Airbnb
- Coronavirus has hit the travel and hospitality industries hard, leading some short-term rental operators to offer their properties up as places for customers to quarantine.
- Property managers are adjusting their amenities to include pandemic-ready items like protective masks and large cases of wine.
- The slowdown has hit urban areas the hardest, while rural areas have seen upticks in demand.
- D.Alexander, a short-term rental company, has started a campaign called "Destination Isolation," offering their properties for stays as long as three months and no shorter than one month.
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Peter and Brynn, a twenty-something professional couple based in San Francisco, are repeat customers of Airbnb, having used the vacation rental company for travel in the past.
Now, they're using it to quarantine.
Peter and Brynn, who asked not to use their last names because of the sensitivity around traveling right now, felt compelled to move closer to their parents, who live in Connecticut and are in their fifties and sixties. They are both working remotely and wanted to find a way to travel home that didn't put their parents at risk.
The solution came in the form of a short-term rental property near the beach in West Haven, Connecticut. Their friends, still finishing up their own two-week quarantine, had flown home to Connecticut and booked this property. This weekend, their friends will leave and Peter and Brynn will take their place for two weeks, quarantining near the beach before they are in the clear to see their parents.
Coronavirus has put nearly all tourism on hold, triggering layoffs in the hotel and short-term rental industries and the stirrings of a revolt among some property managers who rent their properties on Airbnb. Property managers who relied on tourism revenue have had to find ways to adjust.
Property managers and short term rental companies have adjusted their strategies to meet the needs of customers who are looking to quarantine after a flight or to find a rural escape from the city. They're changing their marketing strategies to attract customers with different needs, offering amenities that are specifically tailored for social distancing, and opening up their properties to longer stays.
Even Airbnb is getting into the action: the company's blog post announcing its $1 billion fundraising round on Monday highlighted longer-term stays as a "core product" for the future of the company, a first for the company.
How property managers pivot in a pandemic
Vered Schwarz, the COO of short-term rental property management software company Guesty, told Business Insider that her customers are repurposing their properties in ways that fit current needs.
For rural properties, that means opening them up to long stays for what Vered calls "cityscapers."
"These are folks that are escaping from the center of town, and prefer to go to the Catskills," Schwarz said. These customers often have families and are searching for areas where they can ride out months of isolation in a home that has a backyard for their kids to play.
Guesty data showed that this time last year the Catskills, a mountain range in upstate New York, had an occupancy rate of about 30%. This year it's more than 60%. Schwarz said that she has seen similar increases in other rural areas. A study by hospitality data company AirDNA also found that remote areas in the US were seeing spikes in short-term rentals.
For suburban and some urban properties, property managers have focused on customers like Peter and Brynn that are looking to quarantine. Properties in dense, urban areas have seen a precipitous decline.
Customers are staying longer than usual across all locations, Schwarz said, with the average length of stay doubling to nine days, from four-and-half days. Some of these property managers are offering discounts for longer stays, a trend that Peter and Brynn noticed when they were booking their stay.
Property managers are also providing coronavirus-specific amenities to support customers looking to isolate. Schwarz said that she's seen property managers offer extra cleaning products, masks and hand sanitizer on their properties, and shipments of food to a customer's front door.
Marketing strategies have also changed, as property managers are no longer trying to attract tourists, and instead draw in "cityscapers" that are only a gas tank away or people looking for a place to quarantine after a flight. The specific changes in strategy are contingent on the types of customers they're trying to attract: with property managers advertising in local Facebook groups and looking for direct reservations instead of trying to attract tourists on sites like Airbnb and VRBO.
"Destination Isolation"
D.Alexander, a short-term rental company that operates properties on Florida's Emerald Coast, Sedona, Arizona, and in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, unveiled its "Destination Isolation" campaign at the beginning of April.
The program offers stays for one to three months at a fixed rate for people searching for a place to isolate, and D.Alexander pledges to donate 10% of the cost of booking to a coronavirus-related charity. The company will also provide customers with a collection of wine and Malin & Goetz cleaning products and Sheets & Giggles linen.
The idea came as the D.Alexander team was brainstorming how the company could potentially help people to isolate, Alex Allison, CEO and co-founder of D.Alexander told Business Insider.
"We recognized very early that this won't be a two week isolation period," Allison said.
One thing that is much shorter with this campaign, Allison said, is the lead time between a customer booking a stay and their stay beginning.
"If you booked a property today, you wouldn't stay there for 115 days," Allison said. "That's now shortening from 115 days to one week."
The prices are also reduced: a three-month stay in Sedona, Arizona has been discounted to $46,000 from an original cost of $79,000.
While D. Alexander has been able to adjust to the change in demands, other property managers haven't been able to. Joanna Ahrens, who lives in Florida, owns a rural property in Swain County, North Carolina near the Great Smoky Mountains. Before the coronavirus hit, she had most of March and 28 days in April booked up.
Customers started to cancel in mid-March, but within days, the same dates were being booked by different, more local customers.
"People started booking from the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee: a gas tank's drive away," Ahrens told Business Insider.
That changed when Swain County, which draws a lot of tourists, shut down all short-term rentals in the county because of coronavirus fears. Ahrens had to cancel most of her bookings, though she's kept her late April bookings in case the county reopens short-term rentals.
"It's all up to the county at this point," Ahrens said.
