Top tips to save money & score great deals on Airbnb – Our Ultimate Guide

Mrs. Nomad Numbers and I had a passion for international travel from a young age. Recently, we decided to take our passion to the next level by becoming full-time slow travelers.

Since we started our nomadic journey we used different methods to decrease our spending. This includes finding the perfect accommodation with up to 50% discount by using Airbnb, paying for our flights by using exclusive travel rewards or even using geo-arbitrage to reduce our cost of living by 50%.

In today’s article, we will be talking about how we save up on accommodations thanks to Airbnb. We will explain what Airbnb is, how to get started, how we search for our rentals, how we narrow down our results, and how we find out additional information to learn more about a specific accommodation. We will also explain why we introduce ourselves to the host before confirming our booking, what we said and how we find the best discounts. And last but not least we will share our best tips (as well as the red flags) we learn after booking many accommodations through Airbnb. This post is packed with many tips, so let’s get started.

What is Airbnb and how does it works

The Airbnb story started in 2008 when their founders (B. Chesky, J. Gebbia & N. Blecharczyk) started to rented air beds (hence the name AirBnB) out of their apartment in San Francisco for $80/night. A year later the company was born and it has now become the world’s biggest accommodation-sharing site that helps to connect hosts with travelers around the world.

How does AirBnB works?

Airbnb connects hosts with guests. As a host, you can list any space that is suitable to be rented out. From a private room in your house/apartment to a hip Airstream/RV in the middle of the desert, an amazing yurt to enjoy stargazing views at night, or even this cool treehouse!).

The site helps hosts match with guests that are traveling and are looking for a place to stay.

Is AirBnB safe?

As a traveler, why would I want to stay at a stranger’s place? As a host, why would I want to have a total stranger to come over to my place? Well, I hear you and Airbnb probably did too. Airbnb uses a review system that gives a pretty good idea of the reputation of both hosts and guests. Once a stay is over both hosts/guests need to review each other which is a pretty great way to know both parties. That being said, each system can be gamed so we will share the tips that have helped us get the best possible AirBnB experience since we’ve been using the service.

What to look for when booking your accommodation on AirBnB

Location, Location, Location!

The first thing that we do is that we look for the best area to stay in a given city that we like.

• For small cities, the city center is usually a good place to start with
• For larger cities, we concentrate our search on the top 3 neighborhoods

Nomad Numbers Pro Tip: To find the best area with any given city we start by doing an online search on sites like Wikitravel.org, Wikivoyage.org and also check out some travel blogs.

Once we have identified the area we would like to stay in, we then jump into Google Maps to narrow things down by looking at the best location to be as close as possible to at least one of the following:

• a grocery store (we avoid convenience stores)
• a farmer’s/local market
• a metro/subway/bus stop

We then overlap our ideal locations with the search results from AirBnB.

Our AirBnB search criteria

Let’s now talk about how we search for our accommodation in Airbnb.
We start by providing the city/country for our stay from the search bar.

Feel free to try it out using the form below

We then specify the dates we want to stay.

Nomad Numbers Pro Tip: You don’t need to provide these dates to get search results. This might become handy if you want to look for a specific deal or to see what the entire Airbnb inventory is for a specific area.

We then provide additional search criteria for our accommodation. This becomes very helpful to narrow down your search results to what you really like. This information can be access by a list of button available under the search bar that you can see on the previous screenshot.

Here are the criteria we usually preset:

• Guests: 2
• Home type: Entire place. (You can also choose from a Private room or a Hotel room).
• More filters: This is where you can be very specific about the type of place you are looking for. Here are our most commonly used options:
  • Bed: 1
  • Bedroom: 1 (as we don’t want a studio)
  • Amenities:
    • Kitchen: we love to cook so this is not negotiable for us
    • Wifi: who doesn’t need Internet these days?
    • Laptop friendly workspace (optional): this usually ensures that there is an extra table/desk that we can use when we need to get some work done.
    • Air Conditioning (optional): We usually use this when A/C is a requirement and there are a TON of listings to go through.
• Host language (optional): French and/or English. This isn’t important while you book since AirBnB will automatically translate your message with the host in their language and vice versa. But once you begin your stay, if you expect face to face interaction with your host, this can become handy to make sure they can speak the same language as you.

Narrowing down the results to our top 5

Ok so by now, we usually have anywhere from 1-50 options to choose from. In order to narrow down our selection to our favorites, we go through the pictures and the reviews left by other guests and try to find answers to the following questions:

• Is the kitchen fully equipped? Since we love to cook, having a blender and some good cooking utensils can make a huge difference for instance. Usually, by looking at the picture(s) of the kitchen we can try to know more about how equipped is the kitchen.
• Does the living space get a lot of light? We don’t like living in caves, do you?
• Is the bedroom good for sleeping? We like to make the bedroom our sleep sanctuary so it is important that it as dark as possible and in general, we would prefer places that aren’t too cluttered.
• How is the Internet?. We are still baffled that as of early 2019 AirBnB, doesn’t provide a way to let the host provide the internet speed of their accommodation. The pictures won’t likely show this, but sometimes people will call out if the Internet connectivity is horrible.

Nomad Numbers Pro Tip: When you find a place you like on AirBnB you can save it as a favorite. To do so, click the “Save” button at the top right of your screen and then add it to a list specific to your trip. That way you can easily got back to your top properties (even if they became unavailable for your specific dates).

Introducing ourselves

Before we book our stay, we like to contact the host and introduce ourselves. We do this for a couple of reasons:

• Make a genuine human connection.
• Differential ourselves for most guests which can be helpful if the hosts are receiving multiple requests and need to decide which guest to pick.
• Ask for additional information that we could not find on the listing itself.

To achieve this, we use a specific template that contains the following information:

• A little introduction about ourselves.
• What we especially like about the place.
• What are the things for which we still have outstanding questions.
• Our excitement about booking this place and (if applicable) meeting with the host.

If you are interested to get our Airbnb template fill-out out the form below so we can send it your way.

Negotiating prices

If both parties are really interested in booking, it’s time to ask for a discount (you can ask for up to 20% without offending anyone). There is no guarantee that this will work but at this stage of the booking process, there isn’t much to lose either. Some reason that will increase your likelihood to get a booking:

• The place got a couple of recent bad reviews that the host wants to get over. Any good incentive for a potential guest to enhance the stay will definitely increase the likelihood of an outstanding review in exchange.
• The host usually can’t book the place at the time of your stay.
• You want to stay for an extended period of time (4+ weeks).

Hosts will do anything for getting up their positive reviews and reduce their vacancy and in this case, you have the leverage to negotiate the price.

Note: Airbnb should usually show you a discount if you book for at least one week (the weekly priced discount) or for an entire month (the monthly priced discount). Booking for more than 4 weeks doesn’t generate any further discount. Since we slow travel and stay at least 4 weeks per city we visit, we have been able to get monthly discounts up to 40% from the regular nightly price, which has helped us save a LOT of money on our accommodations 🙂

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Additional tips to help negotiate a bigger discount:

• If you are staying for 3 weeks only, check the monthly discount (by booking an extra week). If the total is cheaper, you could book for the entire month and leave earlier. OR to be nicer to your host, ask if he/she would match the discount while letting you stay only 3 weeks. This should be a win-win as the host can still recoup a week that can be potentially booked.

Confirming the booking

Once we are ready to finalize our booking we take our best credit card (so we can get those precious Travel Rewards that helped us significantly reduce our cost of travel).

What to avoid when booking your accommodation

• Less than an overall 4 stars review is a NO-GO: Any accommodation on AirBnB has an average rating which is the combination of a few key attributes. Anything less than 4 stars isn’t good for us. People should post accurate pictures, communicate well, provide a great check-in experience, offer a clean place, and obviously price their place accordingly. You will also be surprised about how many 5 stars accommodations you will find on AirBnB.

• Missing/incomplete pictures – If there are missing pictures, this is likely that the host is trying to hide something and we usually don’t like that. If everything else looks good, we would email them and ask if they can provide more information about what we can’t see.
• Unresponsive hosts – If you are in the business of renting your place to others, you should be responsive. We don’t expect any host to reply within one hour (even though this is nice to have) but people should at least get back to us within 24 hours. Not hearing from a host for more than one day isn’t a good sign.
• High cancellation rate – You can check this by reviewing the reviews as AirBnB will post a review each time the host cancels a reservation. A high cancellation rate means that you run the risk of losing your accommodation at the last minute which isn’t a good thing.

What are our biggest tips?

• A picture is worth a thousand words, so pay close attention to the pictures to get an idea of what the place looks like. The host can write whatever they want in the description, at the end of the day you can’t lie in a picture.
• Send an introduction email to the host. You will be surprised to know that most people just book without even introducing themselves. We create a template that we adjust for each of our stay that let us get some additional information about the place and get a first pulse about the host. This has also been helpful when wanting to negotiate the price of a booking we like.
• Be nice to the host & leave the place in good condition – Be courteous throughout your entire stay. When leaving the place, keep things in order. You usually don’t have to clean (since AirBnB has a cleaning fee that the host gets to clean their accommodation) but make sure you don’t leave a mess.
• Leave an honest review of the host and highlight what you really like about the place, so you can help them improve the experience for the next guest. Keep in mind that you can share both a public (that will be shown on the listing page) and a private (that only the host will see) review. We like to share any constructive feedback with the host via private review.

If you are interested to get our AirBnB template fill-out out the form below so we can send it your way.

Our bottom line

If you have already been using Airbnb, we hope that our tips will help you save time and find the best possible deals for your next stay! If you are new to Airbnb, we hope that this article will help you get started. If you want to get started, you can use our sign-up link to get up to $55 USD credit (or the equivalent in your local currency) and we will also get some AirBnB credit at no additional cost to you once you book your first stay.

If you have other tips, please leave a comment in the comments section below as I am sure we can still learn a bunch from our readers!