28/03/2021
Strangers in our home! ๐ณ
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We love travelling and always stay in an Airbnb. We usually booked an entire apartment to ourselves but we wondered what the market was like for single room bookings.
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We researched in our area for what hotels there were and what they were charging and were surprised at the lack of affordable places to stay. After looking on Airbnb, we realized that there were many people renting their spare room and on the face of it, looked like they were doing well!
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In June 2019 we put our spare room on Airbnb and before we knew it, we had bookings flying in. We live in a popular area of Bristol, walkable distance to the centre, great places to eat on our local high street and also on the bus route to the airport!
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We had a vast variety of people stay with us, for so many different reasons; work, holiday, stop off before taking a flight, graduations, visiting friends and family, nights out, moving to Bristol, the list goes on!
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It was rather daunting when our first guest arrived (you do have a stranger in your home after all!), but after we got into the flow of things, we were actually looking forward to guests arriving and meeting new people!
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We decided to only let our room when we were home, so when we stayed with family, friends or went on holiday, we blocked our calendar. From June 2019-March 2020 we had our calendar available for 153 nights. Our average occupancy rate was 80% and we made a total profit of ยฃ4,221 for the 122 nights that were actually booked. Not bad, for a room that was sat empty!
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We decided to block our calendar when Covid started to hot up and we haven't unblocked it since. We have decided that until Covid has completely 'gone', it's not worth having someone in our home. Hopefully it won't be long until we can start up again!
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Our friends and family thought we were mad. We wondered if anyone on here has or would be be happy to stay in someone's spare room?
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Would you rent your spare room on Airbnb?
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