Just Opened in Kona...well May 1

chinbr · Mar 9, 2023

Hello everyone! We thought about opening a B&B and finally going to in May on the Big Island in Kona! Any tips, tricks, marketing and technology advice appreciated! Trying to only go through AirBnB and VRBO as I understand rates for all the other platforms are high. We only have 4 units but would like to book up sooner rather than later! Any tips, tricks, marketing and technology advice appreciated!
Here is my website: www.ohiakonaestates.com.

Arks · Mar 14, 2023

Beautiful place!

WesternMass · Mar 17, 2023

Congrats! My family is originally from Holualoa, it's awesome out there. Good luck with everything!

Tom · Mar 19, 2023

Nice facility, you built well.
Vrbo and Air will be useful, but ideally you will become known and will get direct bookings. With direct, you save money, but you want to make the direct deal seem good to the customer, too. People are used to Vrbo and Air having lots of fees, but not so much with direct booking. You are in a different, obviously high-end market from me, and I don't know what is standard there, but a $500 cleaning-and-linen fee seems over the top. Your minimum stay is already $4720 with tax, and you want another $500?
Looked at but didn't play with your google calendar booking. You will want to make sure it and the other sites share availability info accurately.
Consider how to deal with infilling gaps between booking blocks. With a 5-night minimum, there will be a lot of calendar holes that you may want to fill with 2- or 3-night stays. Some booking engines have settings to allow this (Vrbo does not), or at least instruct customer to call you, but with time-zones, the more people can do online without Vrbo and Air, the better for your bottom line.
Pōmaikaʻi iā ʻoe

chinbr · Mar 23, 2023

Tom said:
Nice facility, you built well.
Vrbo and Air will be useful, but ideally you will become known and will get direct bookings. With direct, you save money, but you want to make the direct deal seem good to the customer, too. People are used to Vrbo and Air having lots of fees, but not so much with direct booking. You are in a different, obviously high-end market from me, and I don't know what is standard there, but a $500 cleaning-and-linen fee seems over the top. Your minimum stay is already $4720 with tax, and you want another $500?
Looked at but didn't play with your google calendar booking. You will want to make sure it and the other sites share availability info accurately.
Consider how to deal with infilling gaps between booking blocks. With a 5-night minimum, there will be a lot of calendar holes that you may want to fill with 2- or 3-night stays. Some booking engines have settings to allow this (Vrbo does not), or at least instruct customer to call you, but with time-zones, the more people can do online without Vrbo and Air, the better for your bottom line.
Pōmaikaʻi iā ʻoe

Thank s for all the tips! The $500 cleaning is pretty much going rate for cleaning the place and linens for a week. Labor in HI is really hard to come by and expensive. I also need to figure out a good solution for syncing calendars. AirBnB, Google, Booking, and VRBO it is prone to have mistakes and lags.
You are right wrt gaps in calendars due to the min stay. I can manually disable but again it becomes a challenge to do across all platforms.