Hospitable adds Airbnb's 15% top rated guest discount, with 30 blackout dates a year

Hospitable has added Airbnb's top rated guests discount to its channel settings, so hosts can switch it on without going into the Airbnb extranet. Qualifying guests automatically get 15% off, and Airbnb may give the listing a badge and better placement in search.

The discount is available on eligible listings. Hospitable does not say what makes a listing eligible, which is Airbnb's call rather than theirs.

The 15% is not negotiable, the dates are

This is a fixed discount, not a lever. You are agreeing to sell at 85% of your rate to a set of guests Airbnb picks, in exchange for a badge and a placement benefit Airbnb does not quantify.

What you do get to control is when. Hospitable lets you set Airbnb blackout dates, so top rated guests pay your full rate on your busiest days. The cap is up to 30 dates per calendar year.

Thirty is tighter than it sounds once you start listing them. A summer peak, two public holiday weekends and a local event week will eat most of it. If you are in a market with a long high season, the honest answer is that this discount will apply during part of it, and you should work out what 15% off your peak rate does to your margin before you switch it on.

Hospitable does a one-time import to match any blackout dates you have already set in Airbnb, so you are not re-entering them.

How it behaves

Discount status changes sync with Airbnb in both directions, so the setting in Hospitable and the setting in Airbnb stay in step.

Turning the discount off does not affect pending or confirmed reservations. A guest who already has a booking at the discounted rate keeps it. That is the right behaviour, and it also means switching off is not a way to undo a discount you regret giving.

What to do about it

Run the arithmetic before the badge tempts you. 15% off is a large concession in a business where the difference between a good year and a bad one is a few points of ADR. For a property that is struggling to fill midweek or shoulder season, buying volume from well-reviewed guests at 15% is a reasonable trade, and the guests in question are the ones least likely to leave you a problem.

For a property that already sells out its peak, the calculation is different, and the 30-date cap is what decides it. Count your genuinely full dates first. If the number is well above 30, you are discounting dates you would have sold anyway.

The other thing to weigh is what else you have running. If you have the mobile only discount or a new listing promotion on, or a dynamic pricing tool setting your rates, check what a top rated guest booking on a phone actually pays. Stacked Airbnb discounts are where this kind of convenience usually bites, and the place to find out is a test quote rather than an owner statement.

Hospitable shipped this alongside credit card payments for operations bills and a set of API changes in the same 30 October update.