Your cheapest booking is the guest who already stayed
2 min readStayolo
Every booking you take from a platform has an acquisition cost. You pay it in commission, and you pay it again the next time, because the introduction does not carry over.
A guest who has already stayed is the one exception. They know the place, they know the area, they know whether the bed is comfortable. There is nothing left to sell them. The entire cost of that booking is the effort of getting in touch.
Most hosts never get in touch, for one boring reason: they do not have the address.
Keep the list
If you take nothing else from this, take this. Every guest who stays should end up on a list you control, with a name, an email address, and the dates they came.
Direct bookings give you this automatically. Platform bookings usually do not — you get a relay address that stops working, which is deliberate. So capture it another way: the arrival details you send, the welcome book they sign, the wifi code they ask for. Ask once, keep it somewhere durable, and tell them plainly what you will use it for.
Then write to them roughly never
The instinct once you have a list is to send a newsletter. Do not send a newsletter. Nobody who rented a house for a week wants a monthly update about it.
Two messages a year is plenty, and the good ones are specific rather than promotional:
Before your season opens. "We open for the summer in April — telling you first in case you want the same week." That is not marketing, it is a courtesy, and it converts like one.
When something genuinely changed. A new terrace, a rebuilt kitchen, a second property nearby. People who liked the place are curious about the place.
The maths
If a fifth of your guests come back once, and each of those bookings avoids an introduction fee you would otherwise have paid, the list quietly becomes the most valuable thing you own — more valuable than any single listing, because no platform can switch it off.
Start it today, even badly. A spreadsheet with forty names beats a perfect system you set up next year.
Filed under repeat-guests, email, guest-data.