Confusion about listing house vs rooms

[Linda2623]

Hi everyone! I’m brand new to Airbnb and I admit that I’m struggling a bit with properly listing our property. We have five bedrooms that have keyless locks and are private. Our current listing is for the entire house, but we just had an individual book a month, which is fine, but we don’t know how to make it clear on the calendar that other rooms are available. Someone suggested that we do one listing for the entire house and one for the rooms, but would that mean I’d have to have a listing for each room?

[Miloud0 · Accepted solution]

Salute @Linda2623, 

If it is possible, i think that you could create a listing for each room, 5 listings, in addition to a listing which includes the all 5 rooms if you have a guest group. So you could have 6 listings. 

Also, you could see these links :

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/289/how-do-i-list-multiple-rooms

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/1864/how-do-i-link-airbnb-calendars-for-multiple-listings  

Thanks, 

Miloud

[Linda2623]

Thank you!

[Lisa723]

@Linda2623 you have just rented your entire home for one month. So the other rooms are not available. You need to create one listing for each room. If you also want to have a whole-house listing, you can link them, as described in the links above.

[Lisa723]

[Linda2623]

Thank you. 

[Emily487]

@Linda2623 

You might get a helpful person on the phone with Customer Service. They might let you cancel this booking without penalty since it is your first booking if you explain that you meant to rent the room and not the house and that you were still in the process of figuring out the website. 

However, your listing says "you have the entire house to yourself" and  it's not clear at all that they are actually rooms for rent. 

Keep in mind that a single person renting an entire house that provides breakfast every morning and has room for 8 will most certainly be sneaking more people in. If you don't cancel this booking, you should have a plan for keeping a tight ship during this person's stay.

[Miloud0]

Salute @Linda2623 

Thank you too 

Thanks, 

Miloud

[Sarah977]

@Linda2623  Going live with a new listing and having it open for bookings when one is confused about how to even list their space is really jumping the gun. It's akin to opening a restaurant when you don't have a chef yet. I would suggest that you snooze your listing until you understand how to list your place and read all of the help articles for hosts on the Airbnb site, read the Terms of Service, familiarize yourself as to where to find all the settings in your hosting account, and spend some time reading posts on this forum ad asking for help from other hosts, as you did here, about anythig else you might find unclear or confusing. Only after that, go live with your listig again.

I'm not sure what you have in mind with this listing. To rent each bedroom separately and have strangers share common spaces, like a hostel situation? Because that requires a different sort of hosting and cleaning arrangement than a place which is rented to one group as a "entire place" or a situation where a host is renting rooms out in the house where the host lives.

[Sarah977]

@Linda2623  Your listing is still showing- you really need to snooze it right away before you get more inappropriate bookings because of it not being set up correctly.

I could, right this minute, instant book your entire 5 bedroom house, for $53 ($66 minus the 20% discount that is showing), for just myself, and have use of all 5 bedrooms and the rest of the house. Which is obviously not what you want.

Airbnb might forgive you cancelling one booking on the basis that you are new and were confused about how to list, but they are certainly not going to let you just continue to cancel bookings and you will be hit with many penalties. 

[Mark116]

@Linda2623   I don't imagine you intend to rent the entire house for $50 a night, which is what it is showing, you had better tweak that or snooze it ASAP before you get a ton of bookings that you will be stuck with.

[Peggy-And-Mike0]

@Linda2623 I just did some test runs and found your set-up frustrating. It shows a low price for "whole house" and then when dates are put in and the number of guests set to the max, the "extra guest fee" went to $150 and the total was much higher.  Guests really hate that practice as it feels like bait and switch, or they will just ignore and not put in the right number of guests and be surprised when you react negatively....and rate you poorly, which as a new host is something you should avoid.  Transparency is what you want.  As others have recommended, create a listing(s) for a private room(s) and price it as such and be clear about what they are getting for that price and that other guests are in the home. When I click through your photos it's all "hey this is beautiful" and not a lot of specificity.  That is sooooo important, especially if they are sharing bathrooms. One thing you'll learn is most guests don't read so you have to say something three times before they might see it.  And repeat it in your confirmation message.  After you've done the private room listings, then create a true whole house listing and price it as such and design the calendar so that the reservations can't conflict.  Also, the repeated "construction underway" language is a bit off-putting and something I would avoid....under promise and over deliver.  If you don't have it, don't say it's coming because it points out what you don't have. Just state what you do offer.  Good luck with your hosting adventure....it's more important to be good at it from the get-go than to just go so be sure you are ready and prepared and have read all the great advice on here.  If you haven't bookmarked this link, I suggest you do and read every one of them before you go any further:  https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/Community-Help-Guides/m-p/23100#U23100

[Sarah977]

@Linda2623 Another thing that's confusing about your listing is that the caption on the living room area photo says that the host will need to pass through this area to access the kitchen. If you list an "Entire Home", you, as the host, don't get to access the kitchen- if guests rent an Entire Space, they expect privacy- you can't go in and out of the kitchen, or in the house at all, except for an emergency situation, or if you go in to clean and that has been arranged with the guests at the time of booking.

I suspect you are thinking to make breakfast for your guests there? That just isn't how an entire house listing works. What it seems to me you are wanting to do is have a bed and breakfast type set-up, rather than a entire house listing. If so, that is how it should be listed.