My wife and I have been slow traveling around the world for last 3 years, and our top travel hack that has saved us most amount of money is to book directly with Airbnb host. We usually rent for a month so savings in fees are easily ~$300 - $500 on each stay, i.e. about 15-20%. Not every host offers it we respect that, but there are so many hosts out there that would rather have you book directly via their website and we as guests want the same. The problem is these hosts can’t promote or say that on Airbnb.
This inspired me to build OpenBnB.org, where I’ve started collecting direct booking websites of hosts. So far, I have around 1,500 hosts representing 150,000 listings – most of them in USA. The idea is to give guests more options to book, and hosts another channel to distribute their listings.
The first solution is a browser extension that makes it really easy to find the direct booking website of hosts when you’re browsing Airbnb. It just a one-time easy install with no sign ups. It: 1) highlights all the directly-bookable listings on the search page, 2) lets you search listings only from hosts with direct booking option and then of course 3) gives you the direct booking link on the listing page. What I like about this solution is it doesn’t require guests to go to a different website; they can just browse Airbnb (largest inventory of short-term rentals) as usual and get more options to book when available.
Other than savings, I think there is something about the direct relationship with hosts and guests, without any intermediaries. The cool think is I estimate about 20-33% of Airbnbs can be booked directly! That means I’ve only collected around 6 to 9% of all directly-bookable listings around the world.
I’ve seen some other chrome extensions do something similar, but none of them highlight these listings nor let you search listings only with hosts that offer direct booking.
What do you think? Try it out and let me know if this is useful. I’m also planning to spin up a website that only has listings from these hosts, kind of like a meta-search engine for vacation rental websites.