How We Work With Orphan Days

Interested in having a calendar that looks like this? 

In this post we are going to walk you through how we were able to achieve nearly 90% occupancy at our properties in April 2023.

As we all know, maximizing the busy season is important to hitting the lofty revenue goals we all have as Airbnb investors and owners. 

A big change we made in March was optimizing for “orphan days”. Orphan days, or dead days as they are commonly known in the industry, are the days that remain in-between bookings. For example if someone booked a Friday - Sunday on back to back weeks, Monday - Thursday would be called orphan days. 

Historically these days sat empty as we thought people weren’t interested in booking for the week days. What our folly was and many other operators is, is that they weren’t taking full use of their tools. 

In price labs you can get extremely granular on your settings for these orphan days. So what we did was we enacted a 50% discount for orphan days. You may think, but Sean you’re getting a bad deal, but for us this is a great deal. Instead of the property sitting vacant we will happily take a ~150-200 a night bookings. Over time these things add up and can help increase your revenue by 10-15% throughout an entire year. 

No need to gatekeep here. Below are the exact settings that we used to help drive bookings to orphan days. 

I will note, if you don’t have your operations running smoothly this can be a risky strategy as you are also dealing with same day turnovers, last second bookings, and guests coming at interesting hours of the night. 

However if those processes are dialed this is an excellent opportunity to maximize revenue. 

*Keitel property had 5 days booked offline for $4800 during Stagecoach

More questions on how to optimize your listing? Contact us and we’d be happy to help!