Airbnb Hosts in Colombia: How to Win with Coronavirus

For Airbnb hosts in Colombia with coronavirus cases increasing, how can you win with coronavirus and mitigate the impact on Airbnb rentals in Colombia? This is our mission.

For the past year and not telling for how much longer, no matter what city in Colombia you are in, no matter what season you’re in, you must treat it like the slow season.

You must now switch your mindset and start planning for the next few months. We’re going to try to attract some bonus bookings 1-3 months out, just as you would if you were planning for the slow season.

In this article, I’m going to discuss nine options in accomplishing the above and look at how you can protect your rental and guests from the virus including ways to boost bookings and explain how to manage possible future cancellations.

Apartment buildings near Santafé mall in El Poblado, Medellín

1. Defensive: Decrease Your Nightly Rate

Whether you’re connected to a smart pricing tool or not, you need to lower your nightly rate. Lowering your price on Airbnb is the single biggest thing you can do to influence your search rank in the short term.

If you are connected to a smart pricing tool, your prices are probably especially high because your occupancy might look okay, but you have to assume a higher-than-normal future cancellation rate.

That means, if you are normally aiming for an occupancy rate of 50% in the next 30 days and 30% in the next 90 days, you want to increase that by a factor of at least 50%.

2. Offensive: Proactively Inform Your Guests

The airline industry, like the vacation rental industry, is also feeling the hurt of coronavirus. I received an email from Avianca Airlines related to a future trip I’m going to take. They’re telling me about my options and what they’re doing to make sure I am safe during my travels.

If your future guest is getting their information solely from the scare tactics used by the large media organizations, you can understand they think the world is about to end.

Proactively message your guest and inform them what you’re doing to keep your home Coronavirus free and what they can do to stay healthy.

To help calm their nerves, you can briefly educate them on the true seriousness of the situation and how unlikely they are to get affected (hint: I’m still more scared of air pollution or McDonald’s killing me than coronavirus). Those at risk of death from coronavirus or serious illness are mainly the very old, and already ailing.

Computer generated image of COVID-19, photo by Felipe Esquivel Reed

3. Offensive: Provide Safety-Promoting Surprise + Delight Features

With the informational message you’ll send your guest, add that you will be:

• Providing a few N-95 filtration masks for them upon arrival
• Adding special hand soap in the unit
• Leaving an antibacterial hand sanitizer
• Purchasing an air filter

4. Offensive: Increase The Flexibility Of Your Listing

As Airbnb hosts, we actually have a lot of flexibility with our listings. During the slow season, you might apply a few of these flexibilities in order to increase your occupancy. Here is a list of all the things we can do to make our listings more flexible which means we’re increasing the pool of guests who can book our space:

• Decrease the minimum number of nights
• Select less restrictive cancellation policy (Flexible or Moderate)
• Add or increase weekly or monthly discounts
• Allow pets
• Allow events
• Allow smoking (you can select allow smoking and specify only outdoors with windows closed)
• Increase the maximum number of nights

5. Defensive: Change Your Cancellation Policy

Airbnb has three main cancellation policies:

• Flexible: Guest can cancel up to 24 hours before check-in for a full refund minus Airbnb fee’s
• Moderate: Guest can cancel up to 5 days before check-in for a full refund minus Airbnb fee’s
• For flexible and moderate, the guest will receive all funds including Airbnb’s fee if canceled more than 14 days before check-in
• Strict: Guest can cancel up to 7 days before check-in for a 50% refund minus Airbnb fee’s
• In all cases, the guest can cancel 48 hours after booking as long as the check-in date is more than 14 days in advance

You could change your cancelation policy to strict and encourage guests to buy traveler’s insurance. That way the burden will be on the travel insurance provider and not you as the host.

Any change you make to your cancelation policy will only affect future reservations. But remember, this makes your listing more restrictive. It’s the opposite goal we want, especially now.

Even if you change your cancelation policy to strict, Airbnb has, understandably, been quite flexible with cancellations related to coronavirus.

Airbnb has said that their Extenuating Circumstances Policy applies to any reservation where the host or guest had to cancel the booking in order to comply with restrictions implemented by the government or health authorities. This includes bookings in mainland China, South Korea and parts of northern Italy.

Also, guests traveling from a severely affected area are eligible to cancel their bookings for free. Also, flight cancellations qualify.

Our focus should be on attracting as many reservations as possible rather than punishing guests who may want to book your space.