Would you like fries with that?

Care to supersize your meal? Want a little extra? Of course you would. Because we love up-selling.

Up-selling is where a seller encourages a buyer to take an upgrade or an add on to make a more profitable sale. And it works. Everyone knows it does. But…

It can be sleazy.

I hate it when someone gives me the hard sell. I was happy with my choice, and now some salesman is pushing me for more. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Back off. I find ‘luxury’ places the worst for this. And cheap airlines. It detracts from the whole experience for me.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Up-selling can be done well. Here’s how…

Provide Real Value

Give great service as a minimum, and offer extras as well.

And don’t take the piss. Don’t price gouge when your customer has no other choice.

You can up-sell on Airbnb. To do it well, make it beneficial to the guest.

It is worth doing. If you can up-sell every guest by just $5 a day, and you have a occupancy rate of 20 days a month, that’s an extra $1200 a year you are making. Once you start adding higher priced up-sells, this figure can get many times bigger. All for little or no work on your part.

Ever since I conducted The Great Airbnb Experiment, I’ve been thinking of ways to increase profits at my Airbnb. Here’s some ideas I’ve brainstormed to add value to my guests:

1. Mini Bar

This first way to up-sell on Airbnb would be so easy to implement. Simply stock a box or basket with some nice to have ‘extras’ such as coke and snacks and leave an honesty box next to it. You could even get a cheap mini-fridge like this* for it. Put a note up with a price-list and let your guests help them selves.

A multipack of Coke on Amazon Prime* costs $4.68. That’s 39c each. If you were selling for $2 a can that’s a tidy profit for very little work. With Prime*, the product even gets delivered to your door!

Now, you might question how ‘honest’ the guests really would be with your honesty box. But if you don’t trust your guests not to steal a bar of chocolate, maybe you shouldn’t trust them with your entire home either. Maybe this whole sharing economy thing isn’t really for you. Besides, it’s good for business when you let people steal from you.

But if, like me, you’ve outsourced or automated your Airbnb you might be wondering how to manage payments remotely.

The simplest solution I could come up with for this was using PayPal’s PayMe feature. You can create a unique link so that guests can pay you directly through PayPal. My link is PayPal.me/OFranks.

Once you’ve created your menu, print out your PayPal PayMe link and a price per item onto some basic printer labels* and slap them on to your products. When your guests are hungry, they help themselves to a snack and make a payment over the PayPal app. Easy peasy.

2. Equpment Rentals

Similar to the Mini Bar, but a step above in terms of profit, another way to up-sell on Airbnb is to offer equipment rentals.

Bike rentals would be easy enough. Simply lock the bikes up with one of these coded bike locks* and leave a sign with the price and inviting guests to send you a message if they would like to hire a bike during their stay. Once a guest has asked for a rental, you can send them the combination code for the lock.

The same principle would apply to surf boards, paddle boards, kayaks or ski rentals. Maintenance and upkeep could be a problem and there may be liability considerations, but all of these could be overcome with enough forethought. My own Airbnb is only a block away from these rental bikes provided by the city, so I probably wouldn’t bother with bike rentals, but am considering renting my paddle boards out.

Again, you could either go for a basic honesty box or with PayPal for payments here. I’m not a fan of needing to actually be present since I aim for complete automation with my Airbnb, but you could always show up in person to hand over the rental item if you are local to your Airbnb.

3. Car Hire

Even more ambitious than equipment rental would be car hire. But again, thanks to the wonders of modern technology and the sharing economy, this can be done quite easily.

The best known app for private car hire in the US is Turo.

In the UK there is EasyCar – part of the same group that owns the airline EasyJet.

The premise of both platforms is basically the same – list your own vehicle on their app, set a daily rental price, hand the keys over to the renter and collect some cash.

I think it would be really attractive to guests arriving by aeroplane to be able to just jump in an Uber to your place, knowing they have a rental car waiting for them when they get there. The cars are cheaper, and no more waiting at the rental company’s desk at the airport. I would use a portable lockbox padlock* to put the key in, and attach it to some metal under the car chassis (which is what I do with my car keys when I go surfing). You can see my video of it here.

4. Concierge Service

Another way to up-sell on Airbnb is with a concierge service. A good hotel always has a good concierge service, doing things such as helping guests make reservations at the spa, arranging babysitters, booking tickets to local events and so on. And there is a reason hotels offer this service – they take a cut. And so could you…

The way to start offering a profitable concierge service is to approach businesses in your local area and build a relationship. Develop a rapport and see whether they would be open to paying you a commission for sending them clients. Zeel, for example, offers local masseuses that come to your home. They bring all the equipment too. You could easily find someone on there operating in your area and contact them to see whether they would be up for getting more work on a referral basis.

Once you have your connections in place, simply design a flyer, and a page in your House Guest Book offering these services. It doesn’t need to be complicated – just something along the lines of:

“We are here to help ensure you have a fantastic visit! We can arrange the following services to be provided during your stay:

• Babysitters
• In house massages
• Local Tour Guides

For more information call or send us a message”

If your guest decides they want a massage booked (for example), they contact you as per the flyer. You then check availability with the masseuse, hold the time slot, then confirm with the guest. The masseuse will take the payment when doing the massage, and pass the referral fee back to you. Simple.

Don’t want to take the bookings yourself? Once again, the internet provides us with other options, this time through the aid of a virtual assistant. Hop on to Fiverr* and you will find hundreds of virtual assistants (VAs) with excellent English able to provide high quality support via email and over the phone. Because they are working in countries like India and the Philippines, their overheads are significantly lower so you can easily take on a well educated graduate student for around $5 an hour. Change the contact details on the flyer to go directly to the VA and cut yourself out of the process. The commission will still come directly to you.

I’m really keen on the idea of utilising a virtual assistant in lots of areas of my work. I can see it having huge potential. I’ll write another post about this once I’ve researched further and maybe taken on a VA of my own.

Just remember to focus on quality over commission. Sending your guests to a bad company just because it gives you a nice kickback is the completely wrong approach. Helping your guests find the best place, the lesser known gem, the secret spot – that’s the way to go.

5. Dropshipping Artwork

Another way to up-sell on Airbnb is through selling art. You don’t need to be Sotheby’s Auction House to make it work. If you are a budding artist with work to sell, what could be better than curating your very own gallery in your own Airbnb. You have a captive audience guaranteed to see your work, and you’ve also provided decoration for your property.

To make a sale, you will need to rely on some technology. This is where dropshipping comes in.

Dropshipping is a retail fulfilment method where a store doesn’t stock the products they sell. Instead, when a product is order by a customer, the store then orders the product from the suppliers who ship it directly to the customer’s home. It’s a brilliant business model from a store’s perspective – no need to purchase stock, no need to have a warehouse of goods, no need to deal with shipping.

There are now plenty of companies that will offer dropshipping for prints, using print-on-demand technology.

Sam Priestly has written a blog post about how to easily set up a dropshipping company. His focus in this article is on dropshipping T-shirts, but it would be just as easy to implement this technique with artwork. Read his article for an in-depth guide into the process, but in essence you simply design a Shopify webstore (a very simple process which can literally be done in minutes), source a print-on-demand company like this one which can do prints and canvas, upload your art to their app inside Shopify and complete your set up to include price and postage. You art can now be bought at the click of a button!

What  I like about this using this method in an Airbnb is that you don’t need to do any advertising. Simply hang your art in your Airbnb and leave a sticker next to it with a link to your Shopify site. Once your Guests place an order, a copy of your artwork gets printed and sent to their home, waiting for them when they return.

If you aren’t artistically inclined or too nervous to consider selling your own work, you could always partner up with a local artist. They provide the art to hang on your walls, you send clients their way and you both take a cut of the profits.

Freebies

The best things in life are free – according to the song anyway. So while I’ve listed above a handful of ways to up-sell on Airbnb, bear in mind that some things really should not be charged for. Things like tea and coffee being provided at an Airbnb are expected, not add ons. Trying to charge for these would be a surefire way of cheapening the experience for your guests. Be sure to focus on giving your guests the best experience you can, not the most expensive one.

Experiment

I’m going to experiment with a few of the above options and let you know about my successes (and failures). I think step one will be the mini bar – it seems a very low cost low risk way to up-sell on Airbnb. After that I think I will try dropshipping some photographs of local sites. If you try any of the above techniques please let me know in the comments below – I’d love to hear how you get on.

Thanks for reading.