HOW WE PAY FOR TRAVEL WITH AIRBNB
We rent out our primary residence about once a month and every time we travel. Last year, as we were prepping for our summer abroad, we started experimenting with putting our house on AirBnB. I gave the house a good clean, tidied everything neatly, and snapped some photos on my iPhone before throwing up a listing.
This was a week before Christmas, when we’d already planned to go out of town to visit family. Three days later, we had our first booking. Now we’ve had our house listed with semi-regular guests for over a year and we’ve had our fair share of mishaps, but overall it’s been a successful experience.
Basically, every time we book a trip, we open our house on AirBnB. Because both my husband and I have flexible work that can be done from anywhere, we also open it (for a higher price) if we’re just thinking about going somewhere.
Over the last year, with over $5,700 worth of bookings over 50 nights, we were able to pay for six nights of lodging in Roatan, a month in Florence, one night in Rome, three nights in Switzerland, a month in Paris, and four nights in Berlin. It’s not always easy and I’ve spent more than a few nights tossing and turning over the possibility of returning to a mangled couch or a kitchen fire, but it’s been overwhelmingly worth it. Here’s how we make it work:
Know your marketability
We live in the downtown area of a small city, about an hour north of Dallas. Because of this, there’s not much tourism. But there’s still a market for guests. With no hotels in our immediate area, people book our home mostly to visit family. We have had a couple of weekend guests come up from Dallas to visit our little town square and with roads expanding and more residents moving in, we’re hopeful the tourism will follow.
Our house has two bedrooms and one bathroom, putting it in the sweet spot for couples and small families. We also own our home and live in a neighborhood with no HOA or rental restrictions. This varies by county and state, so make sure you check before starting out.
You can check out our listing below (iPhone photos and all)
Make sure you can handle strangers in your stuff
The first thing you have to get over is a mental block. There’s a certain amount of weirdness to knowing strangers are sleeping in your bed, putting their feet up on your couch, and eating off your silverware. Before you decide to invest anything in making your house AirBnB friendly, make sure that’s something you can be okay with.
We were already familiar with having strangers in our house (albeit not our furniture) as we had to rent it out for the first six months after purchasing, while waiting for the lease on our own apartment to be up. So we purchased extra sets of sheets and towels and decided, “why not?”
Fix up your space
This step can vary in difficulty level based on the state of your space. When we bought our house and moved in (eight months before putting up our listing), we did a TON of reno to make our home work for us. This included painting every inch of the house (both inside and out), redoing all the trim, adding outdoor living spaces, updating the kitchen, and adding touches of character with wall and ceiling treatments. So when we were ready to list, our home was already pretty up-to-date and fresh. We did, however, have a bout of trial and error with our very first guest.
We had a couple quirks: a TV setup requiring three remotes and a dishwasher not screwed into the counter. And we definitely heard about them from the guest! So we upgraded our TV and screwed the dishwasher in and we haven’t had any negative feedback since.
For you, this might look like tightening a leaky faucet, making sure all your lightbulbs work and no doors stick on their tracks, as well as touching up cosmetics like wall paint.
Invest in some locks
For our very first booking, we literally emptied out both closets in their entirety, as well as the dresser and many cabinets and closets. This was way too time consuming and left my car filled to the brim with junk.
Since then, we’ve streamlined the process by adding locks to our closets and a few cabinets. We store all clothes we’re not bringing with us, as well as important documents, booze, and breakables we wouldn’t want to lose.
No one has ever complained about not having closet access, and we added a garment rack in the primary bedroom. Now, instead of taking 5+ hours to prepare for a guest, it takes about two.
If you have enough space, you can even designate a spare room or the garage for this purpose. Unfortunately, our 900 square foot home has neither, but we make it work.
Set up a management system
One of the things you have to decide is how you’re going to manage your AirBnB. If you’re nearby or going on short trips with one guest, you can get away with completely self managing and handling guest turnover.
But if you’re going to be away longer, you need someone to handle things a typical cleaner wouldn’t do (or hire a cleaner who’ll turnover for you as well). When we were gone last summer, we were in a completely different time zone, 8 hours ahead. We didn’t want to leave our guests hanging if they had an emergency or needed something while we were sleeping. So we asked my sister-in-law, who lives around the corner, to manage the property for us. I added her as an account admin on AirBnB so she could see and respond to messages, and she checked the house before and after every guest, washing the sheets, putting dishes away, setting out fresh towels, and making sure the house looked like the listing.
And thank goodness we had her helping us because one night, after we were fast asleep in our own AirBnB in Paris, the air conditioning went out. Our guests came back to a 90 degree house and my SIL was able to answer their message, find them a place to sleep for the night, and call a repair guy to come out in the morning. We paid her ten percent of every booking fee and it was 100% worth it.
Find a reliable cleaner
The number one problem I’ve had with AirBnB’s in the past (other than a tragic lack of style) is uncleanliness. Hotels and most AirBnBs don’t face the same level of wear and tear as primary residences, so you have to triple clean before even thinking about opening yourself up to reviews. Even one bad review mentioning dirtiness can seriously hurt your search rankings.
Before starting AirBnB, I cleaned our home myself and though I didn’t do the most thorough job, I would consider our home pretty clean! But I am no professional cleaner and I knew we needed to hire someone to make sure we were presenting the best version of our house possible. Finding a housekeeper has been the aspect we’ve struggled with the most.
We started with a Facebook post in our local community group, searching for help. An individual reached out and she’s done most of our cleaning for the past year. She was usually reliable, but we had a couple times when she just didn’t show up. Luckily, both times we were still home and could figure it out (cut to us frantically scrubbing the floors), but had we been out of the country, we would’ve had trouble.
I wouldn’t say we’ve locked this down, but we know now what questions to ask and we’ve found someone who uses Google Calendar to confirm appointments instead of just FB Messenger -- yes, I should’ve known better.
Pack a go-bag and sit tight
With the method we use, we have to be pretty flexible with our time. Ideally, we’d get guests booked for the exact days we’re going on a planned trip, but it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes the dates don’t exactly line up. Other times, a booking dictates when we travel. If I forget to close the dates, sometimes we can’t or don’t want to take a trip and we’re forced to stay locally. But we also have family nearby who are gracious enough to lend us their spare room. So make sure whatever availability settings you have work for you.
We’re on a mission to see as much of the world as possible and without being independently wealthy, sometimes I have to get creative with how we pay for travel. AirBnB has been a (fairly) easy way to subsidize our travel budget and share our home with others. I hope it works for you too!