Applying promotions to your listings can help increase immediate bookings, encourage returning guests, and attract new audiences. Promotions are set up per channel, and can be applied to multiple listings at a time.
You can manage your promotions in Guesty for direct integration sources, manual reservations, Airbnb, Booking.com, and Expedia.
Guesty aligns promotions with the settings supported by each booking channel. For example, excluding specific days of the week is available for Booking.com promotions but not Expedia’s. Therefore, you can exclude days of the week when setting up a Booking.com promotion in Guesty, but not for an Expedia promotion.
Promotions can be set for a specific period (“time-limited”) for example, covering the month of December, or without a time limit (“whole calendar). Time-limited promotions will automatically expire.
Combine promotions
Promotions can overlap or override one another if they are applied to a single reservation, and they can also be combined with other types of price reductions, including discounts and coupons.
Promotion types
You can use different types of promotions for various purposes. The promotions supported by most channels are Early Bird, Length of Stay, and Last Minute.
Early Bird
Add this promotion to fill up your calendar in advance, rewarding early bookers by offering a discount for guests booking up to X days before check-in. For example: a discount of 10% will apply to reservations booked 30 or more days before check-in.
Early Bird promotion will be displayed on Airbnb and Guesty's Booking Engine (Booking Website for Lite users) as an "Early Bird discount".
Length of Stay
Offer your guests attractive prices for longer stays. For example: A discount of 12% will apply to reservations above five days.
Length of Stay promotion will be displayed on Airbnb as "Length of Stay discount" and as "Discount" on Guesty's Booking Engine (Booking Website for Lite users).
Last Minute
Boost last-minute reservations by offering special prices for guests booking X or more days before check-in. For example: a discount of 15% will apply to reservations booked four or fewer days before check-in.
In Airbnb, a Last Minute promotion will be displayed as a "Last Minute discount" on your Airbnb account. There will be no indication that the promotion applies, except for a crossed line over the original price.
A Last Minute promotion will be displayed as a "Last-minute discount" on Guesty's Booking Engine (Booking Website for Lite users).
In Booking.com, when a Last Minute promotion applies, a "Last-Minute deal" indication will appear in the price breakdown, and a "% discount" tag will show in green.
Airbnb: New Listing Promotion
When publishing a new listing to Airbnb, you can offer a 20% discount for the first three reservations. The promotion will automatically expire after the first three bookings. For the promotion to run, you must deactivate Smart Pricing in Airbnb.
A New Listing Promotion cannot be deactivated through Guesty once applied, and cannot be added retroactively to a new listing after it was already published. However, you can do both actions directly via Airbnb's calendar (if needed).
Learn how to create, edit, activate, or deactivate your promotions.
Set up promotions
Follow the instructions below to create, edit, deactivate, or reactivate a promotion. For Airbnb's New Listing Promotion, refer here.
Before you begin
- For a promotion to sync with the booking channel, the listing must be in a "Connected" status on the channel's integration page, and listed.
- When assigning listings to a promotion (or changing the assigned listings), it may take a few minutes for the changes to reflect on the promotion card. Wait a few minutes and refresh the page. If the correct number of assigned listings still doesn't appear, contact us.
Airbnb
- Before disconnecting a listing from Airbnb, unassign the listing from the Promotion. Otherwise, syncing issues may occur when the listing is reconnected to Airbnb.
- In the case of a multi-unit, the promotion can only be set for the main (parent) unit, not to its sub units. The main unit must be connected to the channel for the promotion to sync.
- When selecting Date range under "When can guests stay using this promotion?", the promotion will sync to Airbnb as a seasonal promotion and appear under a "rule-set" for the duration you specified in Airbnb.
- Airbnb Lite users: You cannot use promotions in Guesty. You can set weekly or monthly discounts, instead.
Booking.com
- When a promotion is set for Booking.com, it will apply to all rate-plans associated with the listing.
- When a rate plan and a promotion are applied to the same Booking.com room:
- If both have a different minimum number of nights restrictions, the minimum nights on the promotion will override the rate plan's minimum nights. If the promotion doesn't have a minimum nights restriction, the minimum nights on the rate plan will be used.
- If both have different excluded dates, the more restrictive limitation will apply.
Create a promotion
Step by step:
- Sign in to your Guesty account.
- In the top navigation bar, click the mode selector and select Growth mode.
- Click Revenue management and select Promotions.
- In the top-right corner, click New promotion.
- Select the channel and the promotion and click Next.
- Fill in the information in the Promotion settings step and click Next in the top-right corner:
- The name you choose will be used to identify the promotion in Guesty.
- If the promotion is set to a limited timeframe (i.e., by selecting Date range in "When can guests stay using this promotion?"), you may receive a reservation that is only partially within the date range. In this case:
- For most booking channels, including direct integration sources and manual reservations, the promotion will not be applied.
- For a listing connected to Airbnb, the promotion will be applied relatively, with only the nights within the promotion timeframe receiving the discount.
- Decide which listings the promotion should apply to and click Done in the top-right corner.
- In the top-right corner, click Create promotion.
The status of the promotion will be set to "Active".
Edit a promotion
You can edit an existing promotion's limitations and selected listings only. To change a promotion’s channel or type, deactivate it and create a new one instead.
- Sign in to your Guesty account.
- In the top navigation bar, click the mode selector and select Growth mode.
- Click Revenue management and select Promotions.
- Find the promotion you want to edit and click
at the right end of the row. - Edit the information in the Promotion settings and/or the Select listings steps. Then, click Save & assign.
Deactivate or reactivate a promotion
You can deactivate a promotion you no longer need, or reactivate a deactivated promotion.
You can deactivate an Airbnb New Listing Promotion directly in Airbnb.
Step by step:
- Follow steps 1-3 above.
- Find the promotion you want to deactivate and click at the right end of the row (the filters above the table can help you search).
- Click Deactivate or Activate.
In the pop-up, click Deactivate or Reactivate.