were usually set up in regional areas/tourist areas , but they did not really compete with city hotels to much, and it might take a day or 3 to finalize a booking
As with anything that is popular it became a victim of its own success .it got bigger and bigger .
I think it was eventually bought by Fairfax, they also bought another little Aussie company called Yesbookit that designed a really good online booking platform , that was specially designed for holiday home owners and also had a live booking platform that many of the holiday home property management companies used, so by default these also ended up on stayz.
The problem was as the website got bigger and bigger, one busy little tourist area might have 6+ pages of holiday homes/apartments on its list .
Most people get to page 2 or 3 then stop there.
At the end of the day Airbnb is like any business and at some point needs to keep on making profits, for that it needs homes to let out and for other people to book them .
The main problem is in regional tourist areas, where their growth is coming from reselling homes and apartments already listed on other management websites and the airbnb charge is added to the fee that the customer pays for.
Most people are smart enough to realize that if they look a little bit harder they can save another 10-12% , if you are staying somewhere peak season for a week that is a fair bit of coin.

 

From an owner's point of view, (& not listed anything), what rate of commission so the different portals take? I'm told that one takes 20% which is the same as travel agents take but without the face to face interaction.

 

I was always doing whole property rentals, not shared space.

Me personally... with airbnb, instead of staying at hostels I would look to book a private room in a persons home.

Occasionally what you get with booking doesn't live up to expectations. But conversely, sometimes the places completely exceed expectations. But same for hostels, sometimes the stays were amazing. The reviews tend to be very accurate. If there are a lot of people saying it's a wonderful place, it tends to be amazing. And for hostels... what I found was, if i'm a single traveller there's the great opportunity to interact with other guests or the hostel host. Also, if you are doing a room rental, often its great to interact with the host at many airbnbs. It can make a normal stay really memorable.

 

20%(and lower) should get you a full service holiday home property manager that is based in the same area as your property with a walk in shop front and telephone backup with their own website . They deal with everything , oven breaks down, a good manager will have a new one fitted the next working day ,they should have instant access to handymen, plumbers and sparkies.
They coordinate with cleaners and laundry hire linen and communicate with guests re damage and people that smoke in non-smoking houses/apartments.
If the property manager is doing their job , you should also be listed on Stayz,booking.com,airbnb and other local state based websites etc etc, in additional to their own website and should have a good email list that is sent to past guests for future bookings.
In most cases when a reseller makes a booking their fee is just added to the final cost.